On a crisp morning in October, I watch from the back of a sunlit room as Michael Morris, a Notre Dame professor of the practice and nationally recognized pioneer in entrepreneurship education, stands before a few dozen attentive students and launches note-free into a two-hour, high-velocity seminar that runs the gamut from consumer psychology to guerrilla marketing.
At 73, with a sweep of silver hair, Morris is pacing the room, the sleeves of his blue oxford shirt rolled up, his voice commanding if a bit hoarse, as he peppers the class with questions and insights. “Entrepreneurship isn’t about talking. It’s about walking,” he says.
Above all, he tells them, they must cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset. “Whoever learns the fastest wins,” he says. “Whoever learns, adjusts and makes it right. If the price is wrong, fix it. If the target is wrong, try new people. It is how fast you learn and adjust that determines if you make it. You have to be a curious student of business every single day.”
Roadblocks and mistakes are inevitable, he continues. “The mindset is what you do when you hit the brick wall — how you go over, under or around it.”
As the morning progresses, Morris hits the class with a blizzard of modern business theory, drawing on useful ideas from Eric Ries’ concept of validated learning to Joseph Juran’s 80-20 rule. And for every new concept, Morris has a ready narrative vehicle: a story of business triumph or failure like the Grateful Dead’s merchandising juggernaut, Calvin Klein’s invention of high-fashion blue jeans, and his own futile attempt to wean his daughter from her $7 daily Starbucks habit. The class is fast and funny and often profound, and like any great teacher, Morris has his students hanging on every word.
This might be just another day at Notre Dame but for the fact that we’re not in a classroom, or even on campus. Rather, we’re at the former Spokane House Hotel, a once-thriving motel complex built midcentury on a plateau outside Spokane, Washington. After the building’s decadeslong slide into blight, the state received the property in 2022 and converted it into housing for the unsheltered.
About a year ago, the motel’s restaurant was remade into a conference room brightened by picture windows that overlook a stand of pines. This fall, the room has served as a classroom — one of a growing number across the country — where people in or near poverty gather to learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship. These weekend classes are just the first phase in an innovative, maybe revolutionary experiment at the intersection of higher education, economic development and poverty alleviation: Michael Morris’ Urban Poverty and Business Initiative.
Designed and run by Morris out of Notre Dame’s McKenna Center for Human Development and Global Business, a unit of the Keough School of Global Affairs, the program launched in 2019 with the simple thesis that entrepreneurship may be a uniquely sustainable mechanism for lifting people out of poverty. In itself, that’s not a new idea. Muhammad Yunus won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on making low-interest loans available to the tiniest businesses in the developing world. Embraced by governments and NGOs, Yunus’ model spread globally. “Once the poor can unleash their energy and creativity, poverty will disappear very quickly,” the Bangladeshi economist and social entrepreneur argued in his acceptance speech.
Yet many studies have since shown that microloans by themselves are not enough to move the needle on poverty. Getting any new business up and running is hard, and staying afloat is harder. Creating a durable business out of poverty is harder still. The human factor complicates matters: Entrepreneurs are not created equal. They are differentiated by experience, knowledge, drive and vision, among many other things. A 2019 Massachusetts Institute of Technology field study in Hyderabad, India, noted this asymmetry. A small number of microloan borrowers with pre-existing businesses prospered, while the rest saw little benefit.
Morris offers a radically different approach. Rather than lend money to poor entrepreneurs at scale and hope for the best, his Urban Poverty and Business Initiative offers an individualized, skills-based intervention centered around groups of a few dozen people at a time.
Recruiting these learning groups is no trivial step. Not everyone in poverty is a good fit. Applicants must self-identify as income-constrained, but they are not means-tested. Stable housing and basic transportation are prerequisites; the ideal participant is poor, but not in active crisis or living on the street. The best candidates arrive through referrals from knowledgeable partners — churches, nonprofits, city agencies — rather than direct advertisement.
What the program offers them is not loans or grants, though these often come later, but a crash course in business fundamentals drawn from the theories and methods taught at the nation’s top-tier business schools, followed by one-on-one mentoring and consulting for their business or idea, offered for about a year.
Who are these aspiring entrepreneurs? In Spokane, they are young and old and everything in between. Men and women, a collision of dashikis and trucker hats, streetwear and Carhartt. Some have existing ventures, others just an idea. What unites them are near-empty bank accounts and their dreams to grow a business that can survive the unforgiving reality of street-level American capitalism.
