George Mason University

BRINGING SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP BACK HOME
Changemaker Campus 2008-2011

Social entrepreneurship at GMU has moved forward in a big way since Mason joined the Changemaker Campus Initiative. “Change didn’t come until we put together a team, and that team put together a proposal for innovation,” explains Phil Auerswald, Associate Professor of Public Policy and change leader for the GMU Changemaker Campus team.

Before Changemaker Campus, GMU had established strengths in social entrepreneurship research and teaching. Faculty co-lead, Phil Auerswald, is co-founder and co-editor of Innovations, a quarterly journal from MIT Press about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. Innovations features case narratives authored by outstanding entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs, and otherwise offers much needed opportunities for publication of applied research in this field. Faculty co-lead Paul Rogers is a national leader in developing techniques to use narratives of social entrepreneurship to teach writing at the undergraduate level.
Despite this strong base in research and teaching social entrepreneurship at GMU, “everything was oriented outside of the university before Changemaker Canpus,” Phil explains. When asked what difference membership in the consortium has made, Phil says “Changemaker Campus has helped us bring social entrepreneurship back home: expanding social entrepreneurship activities on campus that engage students in a really new and exciting way.”
In the first year of participation in the Changemaker Campus Initiative, Paul and team member Alex Gudich-Yulle took the lead in developing a proposal to place social entrepreneurship at the center of GMU’s undergraduate education. That proposal, Social Innovators and Social Entrepreneurs: 21st -Century Leaders of Change, was selected by the provost as one of three finalist for adoption as part of the school’s reaccreditation process.

“At first our team was ahead of the rest of the university, in terms of appreciating the potential value of social entrepreneurship for student learning.” Phil says. “Being a Changemaker Campus has been a real lesson to all of us in the challenge of institutional change.” A major hurdle that, after two and a half years, the team is now on the verge of overcoming, has been the absence of a full-time staff person dedicated to social entrepreneurship education. “The process of creating something on campus has taken time, because it involved building trust among administrators, faculty, and students in departments and divisions across campus. Now momentum is building. It’s finally happening.”