MBA alum’s environmental startup success supported by Olin connections

As social entrepreneur Magdalen Pike reflects on her first full year as founder/CEO of Passback, the numbers are impressive.

• Teaming up with 25 partners, Passback collected, refurbished, and redistributed more than $40,000 worth of used sports gear to children in St. Louis and as far away as Africa and Central America.
• The nonprofit startup reported over $130,000 in revenue, along with 2,400 hours of volunteer assistance.
• Passback’s green sports gear initiative achieved a three-ton-plus landfill diversion of plastic and metal items by keeping sports gear in circulation.

How did she do it? Pike, MBA 2023, chalks it up to long hours and hard work: “It's really nonstop. It's hard to turn your brain off. It’s like you find this thread and you just can't stop pulling it, can’t stop thinking about it.”

She also credits a lot of assistance, including from her network at WashU, which has helped with everything from marketing and research to engineering and grant writing.

“I have used one- to two-student teams every semester since our launching and that has been crucial for the startup of this,” Pike said. “And then there’s been the WashU alumni network connections, and word of mouth being put out from this really anchored institution.”

And now she’s taking on even bigger challenges as she helps another environmental organization promote education efforts in Africa and Asia.

“What’s cool is I can expand my own circularity education efforts in St. Louis to a global level,” Pike said.

‘So every kid can play’

The inspiration for Passback came from Pike’s years helping her father, who was a youth camp director for several large St. Louis soccer clubs. “I would go after school to work with him, and I saw that all these sports complexes had the same problem of leftover gear,” she said. “There was new gear coming out every year, all the players’ closets were full, and there was so much in overhead costs to store this gear.”

She played college soccer for Southeastern Missouri State University and after graduating took a job with Tiny Superheroes, a company that supports kids who are overcoming illness or disability. Pike said the organization’s founder and CEO, Robyn Rosenberger, inspired her and connected her to a network of other social entrepreneurs. That led her to seek an MBA at Olin in order to develop her own entrepreneurial plans.

In two Olin courses, The Hatchery and The League, Pike attacked the business problem she wanted to solve: How to transfer excess sports gear from teams who don’t need it anymore to those who do.

The result was Passback.

“We upcycle sports gear so every kid can play,” she said. “We work with sports clubs, retailers, and individuals with surplus. We do the heavy lifting of off-loading that gear. We refurbish it, and then we redistribute it to nonprofits serving families who need it.”

While her current focus is primarily on youth soccer leagues in St. Louis, Passback does accept gear from other sports. Her eventual goal is ambitious: “I want a Passback in every sports-minded city across the United States.”

As Pike prepared to graduate in December 2023, she was on a different track than many of her classmates in the MBA cohort. “I think coming from a social startup background, I was in a different mindset than a lot of my colleagues,” she said.

Luckily, Pike said, she connected with professors who understood her passion for social entrepreneurship and gave her valuable guidance, including professors Doug Villhard, Michael Wall, and Heather Cameron, an interdisciplinary professor specializing in social entrepreneurship.

A global opportunity

Over the past year, Pike has been connecting with potential gear donors, including major youth soccer clubs and schools in St. Louis, to arrange for donations of cleats, balls, water bottles, and apparel. She also has developed a network of organizations that need the refurbished equipment, including the International Institute of St. Louis, which works with immigrant families, and St. Louis CITY SC, which runs a futures program for area youth. Passback has also run distributions outside the U.S., in Costa Rica and Nigeria.

She’s been working on fundraising and automating operations. Pike has moved from one donated office space to another, and for much of the year she held a second job at WashU’s Brown School of Social Work to avoid drawing an initial salary at Passback.

A Missouri Solid Waste Management grant allows for a paycheck for her, so she can focus her energies on the startup.

Pike recently hired her first employee and is currently focused on finding additional storage space for gear and positioning special donation boxes for Passback’s partner locations.

Recently, she got a request from a friend and fellow social entrepreneur, Patrick Arnold, who headed up 10 Billion Strong, an organization that helps develop young environmental leaders around the globe. Arnold was stepping back from the organization to do foreign service work and asked Pike to fulfill grants in Africa and central Asia promoting environmental education and entrepreneurship.

She’ll be traveling to Kenya, Botswana, Tanzania, and Kyrgyzstan to hold educational events, as well as conducting some virtual sessions. “It’s an incredible adventure and opportunity,” Pike said.

She still checks in regularly with her mentoring team at Olin.

When I need them, they’re very, very active and helpful. It’s been awesome.  

Magdalen Pike

Pike encourages others to use entrepreneurial problem-solving to find their purpose and make needed change.

“Look at your own surroundings: What problem can you solve? Are you passionate about it? When I was in Olin and being introduced to so many different entrepreneurs, the best ideas, in my opinion, were the ones where people looked at their own surroundings and found a solution to it.”