Many of the Spokane cohort’s ventures are unsurprising: junk-hauling and housecleaning, food trucks and coffee stands. Others are unexpected.
“I’ll be building custom dollhouses and dollhouse furniture for both children and adults,” says Dennis Richey, a grizzled, flannel-shirt wearing man in his 40s who tells me he’s one year clean from heroin. Before his addiction, he was a skilled carpenter who built homes.
Yet while Morris is leading today’s seminar, he is not typically the one running the show. To scale his project, Morris developed an affiliate model, based primarily at universities, to run their own programs under their own banners. What he provides is a comprehensive, rigorous, field-tested blueprint. His years in the trenches of entrepreneurship education — conferences, journal editorships, scholarly articles and books, often coauthored with younger colleagues, have given him a deep network of contacts to draw on.
In Spokane, he found a ready partner in Gonzaga University, which partnered with Catholic Charities Eastern Washington to launch the Spokane Entrepreneurship and Empowerment Network, a UPBI affiliate. Led by Gonzaga professors Dan Stewart and Molly Pepper, it functions not just as a feel-good community development project but as pedagogy. Students from the school’s honors-track Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program help run the boot camp, then pair off to serve entrepreneurs as hands-on consultants producing real deliverables: consumer research, business plans, marketing strategies. For these undergraduates, it’s a unique opportunity to engage with real people on real-world problems. “This year, I had the opportunity to be part of something truly transformative,” one sophomore wrote in a social media post. “It’s hard to fully put into words just how meaningful this experience has been.”
Among the program’s fans is Gonzaga’s president, Katia Passerini, who is on hand to observe the October session. “I wasn’t sure what I would find today, but this is incredible — beyond what I imagined,” she says.
Morris arrived at the McKenna Center by way of the University of Florida, where he’d hatched an early pilot of his initiative. He describes that Florida pilot as the culmination of decades of fieldwork and research on small-scale entrepreneurship. “When I came to Notre Dame, the purpose was to take that and replicate it here and then scale it to other cities. And that’s what we did,” he says. “But the design, the approach, the content, the pedagogy, everything emerged as part of a longer journey.”
From his new base at Notre Dame, Morris used his Florida experience to build a new pilot: the South Bend Entrepreneurship and Adversity Program. It enrolled its first cohort in January 2020 with a three-phase model: the boot camp; long-term mentorship and guidance from established local entrepreneurs; then one-on-one consulting — in this case provided by Notre Dame students taught and supervised by Morris himself. The program caught on fast, in part through Morris’ relentless pursuit of partners among city and state agencies, nonprofits, businesses and industry groups, activists and community leaders.
With the South Bend program in full swing, Morris formed the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative as an umbrella to manage the concept’s expansion into other cities. He viewed McKenna, with its mission of blending business and social impact, as an ideal launchpad for an affiliate-based program. The results blew past his best-case projections. “This was the logical home to do something that could be scaled, that could have a much bigger impact,” he says. “We never, never expected it to scale this rapidly.”
The first affiliate took shape not through Morris’ groundwork but by word of mouth and a phone call from Patrick Snyder, the executive director of BizStarts, an entrepreneurship nonprofit in Milwaukee. Snyder, a consultant and entrepreneur, had joined the BizStarts board early on but thought the organization should revamp its mission, which was then focused on nuturing startups developed at local universities, he told a 2022 podcast. Talented graduates already had abundant resources, he thought, but what about everyone else? He recalled his mother, a poor Italian immigrant who rose from sweeping floors to running her own profitable string of beauty salons in assisted-living homes. “Why don’t we try to support businesses like my mom’s?” he asked the board.
In 2019, Snyder went looking for entrepreneurship programs that privileged the poor. His contacts came back with one name: Michael Morris.
Connecting with Morris in 2020, and learning about the South Bend program, Snyder wanted in. He got the green light. By September, the BizStarts Institute had enrolled its first class of entrepreneurs. In 2024, with the Milwaukee program thriving, Snyder worked with Carthage College to launch another UPBI affiliate in Racine, Wisconsin. “If there were a Nobel Prize given for entrepreneurship in underserved communities, Michael would be on a plane to Stockholm tonight,” he says.
