Faculty: Dr. David Prensky

Subject/Discipline: Interdisciplinary Studies
School: The College of New Jersey
Project Area: Economic Development

Spring-Fall 2005

IDS 321 Social Entrepreneurship
Social Science 324
Tuesday 5:30 – 8:20
The College of New Jersey
Spring 2005

Dr. David Prensky
Office: Bonner Center for Civic and
Community Engagement
1938 Pennington Road
Phone: 771-2849
dprensky@tcnj.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday 3:30 – 5:00, and by appointment

IDS 321 will provide an opportunity for you to learn the core concepts of social entrepreneurship and to apply those concepts as you analyze the role of nonprofit organizations’ social entrepreneurship activities. The focus is on entrepreneurship activities that further the public good—the creation of a social enterprise by a community organization that benefits the community, encourages civic engagement, and meets the needs of both the clients of the organization and the residents of the community.

IDS 321 is the first course in a two course sequence in entrepreneurship for the public good, you must complete both courses. In IDS 321, you will focus on acquiring the core analytic concepts and skills. In the second course, you will use these analytic skills in your work with leaders from an area nonprofit partner to produce a plan for a new program that is consistent with the partner’s mission and that benefits its clients and community. Each student-community partner teams will present its project at a social entrepreneurship plan competition to be held at the end of the second course.

Social entrepreneurship is the process through which an organization develops new programs that provide solutions to social issues that has been identified in the community. The fundamental premises are that the program (1) is an innovative approach to solving a social issue, (2) is consistent with the broader mission of the organization, (3) benefits the civic life of the community, (4) benefits the clients of the program, and (5) is managed in a way that is operationally feasible for the organization. In this course, we will focus on examples in which a nonprofit organization creates a new social enterprise that earns revenue while it benefits its community and the people who live there. Consider a local example: the Rescue Mission in Trenton has a variety of programs—a homeless shelter, drug and alcohol abuse treatment programs, programs to help the homeless make the transition to work and housing, etc. But it also runs a thrift shop that earns revenue. The thrift shop provides low-cost clothing and household goods for area residents and experience for people who are making the transition to work.

The course will meet specific learning goals in social entrepreneurship as well as the behavioral, social, or cultural perspectives requirement in the College’s liberal learning program.

Catalog Description: Social entrepreneurship is the process through which an organization develops a new program to solve social issues. Such a program is innovative, consistent with the organization’s mission, benefits the community and the clients of the program, and is feasible for the organization to operate. The analytic focus will be on nonprofit organizations creating new social enterprises that earn revenue while benefiting their communities and clients.

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor.

Learning Goals
IDS 321 will meet specific goals in social entrepreneurship as well as in the behavioral, social, or cultural perspectives requirement in the College’s liberal learning program.
Specific social entrepreneurship analytic areas and learning goals We will emphasize doing rather than memorizing: you will learn the core concepts of social entrepreneurship in order to master the performance of specific social entrepreneurship analytic tasks in three areas:

1. Analyze the function of the nonprofit sector in creating vibrant communities and contributing to the public good.
a. Understand the structure of the nonprofit sector.
b. Evaluate the public functions performed by nonprofit organizations.
c. Examine the behavioral processes that motivate individual participation in the nonprofit sector.
d. Understand and analyze the relationships among the government, the nonprofit secto  and the private sector in promoting the public good.

2. Analyze the role of entrepreneurship in building the capacity of nonprofits to contribute to the strengthening of the communities in which they operate.
a. Understand the conceptual foundations of entrepreneurial activity in the nonprofit sector.
b. Assess the ways that nonprofits use social enterprises to build their capacity.
c. Distinguish the characteristics that allow a social enterprise to contribute to the success of its social mission.

3. Analyze the tools used by nonprofits to create successful social enterprises.
a. Explore the processes used by social enterprises to plan, implement, and evaluate their programs.
b. Recognize the value of the available roles for individual participation in nonprofits’ social enterprises.

Achieving these goals will provide you with the knowledge and skills necessary to complete the major project in the second course in this sequence: a plan for a entrepreneurial program that is consistent with your nonprofit partner’s mission and that benefits its clients and community.

