Marc Carr’s journey from Ghana to homegrown social entrepreneurship

Marc Carr grew up in Jennings, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis not far from Ferguson.
When news of Michael Brown’s death broke last summer, he immediately recognized the landscape.
“I was seeing what happened on TV,” he said. “I knew the street.”
But at the time he was far from home, working as a sales and marketing manager for Avis in Ghana.
This prompted some soul searching.
“It was almost surreal,” he said. He thought, “Why am I in Ghana trying to address the issues when I’m not at home trying to address the issues?”
After returning to the U.S. last year, he founded Social Solutions, a startup that seeks to “crowdsource ideas to solve local problems,” he said.
In January, the organization ran a forum on the aftermath of the Ferguson protests. “What is next with the movement?,” he asked.
It was the first of a monthly series that brings together various “change makers” at Busboys and Poets’ Brookland location to brainstorm solutions to societal ills.
Carr is now scaling up his enterprise with the first Social Innovation Festival, a five-day event that will convene social entrepreneurs in D.C. this September to address the issue of mass incarceration.
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He also plans on creating a “Lab” that will put in motion the ideas generated during the festival’s hackathon.