Other affiliates soon followed. Many were led by Morris’ former students, old colleagues, associates of one kind or another. Alex DeNoble, a well-regarded entrepreneurship researcher who met Morris when they were doctoral students at Virginia Tech in the 1980s, launched one out of San Diego State University in 2021. Mike Bradshaw, who had worked on a program for disabled veterans that Morris founded in the 2000s, started another affiliate through the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2022. By 2026, Notre Dame’s Urban Poverty and Business Initiative could list 61 affiliates operational or preparing to launch, including programs in Canada, South Africa, Ecuador, India and Uganda.
Morris oversees it all with the help of senior program manager Susan McDonald and their dedicated staff from the fourth floor of Jenkins Nanovic Halls. “The program works,” he says, a clean statement that rests on a growing and complex pile of hard data.
Every UPBI affiliate tracks participant data over three years with dozens of metrics that range from owner demographics and business type to success and failure rates, revenue and income produced, and jobs created. Among other things, the data indicates that more than 80 percent of participants exit the program with a formalized, operating business. More significantly, a full third of those businesses eventually reach what Morris calls “a place of financial sustainability.” This is the promised land — where the business is not only profitable, but the entrepreneur is able to move his or her family out of poverty. By comparison, global data shows the failure rate for businesses started by the poor is close to 90 percent, he says. “The numbers we’re talking about are critically important because they demonstrate that people in poverty can build financially sustainable businesses.”
This data may help to reframe a debate that has smoldered among economists and policymakers over the utility of entrepreneurship as a pathway out of poverty. In the 2000s and 2010s, key actors in global development including the United Nations and the Clinton Global Initiative embraced the microfinance model, and billions of dollars in small loans flowed to poor people throughout the world. The loans often benefited borrowers and were linked with valuable outcomes such as improving literacy rates. Yet studies found they did not yield a meaningful improvement in poverty rates. As the disappointing data piled up, belief in microfinance — and entrepreneurship — as a way to address poverty waned.
Morris’ early results suggest that a more structured, training-based entrepreneurship model may hold promise. Proving this will not be easy. The lack of government tracking and baseline data is a key problem. Basic facts about small business activity among the poor, Morris wrote in 2022, are “largely unavailable.” Filling this statistical void with controlled, longitudinal studies or large-scale private data collection is possible, but time-consuming and costly.
While a major impact on policy is likely years away, the benefits of Morris’ initiative are already being felt, as thousands of people work through it every year. “When you are reaching enough people using your framework and your model, you’re poised to have an impact and hopefully start to suggest some new ways to approach a problem that’s existed forever,” he says.
At the core of Morris’ approach is a timeworn concept: Break a complex task into manageable steps and take one step at a time. Progress begets progress; every step builds momentum to help a person power through the next.
When he talks about the steps, he can sound evangelical. “Who are the winners from this boot camp? What is the test?” he asks the Spokane class. “The test is, how many steps did you take? There are 80 steps. Are you working the business? Are you moving it forward?”
Their bible is “80 Steps to Sustainable Success,” a 224-page instruction manual in three parts: planning, launch and early operations, and stabilization. Among the coauthors are McDonald, the program manager, and Snyder, founder of that first affiliate in Milwaukee, but Morris’ voice resonates throughout. The style is straightforward and accessible; the tone encouraging but grounded in reality. “Starting a business is simple,” the manual states. “Anyone can do it.”
Simple doesn’t mean easy. “The challenge is to start a business that is not only profitable, but where the profit is ongoing,” it continues matter-of-factly. The daunting next page lists the first 18 of the 80 steps. Forget business cards, logo design or even registering your business — that’s later. First up is soul-searching and self-inventory, exhaustive research and a heap of math.
As entrepreneurs proceed in their journey, the program clears the way, removing obstacles and mitigating risks. Each participant arrives with unique skills and needs; the program is tailored to meet them where they are. Over months of one-on-one consulting and mentoring, they focus not just on building a business but on personal growth. For some it begins with getting their personal finances in order and strengthening their computer and bookkeeping skills. Others may be ready to plunge into more complex territory, from inventory management and sourcing to market analysis and networking.
