With more than a dozen Boilermaker alumni in his family, Lafayette native Kyle Newell seemed destined to attend Purdue.
“It’s a world-class university located in my backyard, so I took the shortest route to college as possible,” Newell says.
Newell’s parents also introduced him to the importance of service work when he accompanied them on mission trips to Haiti while he was in high school. That commitment to making an impact influenced his course of study at Purdue.
“I wanted to take an interdisciplinary approach that allowed me to combine my interests in business with my desire to create positive change in society,” he says. “Of all the majors at Purdue, combining economics and political science made the most sense to do that.”
As part of his interdisciplinary studies, Newell completed undergrad internships working Congress in Washington, D.C., where he returned after graduation to work at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as global corporate citizenship manager. There, he worked on international trade deals working between U.S. and a number of African governments.
“Working at the Chamber revealed to me that adopting a holistic approach to leveraging my business acumen for societal impact could be profoundly effective — and that pursuing a path in policy was the ideal foundation to drive meaningful change,” he says. “But I also realized that I wanted to make a more tangible impact, so I returned to Purdue for my MBA to learn how to use positive business outcomes to create solutions for a better world.”
During his last year in the MBA program, Newell began working toward a second master’s degree in Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. For his final four courses, he travelled to Nigeria and South Africa, where he subsequently cofounded Emerging Market Advisors (EMA), a consulting firm that built a diverse body of work around climate change and sustainability, including new product development, local economic development and due diligence on potential investments in the energy, environment, and agriculture sectors.
After departing EMA, Newell remained in South Africa and flexed his entrepreneurial muscles again to launch Abavuni, an agriculture social enterprise that used digital solutions to upskill and connect emerging farmers to supply the retail sector. He then moved on to serve as portfolio director at Databank Financial Services, where he oversaw the management and strategic direction of the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SME) Agriculture Fund within the African Agriculture Fund.
Newell returned to the U.S. in 2016 to join EY as agriculture sustainability leader. In this project oversight role, he codeveloped new agriculture tools to engage with agriculture enterprises to improve their work with farmers, create greater transparency within their supply chains, and reduce their environmental footprints. “By developing solutions with leading corporations such as Syngenta, Bayer and Unilever, I addressed critical issues in the value chain to improve their financial performance as well as social and environmental sustainability,” he says. “I also developed an environmental assessment tool to help small enterprises enhance their sustainability performance.”
More recently, Newell served as managing director for the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs within the Aspen Institute, where he focused on gender inclusivity and entrepreneurship approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation and approaches to natural resource production.
He’s since returned to the roots of his career as “fractional” chief sustainability officer at several medium-sized companies across the globe that don’t need or can’t afford a full-time position.
“After more than 20 years of experience in developing sustainable business solutions, I realized that I’d come full circle,” he says. “Instead of hierarchical and theoretical roles, I wanted to take a more practical approach and engage directly with businesses. My goal is to provide a holistic understanding of how to balance financial and sustainability goals while working toward a better world. That’s always been my North Star.”