As founder of Business on the Frontlines, a groundbreaking Notre Dame course that harnesses  the dynamism of business to rebuild war-torn societies and serve people in deep poverty, Viva Bartkus knows firsthand how the University can make a difference in the world.

And thanks to people like Tuck Hopkins, Bartkus has seen firsthand how the University’s Inspired Leadership Initiative Fellows can leverage their expertise and life experience to support that mission. 

Over the past year, Bartkus, an associate professor of management in Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, has worked with Hopkins, a retired lawyer and ILI Fellow who served as an advisor to Business on the Frontlines’ Team Guatemala. The group has partnered with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to help the Mayan Q’eqchi’ people in Guatemala’s Polochic Region, an area where a sore lack of infrastructure, government services, and economic opportunities leaves 90 percent of the population to live on less than $1 a day.

Last year, Bartkus says, Team Guatemala identified cacao as a crop the local people could cultivate and sell, and this year, the team has been troubleshooting how to build a sustainable enterprise that will allow farmers to have access to customers and markets. Hopkins has drawn on decades of working with companies that deliver products to offer practical advice to the MBA students on the team. 

“Tuck has certainly added a great deal to this team,” Bartkus says, noting how Hopkins has worked with Kelly Strait, a Business on the Frontlines alumnus who had previously worked on a project in Sierra Leone, to advise the group. “We partnered Tuck with Kelly so that there would be more senior experience and more direct Business on the Frontlines experience together to coach Team Guatemala.” 

As Notre Dame works to serve the poorest of the poor, Bartkus says, it can continue to benefit from the perspectives of ILI Fellows, who draw on their experience to ask crucial questions and provide a broader perspective.

“I really look to the Inspired Leadership Initiative for those folks who have had a little bit more experience with a little bit more of life and like to spend time with young folks to coach, advise, and counsel them through this process of learning how to use their business skills to serve those most in need,” she says. 

And the benefits don’t end there, Bartkus says. By using their skills to give back with Notre Dame, ILI Fellows can continue to explore how they might make a difference in an encore career. 

“We live our life in chapters, and different things become more important in different chapters of our life,” she says. “And Notre Dame is a wonderful place to actually go through the process of discernment of what will be your next chapter in your life."

Students too often conceive of education simply as an information transfer or a means to burnish credentials, but Tom Stapleford sees a richer model: a life-changing encounter that prompts questioning, reflection, and personal growth.

That’s what Stapleford, associate professor and chair of the University’s Department of Liberal Studies, witnesses each week when he leads a Great Books seminar for Inspired Leadership Initiative Fellows—an experience that allows participants to explore classic texts and grapple with perennial questions. 

“You see the world in a new way, you’ve got new questions that you might not have thought about before, you might have new answers or new ways of responding to questions that you hadn’t even considered,” Stapleford says. “And that, I think, is fundamentally what this program is about. It’s not about information, it’s not about credentialing, it’s about a kind of transformation that occurs through these encounters.These are encounters in the classroom and with the text, but also with the other ILI Fellows.” 

This academic year, ILI Fellows have explored works by Homer and and Virgil, delved into Dante, and navigated writings by W. E. B. Du Bois and C.S. Lewis. For three hours each week, they gather to make sense of the latest text together—and to share the meaning it holds for them as they begin to explore and discern the next chapter of their lives. 

Stapleford says the chosen works help ILI Fellows ponder two critical questions: what they want to do with their lives, and how they can act as a force for good in the world. By tackling texts that stretch them to think differently, and by sharing their insights within the context of a community, they can explore together the answers that make sense for each of them. 

“It’s a very powerful way for the ILI Fellows as a group to go through this experience. And there’s something really important about doing this as a community,” Stapleford says. “Many of them could have just taken a year off and sat at home, read a bunch of works, and gone to plays and the opera. But the difference between doing that and having this experience in a community is quite radical. We have this natural urge not just to experience something, but to talk with someone else who’s shared that experience with us and learn from them at the same time. It’s that communal experience that is really critical for the whole process.”