The escalating challenges and sustained support click where it matters most: the down-at-the-heels neighborhoods these entrepreneurs call home. When Morris started his South Bend pilot and hit the streets looking for allies, community activist Gladys Muhammad became one of his most vocal backers. A key figure in a decadeslong struggle to bring opportunity to the West Side, the city’s oldest and largest majority-Black neighborhood, Muhammad once helped lead a campaign to break the unspoken covenant among local banks that had kept mortgages out of the hands of even the most creditworthy Black borrowers.
After hearing Morris’ recruitment pitch in 2020, Muhammad put out the word, and applications soon swamped available spots. She has watched from her front-row seat at the Charles Martin Youth Center as hundreds of people have accepted Morris’ 80-step challenge. “They get up in the morning and they come here at 8 o’clock, and they stay till 1 o’clock. Nobody made them get out of bed to get here,” she says. “If your business is successful, you made it successful yourself. And if you fail, then you failed yourself.
“He’s giving them the tools and the resources and the mindset that you can do this,” she says.
Morris is adamant that the only way to understand the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative is to meet some of its graduates. So, a few weeks after the session in Spokane, I drop by Rio’s Extraction Services & Repairs, a two-bay garage southeast of downtown South Bend.
In the waiting room I find Mario “Rio” Ellis juggling calls on two cell phones while bouncing a toddler on his lap. Like his employees, he wears a blue work shirt with a name patch and his business logo over the breast pockets. With tight dreadlocks and a row of gold teeth, he’s charismatic and quick to laugh, a relaxed yet substantial presence.
Ellis is 37 and grew up on the West Side, the son of factory workers. The neighborhood was chaotic and blighted by vacant homes, a grim reminder of the collapse of South Bend’s industrial base and the exodus of tens of thousands of residents. As jobs dried up and houses emptied out, drugs, theft and violence flooded in. When shots rang out, bystanders often paid the price. “Bullets didn’t have no name,” Ellis says.
By the time Ellis entered high school in the mid-2000s, the city seemed to be turning a corner. But in 2008, the stressed national housing market cratered, taking the economy with it. Amid soaring unemployment and record foreclosures, the city’s vacant housing stock doubled and its poverty rate rose 40 percent, according to an analysis by Joseph Molnar, the city’s deputy director of community investment. “The sheer scale of the decline is hard to capture,” Molnar writes.
As his neighborhood fell apart, Ellis was adrift. “I was a knucklehead. Expelled several times,” he says. “I was gonna be a rapper.” He left school in the 11th grade, got his GED and spent the next decade making music, hustling drugs and bouncing from one fast-food job to another. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he was working for an industrial bakery, depressed by the end of a relationship and sleeping in his van between shifts. “I felt like I was just at the ends,” he says. “I had pretty much suicidal thoughts — this question, ‘why am I here?’”
The dream of starting a business pulled him out of it. “I took a bet on myself,” he says. He quit his job, bought a trailer and began hauling anything he could flip for a profit, from scrap metal to appliances. As his business grew, he opened a shop, then the garage, drawing on the mechanical and welding skills he had learned from his father, grandfather and uncle.
When he heard about Morris’ program, he joined the first South Bend cohort. “I didn’t know business. I didn’t know how to start an LLC or anything,” he says. “I figured it out, OK, and it was easy. I’m smacking myself in the head. Like, boy, you make stuff so complicated.”
Through the program, he launched a new business called Elektron Motion, a pay-as-you-go electric scooter company. He had experience working for Lime, a national company, but saw his own neighborhood was underserved. “I got an app and everything,” he says. “You download the app, scan the scooter, it’ll kick on, and then you ride.” He sourced his scooters from Swagtron, a local startup with a national profile and nearly $10 million in annual sales. “I talked with the CEO,” Ellis says. “I got with Notre Dame, and they started helping me do this prototype.”
He gives me a tour of his garage and shows off prototypes for another venture in the works — custom dune buggies. “Ideas, they’re everywhere,” he says. But without the structure and tools he gained from Morris’ program, his ideas simply piled up like they were on a broken assembly line. “That’s when that bottleneck happens. There’s so much trying to go on this one line, and you can’t get it through.”
That evening, at South Bend’s main public library, I take the stairs to the second floor, a hive of small classrooms and light-filled atriums. The off-campus location creates a better atmosphere for collaboration, Morris says. He stands amid Notre Dame students from his immersive consulting and development course, giving tips before they pair up in teams with a local entrepreneur and split off for hourlong sessions.
