When Afnaan Moharram finishes her studies at the University of Pennsylvania in December, she wants to combine for-profit work with social change, and, if she can’t find a socially conscience business where she can do that, she wants to eventually start one. In her years at Penn, Moharram, from East Windsor, N.J., has worked on issues that she is passionate about while developing business skills that will serve her in her career.

“I strongly believe that businesses can and should help make the world a better place,” she says. “I’ve always known that I wanted to have an impactful career. I care about a variety of social issues, and I knew that I wanted to invest in at least one through my career.”

The Wharton Social Impact Initiative helped Moharram chart her course as a Huntsman Program student pursuing a B.S. in economics from Wharton and a B.A. in international studies from the School of Arts & Sciences. Helping out with her family’s business did too. She helps manage customer relations and provides operational and technical support for Good Tree Farm, an organic-community-supported farm in New Jersey.

In 2013, Moharram conducted research for her senior thesis, “Alternative Agrifood Ideals: A Comparative Study of United States and Egyptian Organic Industries.” The topic was inspired by her exposure to the organic industry through her family’s farm as well as the time she spent studying abroad in Alexandria, Egypt, spring semester of her junior year. 

Her time in Egypt was a learning experience that extended far beyond the classroom. Moharram is of Egyptian descent but had much to learn about the country’s history and culture.

Born in Texas, Moharram was exposed to Egypt as a young child. She spent her first through fourth grades living there  but visited only once after that. She chose to fully immerse herself in the culture for the first time as an adult and petitioned Penn to allow her to attend Middlebury College’s language-immersive study abroad program in Egypt to fulfill her Huntsman study abroad requirement. A week after the start of the program, she and the other American students in the program were required to speak and listen to only Arabic. This language pledge helped further her understanding of modern standard Arabic and improve her Egyptian dialect speaking skills during her five-and-a-half-month stay.

The next time Moharram flew across the Atlantic was just before the start of fall semester, when she joined three other Penn affiliated people for the Ariane de Rothschild Fellowship in Social Entrepreneurship and Cross-Cultural Dialogue, hosted at the University of Cambridge. The program brought together 25 social entrepreneurs from North America and Western Europe of various faith backgrounds to discuss topics in entrepreneurship, social impact and cross-cultural understanding.

She applied to the fellowship with a new nonprofit associated with her family’s farm as her project. It addresses the need to make fresh organic food from the farm accessible to the most disadvantaged nearby and to educate faith communities on the importance of leading healthy, sustainable lives using each community’s faith as a catalyst for change.

The Fellows pitched their projects to a panel of judges and presented short TED-style talks. Moharram’s talk was done in conjunction with Zachary Levine, a Penn senior and president of Dorm Room Diplomacy, a non-profit aimed at generating mutual understanding and communication between college students in the U.S. and the Middle East.

As she prepares to finish her Penn education in December, Moharram is using the experiences she’s had in the past few years to help shape the vision she has of the career ahead of her. 

During the summer of 2013 she worked as a standards and reporting intern at B Lab, the non-profit hub of the international for-profit for-purpose benefit corporation movement, in Wayne, Pa. 

“I assisted in the verification process for companies seeking benefit corporation certification and created key performance indicator charts comparing the performance of corporations, social businesses and ordinary businesses across a list of metrics,” she says. “Companies receive higher marks for being financially transparent, environmentally sustainable, worker-friendly and benefitting their local economies.”

Since June, Moharram has worked on the Netter Center for Community Partnerships’ Data Evaluation Team at Penn. She is responsible for gathering and analyzing data about the Center’s Urban Nutrition Initiative’s programs.

She’s also been actively involved in various organizations with social justice missions, including Penn for Liberty in North Korea and Penn Sangam and still finds time to help out with the family farm.

Regardless where her work takes her, Moharram plans to continue spend her spare time advocating for causes she holds dear, such as human rights and food justice. She says doing so is “a fundamental part of who I am.”