The learning goals for IDS 321 will also help students in achieving the goals of the behavioral, social, or cultural perspectives component of the College’s liberal learning program:

Learning goals from the College’s liberal learning program—Behavioral, social, or cultural perspectives goal, the human inquiry domain

Students should understand the social context within which they live, and understand how the social dynamics of human behavior and the structures of social institutions influence beliefs and actions. In particular, the following outcomes will be achieved:
1. Students should be able to understand the dynamics of human behavior in social interactions. They should recognize the fundamental factors that shape themselves in relationship to others.
2. Students should understand the nature of human social relationships. They should know how people construct relationships within family, schools, work, and communities.
3. Students should be able to understand how major social institutions organize and regulate social life, and allocate resources according to prevailing and alternate cultural values. They should be able to examine the balance of collective and individual interests and examine how social systems and cultural values are used to perpetuate patterns of privilege and inequality.
4. Students should be able to analyze the impact of major social institutions such as the family, economy, education, government, and religion.
5. Students should be able to gather information, analyze data, and draw conclusions in selected areas of the social sciences.

Activities
In order to learn the core concepts of social entrepreneurship and to apply those concepts to analyze the role of nonprofit organizations’ social entrepreneurship activities, you will read material about the nonprofit sector and social entrepreneurship and then hone your analytic skills through oral and written analyses.

Readings
The assigned readings for this course include three books, journal articles, and reports from a variety of sources about emerging social entrepreneurship activities in the nonprofit sector. They provide material to help you to (1) understand the core concepts of social entrepreneurship and nonprofit organizations and (2) develop the skills that you will use to analyze social enterprises. In order to participate fully in classroom activities, every student should read the material before class. You are responsible for understanding all the concepts and applications contained in the readings, even if we have not discussed them in class. Our emphasis will be on the core concepts and their applications, I do not want you to memorize the countless facts contained in the readings. You should also consult additional reading suggestions that are cited in the course schedule as well as any additional readings and materials that you find to help you to understand social entrepreneurship.

I assume that you are reading The New York Times and The Times of Trenton every day. Both of these newspapers are available online at no cost. You should also regularly browse online resources that focus on social entrepreneurship, such as Ashoka, the Skoll Foundation, the Social Enterprise Alliance, and its online community SocialEdge.

The books that we will read for this course are:
1. Peter Frumkin, On Being Nonprofit: A Conceptual and Policy Primer, Harvard, 2002, $32.89 from Amazon $37.50 list
2. David Bornstein, How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Oxford, 2004, $18.90 from Amazon, $30 list
3. J. Gregory Dees, Jed Emerson, and Peter Economy, Enterprising Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs, Wiley, 2001, $23.07 from Amazon, $34.95 list. Be careful: don’t confuse this book with its follow-up, Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs: Enhancing the Performance of Your Enterprising Nonprofit

Participation
I assume that you are reading newspapers and regularly browsing online sites that discuss the social entrepreneurship community. In addition, you should try to be self-conscious about the people with whom you interact, the places that you work, the stores in which you shop, and the media that you view. This will provide you with irreplaceable opportunities to sharpen your understanding of the core social entrepreneurship concepts by applying them to the material that you know best—your day-to-day social world.

Each class will begin with a discussion of real-world examples of social issues and nonprofit organizations that will provide material for class analysis. I will ask for volunteers to provide examples of a current situation that you have read about in the course reading, that has appeared recently in the news, or that you have experienced directly.

You should be prepared to summarize the real-world social issues that you volunteer. At the beginning of the semester, I will help those who volunteer an issue to identify relevant nonprofit and social entrepreneurship concepts and analyze the issue. As the semester proceeds and you develop the skills necessary to perform the analytic tasks, the analytic burden will shift from me to the student who introduces the example. The goal of such in-class discussions will be to provide models for the more sophisticated analyses that you show in your memos and enterprise plan.

Aside from providing examples, there are other of ways that you should participate: (1) contribute to in-class discussions—information, analysis of social issues and nonprofit organizations, and synthesis of others’ information and analyses, (2) present insights about the nonprofit sector and social entrepreneurship that you have gleaned from your outside reading to the class, and (3) send examples, insights, and pointers to
interesting material to the online discussion group on social entrepreneurship that is part of this course’s SOCS website.

In addition, each of you will be responsible for presenting the key analytic concepts from two of the readings to the class. You will be responsible for (1) presenting a brief review of the reading and its implications for our work and (2) serving as the lead in our in-class discussion of the reading. You will summarize the main arguments of the article or articles, show how the themes relate to the topic of the day, and critique the arguments in light of the other readings for the course. Dates for these presentations will be chosen during the early weeks of class. In addition, you will take no more than a page or two to clearly and concisely address these issues in a memo.

