Page 64 - Innovation Delaware 2019

MIRACLE OLATUNJI
I’m trying to give young people opportunities
for personal and professional development.”
MIRACLE OLATUNJI:
PUBLISHING WITH A PURPOSE Although she’s already an accom-
plished public speaker and blogger,
not to mention having been profiled
by Fortune magazine, there’s nothing miraculous about 19-year-old Miracle Olatunji. Rather, she’s all about having a sense of purpose, which, by the way, is the subject of her first book.
Olatunji, a New Castle resident
and graduate of the Charter School of Wilmington, is wrapping up her fresh- man year at Northeastern University
in Boston, where she intends to major
in business and communications while planning for a career “at the intersection of business and technology.”
But first, there’s that book, titled “Purpose: How to Live and Lead With Impact,” being published in July 2019 by New Degree Press. It will be available
on Amazon first and eventually in retail stores such as Barnes & Noble. Olatunji is also continuing to build OpportuniMe, the online newsletter project for teens that she created in high school.
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“Purpose is kind of abstract,” says Olatunji, who nonetheless acts with purpose in almost everything she does. To turn that abstraction into reality,
she spent last summer researching her book, interviewing successful executives, entrepreneurs, athletes and leaders in the government and nonprofit arenas. Her subjects include Olympic sprint-
er and bobsledder Lauryn Williams, Forbes Impact co-founder Brendan Doherty and Jess Eckstrom, creator of Headbands of Hope, who matches every headband she sells with the donation of a headband to a childhood cancer patient. “I was surprised with how open and re- ceptive they were to being interviewed,” Olatunji says.
She developed OpportuniMe in her senior year at Wilmington Charter, when she learned firsthand the difficul- ties teens experience when searching for challenging internships, enrichment programs and volunteer opportuni- ties. She pitched her idea through the Diamond Challenge, a competition
for high school students run by the
Horn Entrepreneurship program at the University of Delaware, and refined it
as a participant in the first cohort of stu- dents in the Dual School, an experimen- tal enrichment program. Then she went to the World Series of Entrepreneurship competition in Philadelphia in April 2018, where her idea won the $10,000 first prize. Olatunji is now working on transforming OpportuniMe from a news- letter into a website to broaden its reach.
“I’m trying to give young people op- portunities for personal and professional development, help them discover their passions, find meaningful careers and learn about entrepreneurship,” she says.
Miracle is not the only member of the Olatunji family to have an outsized impact at an early age. Her 16-year- old twin sisters, Dorcas and Deborah, both juniors at the Charter School of Wilmington, are carving out their own success stories.
Dorcas has created t2, or Transforming Transportation, an application that promotes community building in
high schools and efficiency through
JIM COARSE/MOONLOOP PHOTOGRAPHY