Putting Student Entrepreneurship to Work for the Community
Hart Leadership expands entrepreneurship initiative
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Durham, NC -- With more students drawn in by the appeal of entrepreneurship, the Hart Leadership Program wants to match their enthusiasm. The HLP recently unveiled its expanded Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative (ELI) to be implemented by Spring 2009.
After being named director of ELI last semester, Christopher Gergen developed a new structure and focus for the program, which will shift its emphasis to the Durham community.
“I’m thrilled to be able to build on the legacy of a great program at Duke and within the Hart Leadership Program,” said Gergen, a visiting lecturer in the Sanford Institute of Public Policy. “We have an exceptional opportunity before us to make a significant difference in North Carolina and in the lives of emerging generations of Duke student leaders through entrepreneurial leadership and social innovation.”
From 2002 to 2007 under former director Tony Brown, ELI students created more than 50 social enterprises, including successful programs like Common Ground, the Duke University Greening Initiative and Crayons2Calculators. For these projects, ELI was a one-semester course, and students had the opportunity to create enterprises that served either Duke or Durham.
Beginning this year, however, the program shifted its focus to developing projects of value primarily to the Durham community and expanded into a three-semester initiative.
“The kind of leadership ELI strives to instill in its students is one of high-impact and sustainable value to the broader community,” Gergen said. “This requires students to break out of their comfort zones and thus break out of the familiarity of campus.”
Gergen’s vision for ELI entails a spring semester gateway course that provides an introduction to entrepreneurial leadership and social innovation. The following summer, 12-18 students from the course will be selected to participate in the ELI Summer Experience, an immersion program funded by DukeEngage that enables students to develop a project in Durham tackling a social issue of common concern.
In a fall capstone seminar, student teams will work in collaboration with community partners to help them address a service gap within an existing organization, blend innovative programs and services across organizations, or develop a new social enterprise.
Promising student projects will be further developed in the extracurricular ELI Incubator, which will provide technical, administrative and financial support for their entrepreneurial initiatives.
Through its work, ELI supports the university’s commitment stated in its strategic plan to knowledge in the service of society. The program also grants students the opportunity to learn the academic and theoretical underpinnings of social entrepreneurship and subsequently put them into practice.
Eventually, Gergen said, ELI hopes to launch a post-graduate program that will provide student teams and individuals with financial and technical resources to launch, scale and sustain their enterprises after graduating from Duke.