Personalized consulting is the third phase of the initiative’s curriculum, following the six-week training boot camp and 14 weeks of mentoring with an established local entrepreneur. Here, ideas begin the hard transition from dream to reality.
I follow Morris into a classroom where he warmly introduces me to the student consultants he’s chosen for me to observe. Matt Wich and Mario Suarez are soon to be seniors, smart and earnest, both wearing polo shirts and chinos with sensible haircuts and no visible scars, tattoos or piercings. Wich is set on a career in law, while Suarez is interested in consulting but is still figuring things out. If corporate recruiters dream, they dream of Wich and Suarez.
Yet Morris has gotten to them first. Wich seems particularly attuned to Morris’ antipoverty frequency and his evergreen motivational style of towering expectations and hard-to-win praise. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that cares about anything more than he cares about these entrepreneurs,” Wich says. “And that’s a motivating factor to, like, really get on top of our stuff. And work really, really hard.”
Their first appointment is with Jasmine Bradley, a 29-year-old full-time entrepreneur with a master’s degree in social work. Her business hasn’t reached cruising altitude. Wich and Suarez are her research proxies and sounding board, roles that require finesse and judgment. They work for her, but they’re not yes-men.
Bradley is ambitious, creative, adaptive and committed to her business, Vegan Bites by Jas, a “meals solution” and culinary-education company she launched during the pandemic. A one-woman show, she’s the executive chef, logistics manager and sales rep and is trying to fine-tune Vegan Bites while developing a new venture — a nutritional literacy outreach for K-5 students aimed first at schools in South Bend’s substantial food deserts.
She is tired. Really tired. “Juices are running low,” she says. Wich and Suarez offer welcome assistance. After some chit-chat and fumbling with notes, they’re reviewing the latest draft of her business model, evaluating real estate options and whiteboarding the “buyer’s journey” of prospective customers. They shine at this last task, pushing Bradley to evaluate her service through customers’ eyes. “What’s your selling proposition?” Suarez asks. “How are you meeting their needs?”
At first glance, the wisdom of having undergraduates act as small-business consultants might seem questionable. But seen up close, it makes sense. Suarez and Wich are not improvising jazz solos so much as playing the notes in Morris’ 80-step orchestral score. It’s all in the operating manual. As sessions unfold in multiple rooms, Morris drifts from one to the next, listening in, assessing, offering advice, insight and solutions. Tom Reynolds, a tall, trim, retired corporate consultant and experienced UPBI volunteer, does the same.
For the students, the consulting role is less a taste of the real world than a five-course meal. “I actually don’t call this a class when I talk to people, because it’s so much more than that. You’re regularly interacting with someone that, this is their business,” Wich says afterward. “I mean, this is as hands-on as it gets.”
“The relationship building is not easy,” Suarez adds. “We have to suggest ideas, and they might not be so receptive at the start, and it’s a back-and-forth.”
Both consider Morris’ class as tough as they come, but they relish the challenge. “Why did you come to Notre Dame? Did you come here for easy?” Wich says. “If you came here to grow, then this is the class for you. If you didn’t, then don’t take this class. That’s the blunt truth. But I think there are a lot of people here that want to grow.”
Before I leave South Bend, I meet up with Morris at Mitch’s Corner, a low-key sports bar. This is Morris’ local hangout, and he seems at ease, if a bit weary, sitting alone and drinking a draft beer. The weariness is understandable, considering he’s been working seven days a week for much of the year.
He’s been a workhorse all his life. “My schedule is always intense,” he says.
It’s not a boast. To say he has a strong work ethic does not begin to capture the Terminator-like relentlessness of his drive. He has a hobby — drums, rock ’n’ roll — and plays with a band. Mostly, he works. In 2024, he published his latest book, Poverty, Disadvantage, and the Promise of Enterprise, a synthesis of years of research, with longtime collaborator Susana Santos. At Notre Dame, he teaches full time; in the summer, he leads a six-week immersive course in Cape Town, South Africa, where he’s done fieldwork and taught since a Fulbright took him there in the ’90s. Then there’s the Urban Poverty initiative. His commitment to attend the launch of each new affiliate in person has put him on the road or in the air weekend after weekend. In each city, he teaches a seminar, meets with program leaders, gives his stamp of approval.
