2021 Fellows Spotlight
A rising 2nd year in the College of Arts and Sciences, Andrew Rummel is passionate about supporting business and companies that want to cultivate social, environmental, and economic improvements for the community.
Andrew Rummel
“Businesses can be the engines that change individuals’ lives and transform communities.”
As a 2021 Tadler Fellow, Rummel is spending this summer interning at Blueprint Local, an impact-oriented opportunity fund focused primarily on US real-estate and business investments. They focus on rebuilding the economic foundation of depressed regions through investment while offering financial returns to investors. Blueprint’s Opportunity Zone funds invest in the rehabilitation of low-income communities through real-estate investments in both development and renovation.
Rummel has always taken an interest in entrepreneurship—he even created his own start-up in high school. Partnering with a friend they launched Rummel and Hughes Marketing Development to help small businesses grow their social media platforms.
“I noticed that there were many small businesses that did not have the technological savviness to create a successful social media campaign to compete with larger businesses with more resources and technological knowledge. We help deploy social media campaigns for small businesses and teach the owners how to use these platforms in order to connect them with new and existing customers.”
At UVA, he knew he wanted to incorporate impact investing into his academic and career goals, which led him to enroll in Impact Investing in Action-Appalachia. Studying economics with an interest in business, he was interested in finding ways to combine productive investments with community development. He credits the Impact Investing course with teaching him about the field of social entrepreneurship and how you can build a career on impact investing and helping local communities.
Every day looks different for Rummel at Blueprint Local; he has been given a project working on a development impact analysis and measurement system to measure impact of their investments. He also engages heavily in research to discover other measurement tools are out there. With the internship being virtual this year, he remarks his most valuable experience so far has been a companywide retreat where he was able to meet the Blueprint Local community in Charlottesville.
Rummel has found that measuring impact can be a difficult task as it involves isolating cause and effect, and in some cases quantifying what can seem like the unquantifiable.
“It’s very hard and messy right now to figure out how to measure impact. Listening to guest speakers shows how difficult it is….as there is no way to measure impact investing in just a few numbers.”
While the work can be tasking, it is important work and highly rewarding. Rummel joined Profit with Purpose at UVA to learn more about the impact investing industry and recommends students looking into impact investing do the same through student organizations and courses to see how this field fits into their academic and career goals.