PepsiCo Inc. will donate more than $1.5 million during the next three years to the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans, a program run through the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, the company announced Thursday at a press conference in Times Square. 

PepsiCo will donate money from its new “Dream Machine” recycling kiosks to the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans, or EBV, a program that teaches entrepreneurship skills to disabled United States veterans and helps them start their own businesses.

PepsiCo will donate $500,000 to EBV each year for the next three years, and it will give an additional $250,000 for every 10 million pounds of material collected in the Dream Machines, said Joe Jacuzzi, a PepsiCo spokesman. The machines are electric recycling kiosks for bottles and cans that keep track of how much people recycle with a rewards program through greenopolis.com. A Facebook page was created for the Dream Machine program Wednesday.

PepsiCo already has kiosks in operation in California and North Carolina and plans to have 3,000 installed by the end of the year, Jacuzzi said.

The fact that the Dream Machines will benefit veterans will get more people motivated to recycle, Jacuzzi said. Even in places where it is accessible, people don’t always participate in recycling, he said.

“Research shows that people like helping make the planet more green,” Jacuzzi said, “but they still need an additional reward to recycle.”

Partnering with EBV made sense for PepsiCo, Jacuzzi said, because it already has a partnership with America Corporate Partners, a group that helps veterans find jobs. PepsiCo provides about 50 mentors to the program.

The Whitman School founded EBV in 2007 and has funded it completely through the donations of SU alumni and private donors, said Mike Haynie, EBV director and assistant professor of entrepreneurship and emerging enterprise. 

EBV accepts 45 applicants each summer who come to SU for an all-expenses-paid nine-day stay to learn entrepreneurship skills. Instructors include Whitman professors and other volunteers, who have included Fortune 500 company chief executive officers in past years, Haynie said.

EBV also operates programs at the University of California, Los Angeles, Florida State University, Texas A&M, the University of Connecticut and Purdue University. In 2009, the U.S. Department of the Army named EBV a national “best practice for programs serving soldiers and their families,” according to EBV’s website.

Now that it has a national sponsor in PepsiCo, EBV hopes to expand to more colleges, run its program more than once a year and start new programs, Haynie said. Of the 20 veterans who completed the training in 2007, 17 own their businesses today and four made more than $1 million in revenue last year, he said.

One new program helped by the donation, called EBV Families, will teach family members of disabled veterans. EBV Families will run for the first time this fall and will be designed and delivered in part by students in a social entrepreneurship class, Haynie said. 

Haynie, a veteran of the Air Force who helped found EBV in 2007, said it is more important to help our veterans now than ever before.

“Experts estimate that about 30 percent of everybody deployed overseas to Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001 will return with a disability,” he said. “And I feel we need to do what we can to help these people.”

Published on April 26, 2010 at 12:00 pm