Growing up, my stutter seemed to define me. When teachers asked me to read a sentence aloud in front of the class, I would open my mouth and out poured choppy sound repetitions, gasps for air, and mispronounced words. Other times, I would simply babble out, “Forgot my homework.” There are few worse feelings in school than knowing almost every answer, and raising your hand to answer none of them.

With the support of my family, I attended speech therapy regularly for my entire childhood. As a result, my perspective on stuttering has changed almost as drastically as my speech itself. Although my level of fluency may never reach the triple digit mark, I now speak with a wealth of confidence. It took years of dedicated practice and commitment to re-training myself to speak fluently, and it was far from easy.

As effective as speech therapy was for me, it came with several inherent drawbacks. Speech therapy is expensive, usually requires travel, and lacks the larger group engagement that plays an important role in interpersonal communication. If I attend therapy once a week for an hour, what happens when I leave and head back into the real world? At times, I felt uninspired and disconnected from my own therapy. Simply put, I knew there must be a better way.

Today, I am working to make the world a more connected place for people who stutter. As a Compass Fellow for Social Entrepreneurship at Tufts University, I am building a new solution to transcend the limitations of traditional speech therapy. What does this mean? My social venture, Balbus Speech, looks to connect, support, and inspire people who stutter across an online community of speech therapy. We believe that connective technology can be harnessed to meet the needs of stutterers and therapists alike. We believe that, by uniting this technology with proven therapy methods, speech therapy can become more accessible, effective, and efficient. More than anything else, we hope to help people who stutter find their voice as I have found mine.

Balbus Speech is currently looking for partners, advisors, and angel investors to make this vision a reality. Visit www.BalbusSpeech.com to learn more and follow Balbus Speech on and on Twitter: @BalbusSpeech. Contact Jack directly at Jack@BalbusSpeech.com.

Jack McDermott – Compass Fellows at Tufts University, Class of 2014

But we know that those of you observing us from beyond our community and those of you interested in joining want to know what, exactly, we’re doing here at Compass, and why we love it so much. So we put a lot of thought into the best way to communicate the feelings and excitement of our community, as well as what we stand for. The more we thought about it, the more we realized that what really unites us here at Compass is our shared set of values.

It’s nothing we ever planned or wrote down before. Our values and the close-knit nature of our community, our Compass Family, just sort of happened to come together. We’re forming incredible connections and meaningful relationships among young social entrepreneurs worldwide. These are relationships that we believe are making the world a better place, and will continue to do so as our community grows. And so, our Values Document is our best attempt to capture the spirit of this community in words. Let us know what you think!

You can read about our values here and download our Values Document.

the team’s boldest move came recently, when the duo decided to devote the summer of 2011 to working full time on their venture in Los Angeles, California. While many college students will spend their summers toiling away in unpaid internships, James and Yeo are creating their own experience and building a social business.

“During the year, homework is always weighing on our minds, and it’s hard to get momentum going. We wanted to see if our consulting model is viable, and we really felt like we could develop our business much faster with a team together and dedicated time to work,” says Michael Hauser, a team member. Hauser, along with fellow team members Sheena Yoon and Luke Iott, have all forgone traditional internships for this startup company experience.

James Li, the young company’s CEO, explains the group’s philosophy and aims this way: “In the non-profit world, charitable donations have traditionally been handled on a person-to-person basis. For non-profit directors, the tried and true methods of raising money have been limited to going door-to-door explaining your cause or having the occasional dinner with a wealthy donor, skirting around the issue of that annual check. It sounds tedious, but there was a reason for it. It was all about the relationships and the trust, [but] the industry has been moving away from that.”

The company aims to help non-profits reinvent the giving experience with new tech tools that make it easier for charities to demonstrate to donors how each dollar making a difference. REaction’s recipe for non-profits is simple: the more time spent cultivating relationships with donors by showing them the direct impact of their donation dollars, the more enthusiastic and willing to give those donors will become. By the end of the summer, REaction hopes to have worked with a couple of clients in Los Angeles to continue gaining practical consulting experience and develop models for future clients. In addition, the team is thinking of ways other than consulting to spread this impact-based giving experience, based on the needs and frustrations of the non-profit directors they have visited.

“There’s no reason that just because technology has developed, the giving experience suddenly has to become so dry, so one-way,” Yeo said. “We’re using things like photos, events, videos and social media to get back to telling that powerful, compelling story for causes.”

Follow the adventures and experiences of REaction Strategy Group at www.reactionis.tumblr.com.

- James Li and Yeo Zuo Yi, Compass Fellows, Georgetown U. Class of 2013

“Our fellows are a dynamic group of future leaders,” said Compass co-founder Neil Shah, “and the thinking, work, and issues they engage in are dynamic as well. A Deliberate Pause is the first book ever to see and address entrepreneurship in that same dynamic way.”

Rather than look for a formula to entrepreneurship or highlight individual people and stories of entrepreneurship as exemplifying “the” way to catalyze and make the changes entrepreneurs are known for, A Deliberate Pause takes a needed pause, stepping back to examine entrepreneurship for its true meaning, and in doing so reveals the patterns across all successful, lasting entrepreneurial ventures. “What we like most about the book is that it offers our fellows both a framework for understanding and an ongoing set of reference points for shaping their thinking, ideas and solutions for creating better approaches to solving social issues,” Shah said.

“It is an honor and an opportunity to have the book chosen by Compass,” author Larry Robertson said. “The honor is a combination of having the book recognized by a larger audience than just the individual reader and to have that recognition come from an organization as unique, admirable and important as Compass. The opportunity is to help students engage in a deeper level of entrepreneurial thinking and looking at the world differently, well before they focus on a particular interest, issue or venture. That’s how entrepreneurial thinking becomes a habit, not just a one time, one idea occurrence.”

The book will be distributed to all new Fellows this fall as part of their welcome packet upon commencement of the fellowship program. The book will also be given to all future classes of incoming Fellows. In collaboration with Mr. Robertson, Compass is in the process of developing accompanying learning guides to tie the book and the modules of the Fellows program more closely together.

About Larry Robertson
Larry is the award-winning author of A Deliberate Pause: Entrepreneurship and its Moment in Human Progress, a book that has received wide acclaim for its unique and insightful look at how entrepreneurship works and for its accessible, actionable guidance as to how all of us can tap this powerful force that enables humanity to progress. He has spent more than two decades in the entrepreneurial universe in roles ranging from advisor to investor and many in between. Larry is the founder and president of Lighthouse Consulting, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and a recognized expert on entrepreneurship in public, private and academic forums.

This year we launched the Zeeba Investment Group, a student-run equity fund structured to invest in the Qatar Stock Exchange. Unlike the archetype hedge fund, Zeeba prioritizes student impact alongside investment profits.

The business made significant progress in recent months. Now incorporated as an LLC in the state of Delaware, we have also found a firm in New York City that has agreed to help us with our accounting framework. After completing an operating agreement and recruiting a student executive board, we have managed to raise $15,000 in initial capital. Our mock portfolio has been studied and altered, and we have begun to put together a board of executive advisers comprised of professors and successful individuals from the finance world.

The Zeeba Group is now looking to secure a broker for entry in the Qatar Stock Exchange. Once securing a broker, we are hoping to enter the market on December 1st, 2010. We have also met with Georgetown officials and are in the final stages of preparing a Zeeba International Scholarship, which will fluctuate in size based on fund profits.