Welcome to our class.  Over the next four weeks, we will be busy.  We will read three books, many articles, prepare projects on social entrepreneurship, and design a plan for a new Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Middlebury College.  Don’t take this class if you are hoping for a breezy J-term!  But if we succeed, you will have a very rewarding four weeks.

I have three goals for our class.  First, I want each of you to expand your understanding of your own agency during this challenging century: to help shape a better world, what may you be able to do, why should you do so, and how will you know if you are making progress?  Second, I want us, as a class, to refine our understanding of 21st-century challenges – including climate change, wide-scale poverty in much of the world, and the struggle for human rights – and then to analyze available solutions to take on these challenges.  Through out the course, we’ll be asking “What works, and why?”  Finally, I want us to engage the Middlebury College community in answering a really exciting set of questions: if Middlebury were to establish a world-class center for social entrepreneurship, what should be its mission, what would it offer to students and other members of our community, and how would it complement other current assets at Middlebury College and the Monterey Institute of International Studies? As we will discuss on the first day of class, this is indeed a very real possibility.

I look forward to this class.