Entrepreneurs - Grove City College

T
ingaTinga, which translates to
“bridge” in Swahili, exists to
support visionary entrepreneurs
in disadvantaged areas around the globe.
Through seed funding and coaching,
the organization essentially serves as
a startup for startups, encouraging the
pursuit of socially responsible business
concepts, such as ILA Uganda.
An acronym for “I Live Again,” ILA—
TingaTinga’s pilot project—is a program
focused on economic empowerment for
victims of war in northern Uganda. Founded
by Ocen and supported by grants and
low-interest loans from TingaTinga in the
United States, the program provides trauma
counseling services to individuals of the
region who have endured considerable losses
of family, shelter and earning capabilities due
to a 25-year civil war in the nation.
“War has devastated their culture,”
Croce said, who witnessed the physical and
emotional damage firsthand when he traveled
to East Africa with Dietrich and other Grove
City College students for a Red Box mission
trip in 2007. The experience propelled Croce,
Dietrich and their classmate, Jackson, to
fight poverty through the development of
TingaTinga and pinpoint Gulu, Uganda, as
the setting for their first pioneering project in
2011. “Their community must be rebuilt
from the inside out. The idea [of ILA] is
to bring transformation to the lives of this
broken community.”
TingaTinga believes the participants
of Ocen’s ILA program will grow to regain
ambition in life, assess their own practical
skills and employ their unique talents for
post-war community development and
economic recovery.
“My passion is to restore my people. I
cannot allow myself to sit and watch them
suffer,” Ocen said. “Continuous support does
not only build a strong relationship with
TingaTinga, but it also helps ILA in fulfilling
its objectives and transforms the lives of our
local village.”
In just a short time, TingaTinga has made
a significant impact in the lives of hundreds
of people halfway across the world. And for
these invested alums, it is only the beginning.
In summer 2012, senior entrepreneurship
major Alex Moore ’13 served as TingaTinga’s
first intern, applying skills learned at Grove
City College to solve real-world challenges
in Uganda. Moving forward, TingaTinga
hopes to mentor groups of students at
the College and recruit fellow Grovers for
internships in multiple geographies around
the world, including potential hubs in Peru
and Nicaragua.
“Grove City College is full of super
talented, super bright students,” said Croce,
who considers the organization’s interns
cultural bridge-builders and catalysts for
positive change. “We want them to have
$5,000 at the end of their internship and tell
us how to invest it.”
TingaTinga believes this invaluable
experience will lay the foundation for a
new generation of students to add value
to the market and drive the American
entrepreneurial spirit into the future.
“As a country, we were founded on a
large group of people who wanted to do
things differently,” Addams said. “We had
opportunities, pulled the trigger and had
success. It’s a risky thing, but it leads to
innovation and progress. And, working in the
Third World, we’ve seen it is also necessary
to understand the status quo and have [an
entrepreneurial visionary] think to himself,
‘There has to be a better way.’”
That vision and balance of expectations
is what Croce, Dietrich, Jackson and Addams
take from their entrepreneurial training
at Grove City College—and implement in
making lives better far from campus.
Fall 2012
“My passion is to restore
my people. I cannot allow
myself to sit and watch
them suffer”
the G ē D U N K www.gcc.edu | 35