NATIONAL FOUNDERS’ DAY THE BAHAMAS
“PEOPLE DO NOT ATTRACT WHAT THEY WANT; THEY ATTRACT WHO THEY ARE. AND INSTITUTIONS DO NOT CHANGE UNTIL THE PEOPLE INSIDE THEM DO.” - Fredrick D. Scott, CEO, The Scott Family Office International Ltd.
legacy organizations like Kappa. It qui- etly answers the question that shadows every institution with history: whether it intends primarily to preserve memory or to expand opportunity. Brother Scott himself embodies that expan- sion; he’s an Army veteran with nearly two decades in institutional finance, a partner in projects intersecting with NASA and the White House Initiative on HBCUs, and a business leader whose work has included relationships with JPMorgan, Delta, and Microsoft. He represents a familiar narrative of modern professional success, but that was not the story he chose to tell. The Foundation’s sponsored session, titled The Start-Up Mindset: Entrepreneur Lessons in Courageous Leadership, was facilitated by Grand Board Member Damon O. Barry, Esq. (Gamma Eta 1992), Managing Partner at Ballard Spahr and one of the coun- try’s leading mergers-and-acquisitions attorneys. Barry opened without euphemism, “When they don’t do it successfully,” he said of founders, “they don’t eat.” It was not motivational language. It was an economic reality. To his left sat
the 63rd Junior Grand Vice Polemarch Evan R. Jackson (Lambda Xi 2018), Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Intus Care, a healthcare technology company launched from his Brown University dorm room and scaled into a venture-backed enterprise employing more than one hundred professionals. Jackson described building a “brain trust” capable of challenging his assumptions, the difficulty of manag- ing teams older than himself, and the emotional volatility that accompanies early-stage leadership. Startup trajectories, he reminded the room, rarely resemble the smooth curves of pitch decks. They resemble markets: uneven, adaptive, and unfor- giving. For undergraduate members raised in an era that celebrates entre- preneurship while often obscuring its fragility, the distinction mattered. Then the conversation shifted.
failure of my life,” he said. “It was January 4, 2013.” After leaving an investment banking firm in 2012 with substantial per- sonal wealth, he believed success had insulated him from consequences. That belief collapsed when FBI agents arrived at his residence to arrest him on charges related to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and making false statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. “I’ll never forget what the agent told me,” Scott said. “You won’t see another free day until you serve your time.” He served nearly five years in federal prison. The room changed; this was no longer a business panel, but a testi- mony. Elite professional environments often treat failure as something to be narrated only after it has been safely resolved. Brother Scott declined that convention, and he spoke in the presence of the very students his foun- dation had brought into the room. Brother Scott did not describe incarceration as an interruption, but rather, as a confrontation. Inside a fed- eral prison cell, stripped of reputation
RECONSTRUCTION AS LEADERSHIP
When Brother Scott began to speak, many expected a story about scale. Instead, he offered a date. “I can actu- ally put a date on the most crushing
WINTER 2026-2026 ♦ THE JOURNAL 47
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