Recipient of the Heller Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship
Oliver Torres (he/they), MBA’24, grew up in a bilingual setting in Miami, Florida. He identifies as Cuban-American and Chilean-American.
Torres attended Brown University as a Bill Gates Millenium Scholar as an undergrad, where he studied education with a focus on policy. He proudly explains that his family’s history has shaped his activism.
Torres’ Chilean family is politically active, having opposed the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. They are vocal advocates for issues such as indigenous people’s rights, the arts, and the recent historic effort to adopt a new Chilean constitution. His Cuban family also lived through historic milestones, including the Batista and Castro dictatorships that forced them to flee to Miami. Torres grew up regularly meeting recently-arrived refugees.
Torres’ family history makes him appreciate and want to defend the rights to fair elections and to freely voice political opinions. Those connections also fuel his drive to uplift community-centered advocacy and immigrant rights.
Torres chose Heller for its focus on systemic impact. Prior to attending Heller, Torres worked with organizations such as The Southern Poverty Law Center in Miami, defending and advancing immigrant rights at the intersection of litigation, community organizing, and policy reform. He recognizes that litigation alone is often not enough to generate social movements, and social progress does not come exclusively from winning or losing in a courtroom.
After graduation, Torres hopes to use his MBA to continue his leadership in community-centered impact. He is exploring career options in impact investing, philanthropy, and non-profit consulting in order to bridge gaps between grassroots movements and newly emerging financial advocacy spaces. He aims to transform non-profit funding structures so that impacted community voices will lead movements and advocacy.
“Heller is perfect because the Social Impact MBA couples quantitative skills and management skills with a social impact lens, and to me, that helps to answer the question of how to be a community-centered leader,” he says.
Torres is a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Scholar, an opportunity that has facilitated his education at Heller while allowing him to be true to his values.
“Racial justice is something that we live and breathe at Heller. My peers inspire me every day to be better and do more” he says. “Heller is the only place to give me the financial freedom to take on my dreamy ambitious projects while also providing hard skills.”
Torres has also been named one of two recipients of the national Reaching Out MBA (ROMBA) and Discover Fellowship.
Torres intends to add a social policy concentration to his MBA that will be tailored to his interests. He would love to start his own nonprofit one day, but before that, he plans to take additional coursework in topics such as fundraising and finance.
Torres is also the student representative for the MBA Program Committee and participates in the Impact Investing Group. He is excited for the opportunity to advocate for his peers, who are, as he points out, his community at the micro level.
In addition to his work on campus, he is a board fellow for Support Center, a nonprofit capacity building organization.