Whenever a jet fighter roars overhead, Alejandro Barriga pauses, his gaze lifting skyward with a smile.
Once an aerospace engineering major at the University of Miami, Barriga, now 21, realized that it wasn’t his calling. So, he pivoted to business and will graduate in spring 2025 with a degree in entrepreneurship from Miami Herbert Business School.
“I started attending UM as an aerospace engineering major, but soon realized I was not interested in the complex mathematics needed for aerospace,” said Barriga. “I moved over to the business school a few semesters ago and it’s been a good fit for some of the things I’m working on.”
The transition wasn’t terribly surprising, given that Barriga created a local nonprofit—Books for You Miami—while still in high school. Barriga’s inspiration for Books for You Miami sprang from the oddest of places—a curbside trash bin near his home.
“My mother told me to take out the trash,” he recalled of that fateful day in March 2020.
He complied and noticed a lid on one of the trashcans awaiting garbage collection wasn’t fully closed. He peered inside and “realized that one of my neighbors was throwing out some brand-new books” written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.
Most people probably would have shrugged and gone back inside, but they lack a superpower that’s common among top entrepreneurs: A knack for spotting business opportunities in the unlikeliest of places.
Barriga’s family regularly sends clothing to family members in Colombia, who probably weren’t expecting to find copies of “Green Eggs and Ham” in a shipment of pants, shirts, and dresses that arrived in Bogota.
“It just kind of started to snowball, where I just collected more and more books and donated more and more,” said Barriga.
With help from his mother, Yenny Cardona, Barriga drove around Miami collecting books as the region fell under the grip of COVID-19.
“No one had anything to do,” Barriga said. “I started using social media to find books that weren’t being used, and I donated them to people who wanted to read. There was quite a large response!”
Barriga secured a 501 (c) (3) designation for Books for You Miami (BFYM) and began regularly sending reading material to organizations such as the Overtown Youth Center and Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, both in Miami. Under Barriga’s direction, BFYM’s also started sending books to Ghana, the Philippines, and Venezuela, with the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid’ series appearing in most BFYM shipments.
While most of the books Barriga sends are in English, he’s also disseminated books published in French, Creole, and German, thanks to Miami’s status as a cultural melting pot. BFYM now has volunteers collecting books, has attracted tens of thousands of dollars in donations and has shipped more than 200,000 books since Barriga started it.
Someone who appears to be a serial entrepreneur, Barriga is focusing on new challenges now that BFYM is firmly entrenched.
“Right now, I’m in the midst of creating a new curriculum for the Miami-Dade Public School System,” Barriga said. “We will be bringing financial literacy to all public schools, and that will be done through Books for You Miami. That’s one of the programs I’m working on right now.”
In addition to his nonprofit work, Barriga is also involved in real estate development with his father, Edgar Barriga, and is developing a software-as-a-service product to simplify processes for architects and real estate developers.
So, the next time you’re asked to throw out the trash, tackle the task with gusto. As entrepreneurial Alejandro Barriga can attest, one man’s trash really can be another man’s treasure.
