Higher Ed Utah

(Arrin Newton Brunson, Salt Lake Tribune) — L. John Wilkerson, a business leader and philanthropist, invited Utah State University’s graduating class Saturday to join him in a fight against poverty.

The keynote speaker at USU’s 124th commencement ceremony in the Dee Glen Smith Spectrum, Wilkerson said 1.4 billion humans wake up each day without access to food, water, clothes, medicine, fuel or shelter.

Wilkerson earned a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences at USU in 1965, a doctorate at Cornell and worked four years on Wall Street before building a career managing technology companies that advance medical care.

Today, Wilkerson, who serves on the executive committee of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, is determined to “make extreme poverty history in our lifetime.” Wilkerson has embraced The Global Poverty Project, a movement organized to change broken and corrupt political systems that keep people poor.

“Extreme poverty robs mothers, fathers and children of dignity and it robs you and me of their creativity, their humanity and their productivity,” he said.

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