UIS honors alumnus Matthew Wallace with the Alumni Humanitarian Award

The University of Illinois Springfield honored alumnus Matthew Wallace, a native of Trilla, Illinois, with the Alumni Humanitarian Award during a ceremony on May 2, 2019 in the Student Union Ballroom. The award recognizes alumni for their significant contributions of leadership or service to improve the lives of others and the welfare of humanity.

Wallace and his wife, Heather, moved to Myanmar in 2008 to live and work full time on poverty alleviation and job creation. He has leveraged his education into enterprise development, and was part of the conceptual design of Opportunities NOW, where he serves as executive director. Opportunities NOW is an entrepreneurship development system in Myanmar that seeks to reduce poverty by providing business training and mentoring in various stages of business startup.

Wallace was a member of the inaugural class (first four-year class) of the UIS Capitol Scholars Honors Program. He says he came to UIS because of an interest in politics, but he became disillusioned by what was happening in state politics at the time and started taking classes that focused on international politics instead. As he did classwork on Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, he became deeply interested in poverty alleviation.

That’s when Myanmar (formerly called Burma) caught his attention. “No one was talking about Myanmar,” he said. “It’s a hard country to get to and hard to get work in, but it had far and away the worst context for poverty at the time. That’s what made me want to go there.”

Upon moving to Myanmar, Wallace began consulting with local companies on their supply-chain management and marketing. It didn’t faze him that he didn’t have much of a background in business. “Compared to the people in Myanmar,” he said, “I had a lot more capacity to learn about how a business could lower costs and raise profits and deciding what products would work well.”

Consulting gave him an idea of how he could work on alleviating the poverty he saw around him. By 2010, Wallace and friend Ryan Russell had plans in place for a business called Opportunities NOW, which would include an entrepreneurship school and a source of loans for graduates. “We were especially interested in helping young people between the ages of 17 and 30,” Wallace said. “In Myanmar, people in their 20s are called the lost or forgotten generation because they have no opportunity to get jobs. Their schools have been a wreck, and there’s no real sense of them having any kind of value for society. We wanted to give them a voice.”

During the next two years, Wallace and his wife returned to the United States, so Matt could earn his master’s degree in International Commerce from the University of Kentucky Patterson School of Diplomacy. His business partner spent the time raising capital for the business.

In 2012, Opportunities NOW launched. “In the first year, we started eight to ten businesses,” Wallace said. Since then, they have trained more than 500 students, invested in more than 250 businesses, and have expanded to a second location.

Opportunities NOW is an entrepreneurship development system in Myanmar that seeks to reduce poverty by providing business training and mentoring in various stages of business startup. Opportunities NOW not only provides the educational framework to help a business grow, but also provides the capital that students need to succeed with their business through the ONOW Social Launch Fund.

For more information on the award, contact Chuck Schrage, associate vice chancellor for alumni relations, at 217/206-6058 or cschr1@uis.edu.