NEW YORK, NY, July 17, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to name Steve J. Mariotti a Lifetime Achiever. An accomplished listee, Mr. Mariotti celebrates many years'experience in his professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes he has accrued in his field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
Few entrepreneurs have done more to share their success with the less fortunate than the distinguished Mr. Mariotti, who not only left a successful business career to teach the impoverished and developmentally disabled, but also wrote groundbreaking textbooks and curriculum that have helped hundreds of thousands of young people discover entrepreneurship. He is the founder and former CEO of the global nonprofit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), which has served more than 700,000 youth globally with entrepreneurship education, and uses Mr. Mariotti's textbooks and curriculum in 22 states and 12 countries. Mr. Mariotti's curriculum has been used to train more than 12,000 teachers worldwide, at NFTE programs in the United States, South Africa, Ireland, Israel, Belgium, China, the Netherlands, Germany, India and the United Kingdom. During his three-decade tenure at NFTE, Mr. Mariotti recruited hundreds of senior executives and entrepreneurs to serve on NFTE's global boards and as mentors and advisors to NFTE alumni. The organization was the subject of the 2009 documentary film Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon, which premiered at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where it was introduced by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The film opened in eight cities with AMC Theatres (NY, LA, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, Atlanta, Miami, KC), and was broadcast during Super Bowl Sunday on BET.
Mr. Mariotti was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in Flint, Michigan, where he learned the value of discipline and entrepreneurship, according to his 2014 article on the Huffington Post blog, where he has been a regular contributor since 2011. In that article, he discussed how the challenging economic climate in Flint enabled artists and small businesses to afford brick and mortar startup locations even though crime and segregation surrounded them. Encouraging entrepreneurs to emerge from similarly challenging economic circumstances has been the touchstone of Mr. Mariotti's career, as he continues to promote the entrepreneurial mindset and enable entrepreneurs worldwide.
After earning a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's degree in business administration from the University of Michigan, Mr. Mariotti accepted a post as financial analyst for the Ford Motor Company in 1976. As the youngest senior analyst in Ford's history, he helped draft Ford's initial policy against apartheid in 1978 with civil rights leader and social activist Leon Sullivan.
In 1979, Mr. Mariotti left Ford Motor Company to start his business Mason Import/Export Services in New York City. Although Mason would develop into a successful business, Mr. Mariotti felt called to teach and work with urban youth. After three years as Mason's president, Mr. Mariotti closed the business in order to become a special education teacher in New York City public schools. He taught high school for six and a half years in Bedford Stuyvesant, East New York, and Fort Apache in the South Bronx and was a Special Education teacher on New York City's Lower East Side for several years.
Mr. Mariotti also taught entrepreneurship and math at Rikers Island, New York City's main jail complex and one of the largest jails in America. He spent many years voluntarily working and corresponding with prison inmates. In 1995, Mr. Mariotti and Mr. Joseph Robinson co-founded Inmates Teaching Entrepreneurship And Mentorship (ITEM) a prison-based program that teaches inmates how to share the basics of business ownership with their children, and with fellow incarcerated men. Throughout his teaching career, Mr. Mariotti attended summer sessions at Brooklyn College, Stanford University and Harvard University in order to improve his understanding of at-risk education.
When he first began teaching in New York City public schools, the chaos of the classroom frustrated Mr. Mariotti, but he discovered that he could motivate even his most difficult students to learn math, reading and writing by tying their lessons to the basics of running a small business. His students quickly grasped that entrepreneurship was a way to escape the crushing poverty that came with being at-risk, low-income youth. Inspired by his success, Mr. Mariotti went on to found NFTE in 1987, and served as its Founder and President until retiring in 2014.
Mr. Mariotti has since served for one year as the Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship Education at Philadelphia University's Center for Entrepreneurship. He is currently the Senior Fellow for Entrepreneurship at Rising Tide Capital, an organization based in Jersey City, New Jersey, dedicated to transforming urban communities by empowering talented entrepreneurs.
