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Before graduate school, the idea of starting something of her own wasn’t even on Jamila Peguero’s radar. “I’m the first in my family to go to undergrad, the first to go to grad school,” she shares. “Owning something, creating something—it wasn’t something I was encouraged to do or even taught was possible.”
That changed when she applied to the Enlight Fellowship at Innovate@BU. As a Master of Social Work student at Boston University, Jamila found herself drawn to the program’s unique combination of entrepreneurship and social impact.
“I was really interested in how to become a leader in the social work space.”
Over the course of the summer, Jamila developed the Care and Justice Network, a professional community for social workers interested in racial justice strategies and interventions. “My original idea was focused on strategic planning and DEI,” she explains. “But right now, the climate isn’t very receptive to that, and my skills weren’t quite there yet. So I pivoted to where I could make the most impact: creating community.”
Her placement with Inclusion Geeks, a DEI consulting firm, showed her the complexities of this work. “Being at a consulting company opened my eyes to the nature of the problem—all the nuances, all the moving parts,” she says.
“It really helped me shift gears and think differently about the kind of impact I want to have.”
But it wasn’t just professional insights that Jamila gained. Through workshops and coaching, she learned practical innovation skills she hadn’t anticipated. “Problem discovery, teasing out assumptions—these are things I didn’t even know I needed, and now I use them all the time,” she says. “And being surrounded by so many people starting nonprofits and ventures, especially students with backgrounds like mine, was so encouraging.”
“This experience opened a whole new door of possibilities for me.”
Now entering her second year at BU, Jamila is thinking long term. Whether she becomes a CEO or leads programs within an organization, she knows innovation will be central to her leadership. “In social work, we’ve been doing the same things for decades—and we still have homelessness, poverty, racism,” she says. “We need new approaches. We need innovation.”
The Enlight Fellowship showed her that she could be part of building those new approaches.
