This Course will clarify the definition and meaning of Social Entrepreneurship and will focus on the need to learn about the source and root of a social problem. You will be introduced to different perspectives about Social Entrepreneurship and you will learn about complementary and opportunistic assets which will help you to detect an opportunity and develop an idea of how to create a business for social change. From a practical perspective you will be asked to initiate a team formation process and start to think about a problem topic that you want to address with your social venture in the future. You will work in a team to research this topic and will gradually start to think about a particular opportunity and identify a purpose for your social venture project.
Welcome to Week 2. The second Module will introduce you to different perspectives about Social Entrepreneurship. You will be asked to initiate your team formation process and select a problem topic that you want to address with your social venture in the future.
an expert in the field of social entrepreneurship in the United States.
Can you tell us a little bit about this venture?
two examples of how these social enterprises have played out.
I am particularly interested in the largest cities in the United States.
outside of the communities where these problems are the most prevalent.
so that they can be around for a while.
is called The New Jersey Social Innovation Institute.
a training program that helps folks who have great ideas to go to the next step.
to the whole topic of social entrepreneurship.
this is what I like to do, to how do you create an organization and a venture?
Who are the potential partners for this kind of work?
how might you create your program to complement what they're doing?
Where does the funding come from?
with a foundation that actually provides some seed funding to the best ideas.
In the last class we had 15 ventures working.
What we do is we ask them to bring teams of people to the training.
who meet once or twice a month for a six-month period.
to pitch those ideas and to collaborate with others to make them happen.
Couple of examples from this New Jersey Social Innovation Institute.
this venture process, they call themselves Fathers Now.
called the Fathers Now Green Maintenance and Cleaning Company.
been in the prison system, and so it's difficult for them to find, find work.
providing job skills and and life skills to these gentlemen.
this was the actual company that creates the jobs.
this would take place in one of our major cities in the state of New Jersey.
Newark, New Jersey. Some of you may have heard of Newark, New Jersey.
It's got lots of challenges.
to put some of the men who go through the social program, put them back to work.
That helps the community in lots of different ways.
That's one of the examples.
Let me give you a second example.
there's a couple of them, one of them is called Library Build.
they don't have the library staff inside of the school.
one of the first things to disappear from inside of this, of our public schools.
and provides the services at a very reduced rate to the school districts.
than the school districts that don't have that.
in order to address it, for these urban school districts.
locality to find some problems that you might work on.
the most challenging social problem.
around town to see what things are plaguing your city.
lots of young people who seem to be disaffected.
I mean, those could point to some of the more serious problems.
That would be one approach.
people who've been working in the community on on various topics.
whether they are just on the community organizers side and ask them.
are increasing in our area?
Because that will also point to some of the challenges.
working on problems already and they maybe working on one.
four others that contribute to the problem that they're working on.
community-level leaders or somebody who has an NGO. That might be another approach.
They have already identified things that they can't work on themselves.
That they may need some partners to work on.
my advice to finding some social opportunities to work on.