We have posted out MiddLab page, including the report.  Enjoy!

I.  Water

• Nicole – http://vimeo.com/7329159 from http://www.rippleeffectglobal.com/

II.  Health

• Nina–  http://sabin.org/vaccine-development/vaccines/hookworm/anniversary

III. Property rights and indigenous rights

• http://fora.tv/2010/01/13/Wade_Davis_Why_Ancient_Wisdom_Matters_in_the_Modern_World   [Great lecture by Anthropologist Wade Davis on why Cultural Heritage is crucial to conserve.] -Brad

IV. Food

• http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/thegarden/
• While not necessarily a piece on social entrepreneurship, the Garden illustrates how a community garden can empower a community, even in light of corrupt politics. Follow the url to watch the trailer. – Brian
• Claire – Here are a series of articles/videos on Project DISC (Developing Innovations in School Children) http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/tag/disc-project/

V.   Education

VI.  Waste

VII.  Food production

I.  Grant program

• Two or three different approaches
• A range of sized projects …
• How to implement? – consult with Lisa Nitze
• How to finance? – consult with George Overholser
• Stonehenge-like grant program

II. Annual gathering of gifted social entrepreneurs

• Four week program … preparatory resources, etc.
• Decide, based on curriculum …
• Inclusive of annual gathering of social entrepreneurs …

Here’s a link to their annual competition with logistics and structure for how this type of program could work, video links, and testimonials.

http://www.foster.washington.edu/centers/gbc/globalsocialentrepreneurshipcompetition/Pages/teams.aspx

For the sake of streamlining our discussion tomorrow, a few of us concentrated our group presentations down to a few bullet points – please review for class so we know what we’re working with. See below.

Group A

Fewer projects, but higher quality projects

Finding experts and developing ideas of the projects to their highest, most cost effective potential.

Education:

·      Annual lecture series

·      Workshops

o      Finding entrepreneurs who may want to share their failures.

·      Incorporating social entrepreneurship into classrooms

Projects:

·      Application process

o      Presentation/ interview process

o      Budget required

·      Advising board to supervise projects

·      Rolling deadlines

Financing:

·      Applying as a non-profit:

·      Starting small w/ focus on advising projects and providing grants

·      Gradual expansion of endowment plugged into lecture series

·      Pursuing grants outside campus

·      Finding donors

o      Potentially meeting w/ trustees to allocate a small portion of the endowment to the center

Group B

• Involve students in every feasible way into the Center
  • Use interns for much of planning on conferences, summer school, day-to-day labor
  • Involve students in decision-making process on grants and center activity
• Offer 8 large grants annually averaging $20-$30K
• Offer 8 smaller grants annually averaging $5-$10K
• Annual conference in September emphasizing the work of grant recipients
• 4-week School for Social Entrepreneurship for recent college graduates – liberal-arts focused
  • Part I: Developing necessary skills
  • Part II: In-depth critique of each student’s proposals
• Integrate social entrepreneurship into the curriculum, scaling up to a minor
• Create a VP of Creativity and Innovation

Group C

• Intramiddlebury networking to facilitate the awareness of interconnectedness of Middlebury’s on-campus resources
• Incubator in the form of idea tables, seminars, and a library to foster creative thinking
• Year-long theme to focus campus initiatives and lectures
• Idea competition, including but not limited to Middlebury students,
• Summer program to empower emerging entrepreneurs with necessary skill sand techniques

Group D

Education
Lectures are crucial, especially a “Pathways to Peace” oriented annual lecture.

Grant Competition
Big grants awarded in various categories (e.g. Environment, Poverty, Hunger, etc.). Limit to 3-5 categories

Small Grants awarded throughout the year, quarterly basis perhaps?

·      Documentation

Grant donors need to know if their money is being well utilized. Blogs, pictures, and videos will serve an educational purpose as it can be incorporated into the curriculum of lectures, as well as particular departments such as the Film Department where film majors can earn credit based on their roles in documenting the projects of the social entrepreneurs.

Essentially, it all ties back to the FLOW OF IDEAS: Creation, Development, Grants, Implementation/Documentation, Fundraising, and then back to Creation.

Group E

• select a program area / community through a demand-driven soliciting process, and community wide selection process
• conduct data-driven, sustainable social entrepreneurship projects / initiatives (incorporating both the Middlebury and non-Middlebury universes)
• engage in thorough data-driven evaluations of undertaken projects
• scale up successes through leveraged finance / relationships with larger NGO’s operating in the area

Group A.

