Vishal Parkash
Entrepreneur, Impact Investor, and Activist, Bard College
2026
Vishal is a rising senior at Bard College, studying Economics with minors in Finance and Mathematics, splitting his time between Bard’s Annandale-on-Hudson and Berlin campuses. His work centers on building bridges across divided communities and expanding economic access for groups pushed to the margins, informed by years living and working across Pakistan, Germany, South Africa, the United States, and Zambia.
He founded Circles of Faith, an interfaith dialogue initiative that has run more than 50 sessions across 20 schools, creating structured spaces for young people from different religious backgrounds to engage with one another directly rather than through stereotypes. He also founded Konnect, a disability advocacy organization whose national summits have produced concrete policy outputs, and MinPower, focused on legal empowerment for minority communities facing systemic exclusion.
His economic work follows the same throughline: hate and exclusion are often reinforced by economic isolation, and closing that gap is part of undoing it. Through RUBAN, he connected more than 200 women artisans across Karachi, Lahore, and Sindh to formal markets, navigating resistance from families who believed women should not work outside the home by reframing the model around household financial benefit rather than confrontation, a strategy that ultimately opened the door for those same families to send their women to financial literacy classes. In Berlin, he founded Emprende to deliver financial and legal literacy to refugees and migrants navigating a new country’s systems.
As Program Director at Rem & Company, a global student-run pro bono consulting network active in more than 30 chapters, he works with businesses led by women and marginalized communities, including refugee-owned businesses, helping them build the infrastructure to participate in formal economies.At Bard, he runs the Economics Club and Finance Club, serves as Fiscal Chair of Student Government, sits on the college’s investments committee and is deeply involved with the Center of Civic Engagement, as a TLS scholar and lead Civic Ambassador, and in the Hudson Valley.
His current research looks at how formal financial systems leave minority and immigrant populations out, and how that exclusion connects to bigger issues like division and instability. In one project, he studied access to credit for minorities in South Asia, comparing Karachi and Dhaka, and he is now expanding that work into more regions. Currently, he is writing his senior thesis on the funding gap immigrant founders face in U.S. venture capital. Different regions and different angles, but the same core question: who gets left out of the financial system, and why.
More recently, his attention has turned to AI and its dual capacity to entrench or dismantle exclusion. He is building a platform to help people understand and build with AI, using AI literacy as a lever to expand financial literacy, and thinking about how the same technologies used to detect and disrupt hate speech and extremist networks can also be misused to target and isolate vulnerable groups if built without care.
Across all of it, his premise stays the same: talent is universal, but access to resources, financial, legal, and social, is not, and closing that gap is one of the most durable ways to counter the conditions that let hate take root.
My network of professionals working on countering hate in all its forms grew exponentially after attending Eradicate Hate in 2021. The myriad voices represented at Eradicate Hate, from big tech companies to academic researchers to those with lived experience, reinforced to me the importance of cross-cutting and collaborative approaches to counter hate and its devastating impacts on society. I’ve been fortunate to sustain and build those networks with many of those I met at Eradicate Hate in 2021.
