Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn-born ice cream icon Jerry Greenfield to speak at St. Francis College

Ben & Jerry’s Co-Founder Is Thomas J. Volpe Lecture Series Speaker

October 14, 2014 Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Ben & Jerry’s Co-Founder Jerry Greenfield will speak at St. Francis College Oct. 27.
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Brooklyn-born Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. will be the 2014 Thomas J. Volpe Lecture Series speaker at St. Francis College, 180 Remsen St., on Monday, Oct. 27. The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place at 12:30 p.m. in the college’s Founders Hall.

Greenfield returns to his native borough with 1,000 scoops of his favorite flavors for “An Afternoon of Entrepreneurial Spirit, Social Responsibility and Radical Business Philosophy.”

When Ben and Jerry opened their first ice cream store in Vermont, they mixed their ideas of entrepreneurship with socially conscience ethics and showed that, just as in the Franciscan tradition, you can be successful by doing the right thing, school officials said.

Early on, they sponsored an outdoor movie festival and thanked their customers with “Free Cone Day” on each anniversary. That commitment to social responsibility has been recognized by the Council on Economic Priorities for donating 7.5 percent of their pre-tax profits to nonprofit organizations through the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation and by the U.S. Small Business Administration, which named them U.S. Small Business Persons of the Year in 1988 in a White House ceremony hosted by President Ronald Reagan.

The St. Francis lecture series is funded through a generous gift from Thomas J. Volpe, chairman emeritus of the St. Francis College Board of Trustees and a former senior vice president of financial operations for The Interpublic Group of Companies, Inc.

Guest speakers offer an international perspective in a variety of fields, from business leaders to world leaders. Past speakers include astrophysicists Neil deGrasse Tyson (Cosmos), authors Frank Bruni, Pete Hamill, E.L. Doctorow and Salman Rushdie, Russell Simmons (Def Jam), Mariane Pearl (wife of slain reporter Daniel Pearl), Paul Rusesabagina (the real Hotel Rwanda hero), Lech Walesa (former President of Poland, Nobel Prize winner) and George Mitchell (former U.S. senator, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, baseball steroids report).

 

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