• What do they mean by projects?  ANSWER – kenny’s project, for example.
• QUESTION: does the symposium model work?  conference?
  • Quality of people
  • Diversity
  • Chances to interact
• LIKE – focus on failures as well as successes
• if not grant, speaker …?
• DONT LIKE: integrate se into curriculum – sustainability model
• FEEDBACK: Davis Projects tomorrow
• DONT LIKE: creating a file, forming a catalog  BETTER?  Videos, story telling ..?
• QUESTION: would folks have had to study se to apply?  Before … after?
• DATA … this is so key …
• As network … space for problem solving …
• Under Center for Creativity and Innovation
• DONT LIKE:  Expert model, speaker model …. (to some degree) … experts in what ..?
• REC – $350,000 to students …
• LIKE:  Rhiya’s version of networked, contingent, on occasion expertise …
• LIKE: Starting small …. see what works …
• QUESTION: encourage world-changing speakers or not?
• DONT LIKE (?): ‘projects’ …. BETTER?  Invest in everyone who comes through door?
• LIKE:  It’s about ‘popularizing ideas’
• Mission?
• LOOKING FOR: open, not closed ……

Group B

• LIKE  Mission (go back to it …)
• LIKE  undergrad mission
• DONT LIKE: grants ….
• DONT LIKE (?): minima, maxima ….
• FEEDBACK: talk to Jesse …..
• PREFER laboratory model
• DONT LIKE: minor, ES focus …..
• LIKE:  Addition of an SE course (What should be the pre-req) — feedback ..
• DOUBLE LIKE: “School for Social Entrepreneurship”
• DONT LIKE: so many Midd students judging …
• QUESTION:  people, not projects

Group C

• LIKE: their arrow thing
• LIKE:  inventory of things we have …..
• DOUBLE LIKE: we provide the space …..
• DONT LIKE: ‘consolidate …’.
• NOT SURE: annual campus theme … among categories …?
• LIKE: that its about building connections …
• LIKE:  incubator (3 parts)
• LIKE: Stonehenge as solutionsU – we need to get Jessica Holmes in here …
• LIKE: Middlabs documentation …
• COMMENT: must distinguish our competition .
• LIKE:  folks, say, from North Africa ……
• QUESTION: Do we need a physical center …?

Group D

• LIKE  Flow of ideas …
• PRINCIPLE  How would we measure it?
• PRINCIPLE  What challenges need to be solved?  Is it likely that we can help solve …
• QUERY ES steering committee model?
• LIKE: networking with other nodes on campus …
• LIKE: outside of midd and midd
• DONT LIKE (AT ALL): general topic areas
• NOT SURE: poster sessions
• LIKE: implementation/documentation
• LIKE: What happens after the grant?  Plus, during!
• LIKE: Hilary’s comment …
• QUESTION: do all of this without a ‘center’?

GROUP E

• LIKE: ‘anchor it around a place.’  Now I get it …..
• LIKE: demand-driven ….
• DOUBLE LIKE: emphasis on data … TOTALLY HUGE …..
  • Remember collaborative democracy ….
  • Constant use of data ….
  • Data and evaluation …..

• “Tenure line faculty members thus face little incentive, few precedents, and some risk in designing an innovative curriculum that combines theory and practice, one of the key elements needed for social entrepreneurship to thrive in an academic environment.“ (Bloom, 4)
  • No force in the undergraduate experience to applying learning
  • The Center would do well to facilitate
    • Learning from experience and in the field
    • Enabling and empowering for future experiences
  • Incentive structure to change the curriculum and method of teaching
    • Tenured faculty
• Research methods in Psychology
  • Opportunity Creation Process (Bloom, 15)
  • Teaching how to do research and develop own ideas
  • This structure and method already exists in Middlebury in some departments
    • Utilize the current resources to push the process of the Center
• Service work on a smaller scale (Hopkins, 38)
  • Connected to data from Davis participants
    • Learning from experience
  • Doing local work on a smaller scale can help as a “dry run”
  • Focusing on Addison County
• Achieving results on scale (Hopkins, 42)
  • Center allowing students to develop a basic skill sets
• Formally institutionalize opportunities for SE (Hopkins, 36-7)
  • Lower the barriers to entry for students to get involved
  • Providing a Minor in SE
    • More accessible than going out on a limb with extra-curricular activity
  • Transfer credit
  • Alternative study abroad experience
  • Extra incentive for students to do these projects may be a significant nudge
• Mission and Focus of MIT Center (Hopkins, 35-6)
  • “…our focus cannot be on programmatic development and resource acquisition alone; our main task is to find ways to convince students that they can effectively work as collaborative change agents abroad, to figure out streamlined ways to prepare them to do so, and to enable effective integration of lessons learned when they returned.”
  • Center is not about the program and resources but finding the way to inspire young people to become change agents
  • Help people develop the capabilities to become entrepreneurs
  • Connection to Social Enterprise Alliance (Hilary)
• Need for social entrepreneurship (Hopkins, 4)
  • Inherent in academics- connecting oneself to the world and opening up to let experiences advise learning and future experiences
  • “The greatest lesson I internalized was a recurrent message in all of the speakers’ presentations: globalization is inevitable, but its consequences are not – and while we cannot stop its onslaught, we have a responsibility to be “good parents” of globalization through a well-guided implementation of technology to fit social needs around the world.”
  • Constant of flexibility
  • Importance of fluidity
• Importance of technology (Hopkins, 31)
  • Change from command and control to collaborative
  • Enhance the flattening of the world
• Importance of traveling as a foundation of understanding the interaction with the face of the world
• Reshaping the classroom in terms of how we teach certain subjects (Bloom, 27)
  • Education is not the only focus but need to apply
  • Next step is strengthen efforts by experience with application
• Bridge all spheres- public, private, voluntary (Bloom, 10-11)
  • This is important in the Center
• “…Address the often-weak connection between professed mission and actual strategy, resulting in unsatisfactory outcomes.” (Bloom, 21)
  • Feasible outcomes and strategies
• Interdisciplinary need of social entrepreneurship (Bloom, 5)
  • Social entrepreneurship has no true academic home
  • Need to develop a new academic generation and realign focus of academic institutions
  • Why Middlebury? Focus and demonstration of interdisciplinary academics

