Fostering Future Leaders at the Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship
On the second floor of the Allbritton Center, students linger in a boardroom after a Start Up Table lunch meeting focused on women-led organizations. In an adjacent co-working space with seats and a high-top table, other students tap away on their laptops. Just a few feet away, an office hosts Wesleyan University’s entrepreneur in residence.
This buzzing, collaborative space is the revamped home of the Patricelli Center for Entrepreneurship. In its 14th year, the Center—established through a gift from the Robert and Margaret Patricelli Family Foundation—has a new name, new space, and evolving mission to meet the interests and needs of a growing number of enterprising students at Wesleyan.
“We really wanted a space for people to be able to collaborate and build together,” said Patricelli Center Director Ahmed Badr ’20 of the redesigned rooms and office spaces. “It’s matching the capacity and the programming with a space that could bring both to life.”
Since its founding, the Patricelli Center has nurtured and incubated budding student entrepreneurs and leaders. Formerly the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship, it has dropped the “social” to reflect current student interest as well as a broader approach to entrepreneurial leadership.
When Badr came on as director three years ago, most of the students were focused on nonprofit startups and projects. But “by year two, I realized that was starting to change,” he said. “There are students who had broader interests, not just in the for-profit sector, but around leadership writ large.”
Trustee Emeritus Robert Patricelli ’61, P’88, ’90 confirms that the Center’s new direction reflects a growing need for more entrepreneurs in every field. “When we started 14 years ago, the focus was on starting and sustaining initiatives in the nonprofit sector,” he said. “But now the enormous scale of national and international change on all fronts demands a broader focus. We need to help Wesleyan students and graduates to be constructive leaders and institution builders in all sectors—business, nonprofits, government, and beyond. The Patricelli Center hopes to be a bridge for students between the foundational liberal arts and the opportunities and challenges in the broader world.”
Entrepreneurship Today
Badr, who launched several successful initiatives of his own before returning to Wesleyan in 2023, defines entrepreneurship broadly. “It's a way to understand the world and actively impact it,” he said. “To me, acting in an entrepreneurial way is seeing an issue, understanding it, and then deciding to do something about solving that issue.”
In that sense, entrepreneurship is a skill that anyone can learn and utilize, whether they are operating at a nonprofit, for-profit, or in government. Or on a college campus. It is also closely tied to leadership, which the Patricelli Center aims to prioritize, said Badr.
“We're here to support and activate leadership in its various forms,” he said. “Everything we do here is informed by letting students engage with folks at the forefront of their fields, learning from those experiences, and then creating a path where those students become the people at the forefront of their fields.”
That’s what his course, Leadership and Social Innovation, is designed to achieve. Through this cohort-style class, students meet global leaders from a wide range of fields, including government, academia, media, and the arts. They engage directly with those leaders to learn about their work and experiences. In the last few years, guest leaders have included individuals like Melissa Fleming, who leads communications for the United Nations, and Marc Pachter, who directed the National Portrait Gallery. This fall, the Patricelli Center will welcome Rashida Jones, former president of MSNBC, for a public talk and class visit.
The course brought Baron Fisher ’26 to the Patricelli Center during his sophomore year at Wesleyan and he has stayed engaged ever since. The class, which requires students to prepare a Personal Social Impact Plan as a final project, motivated Fisher to address a problem he saw in terms of the news about U.S.-China relations and lack of interest on campus in the world’s most important geopolitical relationship.
“I had spent a lot of time studying about China,” he said, “and I saw that there was a lot of polarizing discourse about U.S.-China relations and that there wasn't enough understanding between two sides, the two biggest geopolitical powers. So [I thought] it'd be great to have more understanding on this issue.”
To address that gap, Fisher developed a Student Forum, a student-led course, that he dubbed Tea Time Talks: Contemporary China from Mao to Now, for which he now serves as the Community Fellow, overseeing logistics and planning for guest speakers. Through the Patricelli Center, Fisher also secured funding to support an unpaid internship with the U.S. of Department Commerce last summer. “The Patricelli Center supported me and ensured I was able to be in D.C. in person during a period of uncertainty with government restructuring. Through the internship, I was able to apply my academic interests I built on campus to the professional world by working on U.S.-China trade policy in the federal government,” said Fisher, who is majoring in English and East Asian Studies, with a Civic Engagement minor.
Raiza Goel ’28 also took Badr’s class during her first year. She had only been on campus a few weeks when he encouraged her to take a trip to the United Nations’ Summit of the Future event despite her hesitance to attend the global gathering. “It was a really good experience in terms of learning how to interact with all these people from different walks of life, engaging with meaningful youth,” she said.
Goel, now a sophomore, has been to the U.N. three times. The experience ties in with her interest in studying cross-border terrorism in South Asia, where she is from. What started as a research project for Map the Systems, another Student Forum, is now the focus of her ongoing independent research.
As the Communications and Engagement Fellow at the Patricelli Center, Goel is hoping to attract more students into the expanded space and to what she sees as a more inclusive mission. “In the past, students often connected one-on-one with the director but there were fewer structured opportunities to engage with each other,” she said. “I think that's really changed this semester and has really made my role also change in that capacity because you, as a student, can facilitate conversation.”
New Directions
Fisher and Goel have both taken advantage of the full range of opportunities the Patricelli Center has to offer—from classes, grants, and advising to leadership experiences. Going forward, the Center will continue to build on those offerings and provide others.
For example, the Patricelli Center’s Entrepreneur in Residence and Visiting Professor of Public Policy Marisa MacClary ’94, P’28 is advising students, hosting weekly events, and will teach a class this spring. A healthcare entrepreneur, MacClary can offer insights from her own experience of building a company, Artifact Health, from the ground up and later selling it. “Marisa is really interesting because she has had a lot of experience running something that is in the for-profit sector,” said Badr. “We're also thinking about different gaps that we can fill for students that are interested in different fields.”
Badr described plans to gather better data on Wesleyan entrepreneurs in a portal and create a directory of ventures and ideas that have been funded so students can learn about each other’s work and that of alumni. Badr would also like to increase the number of grants, which now range from $200 micro-grants to $6,000 New Venture Award grants.
He often describes the Patricelli Center as an ecosystem where students of any age can choose their own adventure, whether it’s a conference, micro-grant, experiential trip, or class—a one-off experience or four years of engagement. “The idea is to create...in an ideal world, a space that can have multiple entry points where people can find meaning in and belonging within,” he said.
On October 25, 2025, the Patricelli Center held a rededication ceremony complete with a ribbon-cutting and fireside chat featuring Patricelli, Sasha Chanoff ’94, founder and CEO of RefugePoint, and Phoebe Boyer ’89, P’19, ’23, president and CEO of Children’s Aid Society and chair of Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees.
Before cutting the ribbon, Patricelli reflected on his family's multigenerational relationship with the University—a relationship that has deepened over the years through his enduring commitment to Wesleyan’s mission. “This event today marks the 100th anniversary of the arrival of a Patricelli on the campus of Wesleyan,” he remarked. “My father was a poor kid from New Haven...armed with a $500 scholarship from the Rotary Club of New Haven,” he said, recalling his father’s transformative experience as a Wesleyan graduate in 1929. That early opportunity sparked a legacy of gratitude and generosity that continues to grow, as Patricelli invests in helping future generations of Wesleyans develop entrepreneurial skills to turn their passions into purposeful ventures beyond campus.
The expanded Patricelli Center also receives support from Propel Capital and other generous donors.
