Why wait? Young alumna is determined to make an early, lasting impact on the world

Sarah Pomeranz wants to change the world, and she wants to change it now.

“I’m a bit impatient in my approach,” she admited, noting that, as a business school grad, “it would have been more typical for me to climb the ranks inside a Fortune 500 company and say, ‘I can have an impact in my 60s and 70s.’”

Instead, two years after her 2020 graduation from Rutgers Business School, she founded Consultants for Impact, a nonprofit that works with business consultants who don’t want to wait for their retirement years to create meaningful change in the world.

As CEO, she’s personally coached some 800 consultants over the past three years, helping many of them transition into leadership roles in which they can immediately tackle pressing global issues like ending tuberculosis globally and ending extreme poverty in our lifetimes. 

Doing good has always been a driving force for Pomeranz. She was raised in a modern Orthodox Jewish family that prized the concepts of tzedakah – acts of charity and justice – and chesed – loving kindness. In high school, she was head of the school’s inclusion club and ran a soup kitchen in her Massachusetts community. Then, when she was 18, the death of a close friend injected a sense of urgency into her desire “to live in service for others.” She started asking herself the kind of existential questions that generally occur to people well out of their teens: “What's worth spending a lifetime on?” “What will I and won’t I regret having done at the end of my life?” Those questions, she said, “were a strong and present motivating force during in my time at Rutgers and have been since.”

Her initial career plan was to go into hospitality management, but Rutgers, where she majored in leadership and management with a concentration in entrepreneurship and a minor in social justice, changed that. Her experiences at the business school and in the Rutgers’ Honors College – which brings together students from across the university to learn about global issues – “leveled up my ambition,” she said, “to come to see that I, as one person working in a small team of other people, could actually make a dent in some of the largest global problems of our time.”

As a freshman, she developed a project that utilized catnip, a natural mosquito repellent, to target malaria in Africa. Her team pitched the idea in the Honors College social impact competition and won. It wouldn’t be her only win. As a sophomore, she joined a team working on Sulis, a technology that used sunlight to purify water. In pursuit of the Hult Prize – the world’s largest student startup competition – they aced the first two steps, winning the Hult Prize at Rutgers and then the Boston regionals, which in turn propelled them into the 2018 global accelerator program in London, where Sulis emerged seventh out of 42 teams. They raised $40,000 to fund a pilot program in India, where they later handed off the project to local partners.

The experience, Pomeranz said, “raised the bar” for her vision of what could be achieved working in a diverse, interdisciplinary team. That understanding informed her first post-graduation position as a consultant at Accenture, the global professional services company specializing in management consulting and information technology. Working for a state government client, “I realized,” she said, “that I wasn’t seeing the level of rigor and analysis that was being applied to some of our for-profit clients applied in the same way when it came to nonprofits and the public sector.” That fueled a desire to do better for those nonprofits, and in 2022 she launched one of her own. She described the mission of Consultants for Impact at its core as “matchmaking – trying to place some of the smartest people in the highest-impact roles.”

Optimizing for impact is a concept she applies to everything she does: “We have the capacity to change the world,” she said “but we have to be strategic about our efforts.” It’s a mindset that’s no doubt behind her 2020 pledge to donate 10 percent of her lifetime income to “highly effective nonprofits.”

Mukesh Patel, who taught Pomeranz at both RBS and the Honors College, isn’t surprised that, five years after graduation, she’s running her own highly impactful nonprofit. “I knew she had the entrepreneurial skill and desire, and it was just a matter of time before she built something,” he said. “She’s a builder.”

He was one of several professors who nominated her for RBS’s Rising Business Star Under 30 alumni award, which she won this year. “It felt really affirming,” she said, “that my own alma mater was excited about the work that I’m doing, because this isn’t the usual path.” Not usual, for one thing, because, for Pomeranz, financial success is an ancillary goal, not the goal: “Financial success can bring happiness to a point,” she said, “but after that, it hits diminishing returns. The same is not true when it comes to our impact” –  and that makes her happy indeed.

- By Leslie Garisto Pfaff