In 2014, Mr. Mariotti founded Atlas Learning Inc., a company that develops interactive video series and books for intelligent classrooms that explore the positive impact of the entrepreneurial mindset during times of crisis such as conflict, natural disasters and war. In 2016, Mr. Mariotti co-founded two organizations: Steve Mariotti Partners, a for-profit that consults with social enterprises and helps them develop their fundraising capabilities; and STEEM Advantage Foundation, a social enterprise dedicated to helping low-income senior citizens recreate themselves financially, and to raising awareness about the tens of millions of Americans over 50 in financial difficulty.
NFTE programs around the world use the curriculum, textbooks and workbooks that Mr. Mariotti authored after realizing no textbooks existed to teach young people entrepreneurship. These books include the high-school textbook Entrepreneurship: Starting and Operating a Small Business, which won the Golden Lamp Award from the Association of Education Publishers, Mr. Mariotti's junior college textbook Entrepreneurship: Starting and Operating a Small Business, and Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management, the college text he co-authored with Caroline Glackin. Mr. Mariotti and his team--Dr. Neelam Patel and Suzanne Weixel--coauthored the junior-high book Exploring Careers for the 21st Century. Mr. Mariotti has self-published numerous titles for elementary students on math and entrepreneurship, and was part of two NFTE teams that developed, in conjunction with Microsoft, the nationally recognized online asynchronous-learning BIZTECH 1 & 2 programs, which brought the NFTE curriculum to tens of thousands of students via the Internet. In total, Mr. Mariotti is credited with 34 books, workbooks and manuals on entrepreneurship, with more than 1.2 million copies in print, including donations of books to the Inmates Teaching Entrepreneurship and Mentoring (ITEM) program.
Mr. Mariotti's trade titles include The Young Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting and Running a Business, now in its 4th edition, and An Entrepreneur's Manifesto. Mr. Mariotti has also published Op-Eds and professional journal articles, including the policy paper "Educating the Next Wave of Entrepreneurs" that he co-presented with Daniel Rubuzzi at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2010. Mr. Mariotti attended the World Economic Forum for nine years, where he was deeply involved in policy debates on economic development for low-income people. He has served on the Council on Foreign Relations for eleven years.
In 2013, Mr. Mariotti traveled as a U.S. State Department guest to Southeast Asia to spread entrepreneurial education to emerging economies. He chronicled his travels on his Huffington Post blog, interviewing numerous entrepreneurs from the region, including survivors of the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnam War. Also on his Huffington Post blog, Mr. Mariotti has profiled hundreds of young entrepreneurs and social activists in such articles as: "How a Sociologist Fights Educational Inequality" and "How Millennials Mastered the Art of the Political Movement." As Mr. Mariotti notes, "Many of these movements are fueled by young people dedicated to making their country a better place."
Mr. Mariotti has been honored with numerous awards, including the Bernard A. Goldhirsh Social Entrepreneur of the Year award, the National Director's Entrepreneurship Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the ACE/Currie Foundation's Humanitarian Venture Award, the Salvatori Award and the Society of Entrepreneurial Educators (SEE) first award for Outstanding Educator. He has appeared as a speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Brown, Berkeley and Babson College. Mr. Mariotti was granted an honorary Ph.D. in business and entrepreneurship by Johnson & Wales University in 1990.
An admirer of chess and an avid hiker, Mr. Mariotti loves rare books and has been collecting them since he was ten. He is active in his local church and the Public Library of Princeton. He also enjoys giving friends historical walking tours, and regularly attends seminars at the Institute for Advanced Studies in his hometown of Princeton, New Jersey.
For his dedication and business acumen, Mr. Mariotti was selected for inclusion in multiple volumes of Who's Who in Finance and Business, Who's Who in America, and Who's Who in the World.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to his profession and the Marquis Who's Who, Steve J. Mariotti has been featured on the Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievers website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
About Marquis Who's Who :
Since 1899, when A. N. Marquis printed the First Edition of Who's Who in America , Marquis Who's Who has chronicled the lives of the most accomplished individuals and innovators from every significant field of endeavor, including politics, business, medicine, law, education, art, religion and entertainment. Today, Who's Who in America remains an essential biographical source for thousands of researchers, journalists, librarians and executive search firms around the world. Marquis publications may be visited at the official Marquis Who's Who website at www.marquiswhoswho.com.
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