As I mentioned in an earlier post this week, we were privileged to have Dr. Michael Morris and Dr. Arthur Brooks (both from Syracuse University) on our campus this week. During their campus-wide address they talked about the emerging field of Social Entrepreneurship.
Social Entrepreneurship involves any organization, profit or non-profit, that has a social mission. Syracuse is one of the schools that already offers coursework. Belmont is planning to role out a full undergraduate minor in Social Entrepreneurship next fall (pending a few more approval steps).
Mike Morris stressed that it is important to keep in mind that entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship no matter what the organizational context. I could not agree more. Our program will have students taking a wide array of our standard entrepreneurship classes. We will be using the social entrepreneurship classes as a vehicle to interject experiential and service learning.
He outlined a few key facts on the growth of non-profits in the US:
– From 1996 to 2007 numbers of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS grew from 1.09 to 1.48 million.
– The nonprofit sector has emerged as a vitally important element in the overall fabric of society (Verma et al., 2005).
– However, NPO failure rates are also up
Arthur Brooks went on to give a working definition of social entrepreneurship:
Process of creating value by bringing together a unique package of resources to exploit an opportunity, in pursuit of high social returns.
He pointed out that while there are about 1.5 million non-profits, there are about 9 million grassroots social enterprises that are not organized as a formal non-profit. He believes that this is reflective of American society. Continued citizen independence requires private solutions to social problems and unmet needs and that social entrepreneurship expresses the American identity.
Syracuse University has a fascinating social entrepreneurship that it integrated into their curriculum called the South Side Entrepreneurial Connect Project:
Syracuse University is located directly east of the economically and socially depressed South Side of Syracuse, New York. The South Side has been hurt more severely than any other area in the region by the systemic decline of the Greater Syracuse economy over the past two decades. Many factors contribute to the severe cycle of economic and social depression on Syracuse’s South Side. Similarly, a host of factors require substantive attention if the cycle is to be broken and the South Side is to experience a renaissance. These factors range from housing to education, and from economic well-being to human and social support services. Its residents have referred to the area as an “economic desert.”
And yet, we believe that significant change is possible, that there are valuable assets on which to build, and that the key to sustainable economic development is entrepreneurship. On balance, larger companies within the Syracuse metro area are not likely to expand significantly in the coming years, and few established firms are likely to relocate operations to the area given the region’s contemporary tax, regulatory, labor, and operating cost environment. This set of conclusions is even truer when it comes to Syracuse’s South Side. As a result, the solution rests with organic development through the creation and growth of entrepreneurial firms on the South Side. Entrepreneurship is the key to empowerment.
I am excited to see the launch of our new program become a reality next fall. Hopefully we can develop programs that have a similar impact.
Non-profits are very important to our society, and I’m glad you wrote this blog about it. As a copywriter who gives huge discounts to non-profits, I think giving to those who give is important.