Written work
This course, as I have noted repeatedly, emphasizes the real world application of nonprofit and social entrepreneurship concepts to the analysis of nonprofit organizations’ social entrepreneurship activities in furthering the public good. of organizations’ activities. You will sharpen your analytic skills by writing about the readings and real-world social enterprises. The ability to make a coherent, persuasive argument in a clear and concise written form is a necessary skill, so I will consider the way you present your argument as well as content. I expect logical organization and
clear, concise use of the English language. Edit your work. Very few of us can write effective prose on the first attempt, so you must write, then edit, then rewrite, then edit again, then rewrite again. In your work after college, no one will take the time to translate badly presented talks, memos, proposals, or reports into understandable language, regardless of the power and insight of your hidden ideas.

You are responsible for writing four memos and an enterprise analysis for this course.
Memos
1. Two memos on course readings about which you have presented, as described above in the participation section. The memos should be brief and to-the-point – a page or two in a typical single-space memo format. Think of these memos as an example of a “heads-up” for your boss—you want to provide a good description of the point of the reading and impress your boss with your ability to identify something that matters to her/him. In order to do that, you have to show that it does matter. Please don’t write more than two pages—you can summarize the reading quickly, briefly describe why it raises important issues, and then present your view of the point that the author has made. These memos will be due on the day that you present the reading.

2. Two memos that analyze a particular example of a social enterprise. You must select an example of a social enterprise—either one that is mentioned in our readings or that you have identified on your own—and provide a brief analysis of its approach to social entrepreneurship. Your goal is to describe the social enterprise and tough briefly on why it (1) is an innovative approach to solving a social issue, (2) is consistent with the broader mission of the organization, (3) benefits the civic life of the community, (4) benefits the clients of the program, and (5) is managed in a way that is operationally feasible for the organization. Please provide a succinct description and analysis – three or so pages in a single-space memo format. Please don’t write more than four pages.

These memos are due any time between March 15 and April 19.

Enterprise analysis
This is the final paper of the course. By the time you write this analysis, you will have examined a number of social enterprises and spent some time learning about the tools that nonprofits use to create social enterprises. An enterprise analysis is much like the social analysis memos above; only this time you will provide an analysis of the plan for a social enterprise. Because you will have acquired a set of tools for social entrepreneurship planning by this time in the course, this analysis will be less descriptive and more analytic than your memos. Please provide a concise description and analysis – four of five pages in a single-space memo format. Please don’t write more than six pages. Organizations for these paper will be chosen in mid-March, and the analyses will be due at the end of the semester.

You can find plans to analyze among the winners at the National Business Plan Competition for Nonprofit Organizations (http://ventures.som.yale.edu/competition_winning_business_plans.asp). The Partnership on Nonprofit Ventures (comprised of the Yale School of Management, The Goldman Sachs Foundation, and The Pew Charitable Trusts) runs the Competition.

Assessment
The learning goals of this course and the liberal learning program emphasize the analysis of individual and organizational behavior. The key analytic tasks include (1) examining a particular social issue to identify appropriate solutions that can be developed by nonprofit organizations and (2) developing a feasible plan for a program to deliver a solution. Assessment in this course will contribute to students’ achievement of these analytic goals. Students will be assessed on their mastery of the goals by evaluating their performance in class discussion and papers. These assessment tools will give them the opportunity to illustrates their progress against rubrics that demonstrate analytic proficiency. Ongoing work with other students in the class, the professor, and periodic contact with staff and members of community organizations will provide additional formative assessment within the course.

Participation
Participation is a vital part of this course.

Here are the criteria that I will use to evaluate your participation in the course:
1. Understanding of core concepts in social entrepreneurship.
2. Skill in applying core concepts to the analysis of relevant examples of social enterprises.
3. Quality of the analysis of examples of social enterprises.
4. Ability to initiate and sustain class discussion.
5. Capacity to help classmates develop during class discussion.

Written Work
These are the criteria I will use to determine grades for your written work:
1. Ability to identify powerful, relevant concepts.
2. Skill in applying those concepts to the analysis of the real-world organizational issue.
3. Coherence and persuasiveness of your analysis; organization, structure, language, and grammar of your argument.

Calendar

Nonprofit Organizations

Lynne Azarchi
Executive Director
KidsBridge Inc.
(609) 396-4300
Fax: (609) 581-0293
lynnekidsbridge@aol.com
P.O. Box 4561
Chambersburg Station
Trenton, NJ 08611

Dennis Micai
Executive Director
The Arc/Mercer, Inc.
Phone: (609) 406-0181
Fax: (609) 406-9258
dmicai@arcmercer.org
180 Ewingville Road
Ewing, NJ 08638

Alfa Demmellash
Alex Forrester
Rising Tide Capital, Inc.
201-432-4316
Fax: 201-432-3504
alfa@risingtidecapital.org alex@risingtidecapital.org
PO Box 3099
Jersey City, NJ 07303