Social Entrepreneur Andres Idarraga: Founder of Creci & Mentel

While 2009 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow Andres Idarraga was incarcerated for six and a half years, he spent a great deal of time reading. Books gave him entry into the lives of figures like Nelson Mandela and Thurgood Marshall who inspired him, and in turn, allowed him to imagine a future for himself beyond prison.

Working in the prison’s library, Andres developed a passion for the law and economic development. An immigrant from Colombia, Andres dreamt of going to college and giving back to society.

He was released early on parole after receiving admission to the University of Rhode Island in June of 2004. One year later, he transferred to Brown University, where he majored in economics and comparative literature. At the age of 30, he started Yale Law School. He interned with the ACLU, Florida Legal Services, and the United States House of Representatives. After graduating, he landed a job as an associate at Boies, Schiller & Flexner where he spent five years.

Now, 15 years out of prison, Andres has fulfilled his dreams and is following his passion.

With teams on the ground in Colombia, Andres believes Creci and Mentel can identify the best social entrepreneurs and provide them with capital that’s currently hard to come by. They are also working with incubators and accelerators like Impact Hub in Bogota and Ruta N throughout Colombia. Creci’s and Mentel’s investment models are based on the UN Sustainable Goal and the IRIS frameworks, the latter developed by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), which is led by 2006 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow Amit Bouri.

“I want to show private capital that there is a sufficient turn that would make it worthwhile for them to really be on the lookout for great projects they might not otherwise look to. Once you show private capital that these projects can have a good return then they will look for them,” Andres explained.

Andres is pursuing an executive MBA at Kellogg School of Management, but his work at FlexFunds gave him a true startup education. He joined when the company was just seven people. He’s leaving it with 60.

Educational Transformation

Andres can still clearly recall reading an article in prison about a man who grew up in tough circumstances in Rhode Island, like Andres had, but who went to community college, the University of Rhode Island and then onto Wall Street. Eventually, the man came to realize that his job wasn’t meaningful to him. He pursued a degree at Harvard Law School and returned to Rhode Island where he became a professor and served low-income individuals. Inspired, Andres cut the article out of the paper and put it in his scrapbook. That man, Jorge Elorza, became a mentor to Andres and the mayor of Providence in 2015.

“There I was taking community college classes and thinking to myself maybe I too could do well enough to pursue elite levels of higher education one day,” Andres said as he reflected on the impact Jorge had made on his life. “Sure enough, little by little, it got me there. He really provided a road map for me. He became a mentor to me and when I was in law school he would buy my law books for me.”

Andres’s Immigration Story

When asked about what inspires him, Andres sites the life and words of Paul Soros, “I was lucky to survive. The rest was relatively easy.”

Andres’s parents grew up in Cocorná and Salto Abajo, small towns outside of Medellín that were hard hit by Colombia’s civil war.

After graduating from a rural high school, his mother started teaching in Marinilla, which is where she met Andres’s father, who had moved there for work as well. In the late 1970s, Andres’s father immigrated to the US and settled in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where there was a large Colombian population.