Priya haji biography

She was 44.
In high school, Priya Haji helped her physician father start a free clinic in her hometown of Bryan, Texas, to serve low-income patients.
Biography.

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Priya Haji

Haas alumna Priya Haji, MBA 03, the co-founder of Free at Last, World of Good, and SaveUp, passed away unexpectedly on Monday, July 14. She was 44.

Born in Detroit, Haji earned a bachelor’s degree in religious studies and pre-med at Stanford. After earning her MBA at Berkeley-Haas, she pursued her vision of improving economic opportunity and equality by co-founding three companies.

Free at Last is a national model program for substance abuse treatment and HIV/AIDS intervention in the African American and Latino communities. Under Haji’s leadership, the company served 3,000 people per year in East Palo Alto and raised more than $20M in special investments.

World of Good, a retail marketplace and wholesaler of sustainable and fair trade products, improved the lives of thousands of women artisans in 55 countries. It was acquired by eBay in 2010.

SaveUp, where Haji was serving as CEO at the time of her death, is the nation’s first rewards game for saving money and reducing debt.

Haji fully embodied the Haas School’s Defining Principles, esp

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Priya Haji

Read tributes from

Sammy Shreibati, Priya's co-founder at SaveUp

Holly Boyer, Priya's co-founder at World of Good Development Organization

David Guendelman, CFO, SaveUp

SAMMY'S TRIBUTE

Priya’s vision for her life was to make a positive impact on the world. From venture-backed startups to giving advice to a friend, she had a bigger vision for everything and everyone. Striving to make every moment of her life count, Priya started a free health clinic with her father while in high school, and then started Free At Last, a non-profit drug treatment and prevention center, after college. Soon after business school she started World Of Good, a online marketplace to help low-income women around the world. Priya was one of those people who was going to do something amazing in every part of her life. After meeting Priya for the first time four years ago, I knew I wanted to work with her and be a part of her next vision.

Before we started working together, she—a single woman—was very honest about starting a family on her own. I admired her for embarking on such a life-c

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Priya Haji

CEO & Co-FounderSaveUp

Biography

Priya Haji is the award-winning CEO and co-founder of SaveUp, a mission-driven company working to alleviate poverty in the developing world through commerce. She is also Co-founder and Board Chair of World of Good: Development Organization, a 501(c)(3) focused on creating tools to strengthen global wage standards and improving the quality of life for craft producers worldwide. Today, World of Good, Inc. offers ethically-sourced products through more than 1,300 US retail stores, including Whole Foods and Wild Oats. Haji and World of Good, Inc. recently partnered with eBay to build the world’s largest online marketplace for people-positive products. Working in parallel, the Development Organization is focused on strengthening standards for the growing market to ensure fair compensation for producers. Haji strives to empower craft producers with the ability to achieve economic sustainability.