The Next 4 Billion from the World Resources Institute: http://www.wri.org/publication/the-next-4-billion

Willing to Pay, Unwilling to Charge: 124.30.164.71/asciweb/kwa/…/Willingness%20to%20Pay%20Dehradun.pdf

I just wanted some space to write out some thoughts I had leftover from today’s class, so I figured I’d share them with everyone and maybe spark a conversation.

Our conservations in class today were definitely eye-opening for me – especially the closing but about Social Impact Bonds – and it’s completely changed the way I think about philanthropy. I’m still trying to wrap my head around these bonds because they completely changed the way that I think about philanthropy and how it operates. Now, I’m certainly no expert in philanthropy or finance or the gray areas in between. I had always envisioned philanthropy in basic terms: people would donate various sums of money to various causes as they saw fit…sometimes it would be a one time donation, sometimes it would be a monthly or yearly contribution, whatever it may be.

But the beauty of the SIB’s, in my eyes, is that they enable philanthropists to make a contribution (perhaps an unconventional contribution in today’s terms), earn a return, and then turn around and make ANOTHER contribution, and another, and another, and so on and so forth. With SIB’s, the contributions of a philanthropist don’t need to fund one single endeavor by one organization; they can be reinvested over and over again.

Philanthropy in this sense is not reaching for one’s checkbooks; it’s making smart investments that earn social and financial returns, by distributing cost-savings to investors and the other parties involved. Not only that, but philanthropy in the SIB framework (at least as I understand it) essentially reallocates investment and funding in a socially and financially optimal way. The way I see it, this is about as close as it gets to a free lunch in terms of establishing a more socially just equilibrium.

Role of sports in social entrepreneurship:

• ACCESS: We have the opportunity to access large communities of students through sports – it unites students in a way that simply being at Middlebury does not.

• Neither he nor Dan believe that athletes are inherently superior.

• Dan Doyle sees Midd as a community with a lot of involved athletes.

• Erin’s suggestion: include the Athletic Director as a member of whatever advisory board we create. This should be sufficient to address Dan Doyle’s preference for athletes.

His view of the proposal

• It is all negotiable. Securing $5M from the trustees is not a requirement, per se.

• Erin sees the potential place of such a building as not at the top of any pyramid, but not alone either — there are synergies that can be created between this center and the existing organizations on campus.

• We should pay attention to the Project on Creativity and Innovation. Ron and Jessica Liebowitz started this so, politically speaking, we need to respect this as we go forward and even seek out ways to improve it with our proposal.

• He thinks we should  create a Vice President of Creativity and Innovation position that would oversee the Center as well as everything under Education in Action (ACE, MiddCORE, Fellowships, CSO, Proj. on Creativity and Innovation). This would be an additional title for an existing faculty/staff member.

• This would assure the Hassenfelts that we are giving the Center a central position at the College, also the other Education in Action groups would probably get behind this.

• We would then create a Director position for the Center who would work with this VP. Perhaps an administrative support staff would work for this director as well.

• He doesn’t believe we should have a building quite yet but perhaps we could reorganize to include it with “Education in Action”

Stuff about Dan Doyle

• Dan Doyle is a big NESCAC guy (went to Bates, coached at Trinity) and sees Midd as a place with a huge amount of TALENT and a strong athletic program. He is a believer in the liberal arts.

• Dan is an unbelievable organizer of people. He is expecting 25,000 people for this Youth Peace Summit this summer.

People we may want to talk to

• Dave Donahue, Special Assistant to Liebowitz – has talked some with Erin and Jon about this proposal, he is an expert on local and state economic development and has something to say about each of these. He’s a good ally to have.
• Alex Wolf – senior sports writer at Sports Illustrated, currently finishing a long feature article on Sports and Social Entrepreneurship (small world). He lives in Cornwall and is close with several people at the athletic department, we could get in touch with him through Jon.
• Mike Morgan, womens’ tennis coach – he is responsible for this event Jan. 20-22. Also he is the brother in law of Tommy Clark who started Grassroots Soccer. He would be an amazing contact to have for this center.

That’s pretty much it. Hope that’s helpful.