Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solving the problems of global poverty, will present a free lecture Monday, Sept. 27, based on her best-selling memoir, "The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World."

The lecture, slated for 7:30 p.m. in Kennedy Hall's Call Auditorium, is sponsored by Cornell's Iscol Family Program for Leadership Development in Public Service in the College of Human Ecology. A reception will follow in the atrium.

The lecture will chronicle Novogratz's experiences in Africa and elsewhere on changing the way the problems of the developing world are approached.

In her memoir, Novogratz recounts how she left a career in international banking to find new ways of addressing global poverty. She describes a new form of philanthropic investing called "patient capital" that can help make people self-sufficient. Her story challenges people to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink their engagement with the world.

Novogratz founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation and Duterimbere, the first micro-finance institution for women in Rwanda. Novogratz recently was named to Foreign Policy's list of Top 100 Global Thinkers and Daily Beast's 25 Smartest People of the Decade.

For more information, see http://iscol.human.cornell.edu/.