Andrew Leon Hanna

Andrew Leon Hanna is an award-winning entrepreneur, lawyer, author, and professor. He is co-founder of Mona, a global social venture that highlights and invests in small-business entrepreneurs, including by connecting low-income, women, refugee, and other underserved communities to zero-interest loans. He also co-founded DreamxAmerica, an initiative joining storytelling and impact to uplift immigrant entrepreneurs, which has been recognized on Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas List and nominated for a Chicago Emmy® Award. 

Hanna is the author of 25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs (Cambridge University Press), which tells the stories of three Syrian women entrepreneurs in the Za’atari camp, and of refugee entrepreneurs around the world. The book – a Financial Times Best Book of the Year and Bracken Bower Prize winner – has been called “a powerful story of hope” by Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee; a chance to “discover humanity at its best” by PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff; “inspir[ing],” “sharply topical,” and “original” by the Financial Times; and “uplifting” by Publishers Weekly.

As an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Hanna launched the Global Social Entrepreneurship Lab (GSE Lab). The course partners with founders of leading social ventures around the world to advance their impact on underserved communities – from designing a development impact bond to help the Global Fund for Widows raise capital to grow its women-led microbanks across the globe, to restructuring operations for Native Renewables to scale its solar panel installations in Hopi and Navajo communities.

Previously, Hanna served in the U.S. Department of Justice and the White House. While at McKinsey & Company, he led the launch of Generation – the global youth employment non-profit – in his hometown of Jacksonville and advised senior officials at the White House and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ suicide prevention task force. Hanna also founded IGNITE Peer Mentoring, an education NGO whose curriculum has been utilized at 100+ schools around the world. He has been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 List, and his work has been featured in the BBC, PBS, New York Times, and more.

Hanna earned his MBA with honors at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar, Knight-Hennessy Scholar, and Siebel Scholar. He received a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and recipient of the Irving Oberman Memorial Prize for Law & Social Change. And he earned an A.B. with highest distinction from Duke University, where he was a Robertson Scholar and recipient of the Terry Sanford Leadership Award.