Motion has been a lifelong constant. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1953, where his father, a World War II bomber pilot and career Air Force officer, was stationed at the time. The family moved back to the United States when Morris was 4. Per standard military practice, they moved every four years or so, finally landing in the mid-1960s in Fairborn, Ohio, home of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Morris was a freshman at Fairborn High when his father — by then a two-star general — was playing a “meaningful role in building the modern Air Force,” serving as the service branch’s director of data automation.
Then, at a time in life when most teenagers are angling for car keys, young Michael Morris was out on his own. “I left home when I was 15 years old,” he says. “I found a way to finish high school and work after school and take care of myself.” He’s not inclined to get into the details, but it shaped him. “I have always been fiercely independent,” he says.
After high school, he enlisted in the Air Force and was assigned to a maintenance crew, tinkering on nuclear weapons and traveling from silo to silo across the upper Midwest. It was the height of the Vietnam War, he says, and it beat dodging bullets in the jungle. He took college courses at night.
Enrolling full time, he drifted until a professor, who became a mentor, steered him toward economics. Paying his own way, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and an MBA. “I was ready to become an economist and had a job offer,” he says. But his mentor talked him out of it.
Instead, he took his first academic job at Central State University. The Ohio school was badly underfunded, and students — many from the inner cities of Cleveland and Detroit — often struggled with college-level work. Morris was tough on them from the start, he says. “Wherever I set the bar, the students would rise to that level,” he tells me. “If you meet people where they are, and adapt to their needs, they’re capable of anything.”
Studying economics at Wright State University, he was drawn to entrepreneurship not just as a mechanism of business creation, but as a means of personal growth. But the topic was still a curiosity in higher education. Looking to earn a doctorate, he studied marketing at Virginia Tech.
“Marketing was about innovation and developing new products and services and new solutions for the marketplace,” he says. “It was as close as I could get to entrepreneurship.” When he finished his degree in 1983, the field was having its breakout moment, with Steve Jobs and Apple Computer the stars of the show. Morris had caught the wave at just the right time.
As an assistant professor at Virginia’s Old Dominion University, he was so eager to teach his first course in entrepreneurship that he agreed to do it for free, on top of his normal class schedule. There were no textbooks. “We were creating a new academic discipline,” he says.
In the 1990s he met Leyland Pitt, a South African marketing professor, a connection that led to Morris’ Fulbright. The two collaborated on a field study in the impoverished township of Khayelitsha and wrote a highly cited academic paper on entrepreneurial activity in the developing world. In Cape Town, his ideas about entrepreneurship as a vehicle out of poverty began to crystallize.
In the decades since, Morris has published more than 140 articles and nearly 20 books, editing journals and textbooks and building top-rated entrepreneurship degree programs from scratch at the University of Oklahoma, Syracuse University and the University of Florida. Yet the Notre Dame initiative is surely his singular achievement.
What makes it compelling, it occurs to me, is how it shares the entrepreneurial spirit it cultivates in others. Howard Stevenson of Harvard Business School once proposed an influential definition of entrepreneurship that echoes in Morris’ 80 steps. “Entrepreneurship,” Stevenson wrote, “is the relentless pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”
By that standard, Morris is not just teaching entrepreneurship, he’s doing it, and at a very high level. With a tiny staff and a shoestring budget, he has built a giant network of low-cost and often free entrepreneurship training programs for the poor, which also functions as a massive data-collection project on poverty and small business. His business is not flowing cash but skills and knowledge and community engagement. And it is still growing like a Silicon Valley startup.
The long game for Morris is not building bigger or faster, but deeper and sturdier. “One of my hopes is that we get this program more institutionalized at Notre Dame,” he says. He envisions an enduring home for it at the University. It’s a grand ambition, but Morris is attracting the kind of institutional support that can make it a reality. Notably, in October, the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative received a $2.5 million gift from Coca-Cola as part of a community impact campaign tied to the 2026 World Cup. Mary Gallagher, dean of the Keough School, thanked the company in a press release and lauded the initiative. “This program is at the heart of the Keough School and Notre Dame’s mission to foster human dignity through economic empowerment,” she said.
After we chat, I page through Morris’ 80-step manual again, bookmarking sections for my own use. The preface is brief but hefty. If Morris has a core philosophy, it might be here. “Get out there and do things. Make some sales,” it reads. “The plan will come with time.”
John Rudolf is a freelance writer based in Seattle.