Change Your World:

The Power of New Ideas

2011 - 2013

Common Theme Steering Committee Co-chairs:

GayleWilliams, Assistant Dean IUPUI University College gawillia@iupui.edu

Jane Luzar, Dean IUPUI Honors College ejluzar@iupui.edu

Academic Affairs Faculty Fellow for the Common Theme: Kathleen A. Hanna, Associate Librarian IUPUI University Library kgreatba@iupui.edu Steering Committee members: http://www.iupui.edu/common_theme/About/Committee/

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN SERVING ON THE STEERING COMMITTEE OR ANY OF

ITS PLANNING SUBCOMMITTEES, PLEASE NOTIFY GAYLE WILLIAMS AT

GAWILLIA@IUPUI.EDU.

WHAT’S THE IUPUI COMMON THEME PROJECT? HTTP://WWW.IUPUI.EDU/COMMON_THEME/

The IUPUI Common Theme Project grew out of an initiative by University College and is designed to promote campus unity, conversation, and collaboration across all disciplines on timely issues that connect IUPUI to central Indiana and the world. The first Common Theme, ―Consuming Well for the Wealth of Communities, from IUPUI to the World,‖ spanned academic years 2009–2011 and focused on the green economy, healthy communities, and sustainability. Each year the Common Theme Steering Committee also chooses one book that supports the Theme and invites the campus and community to read and discuss it. The new Common Theme for 2011 - 2013 is “Change Your World: The Power of New Ideas” and will focus on social entrepreneurship, in principle and practice, using David Bornstein’s How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas as the campus reader. We invite faculty to:

Read the Common Theme book (or pertinent excerpts) and any supplemental sources as appropriate and use them to enhance your research, teaching, and student engagement.

Showcase your past and current social entrepreneurship projects or activities with the campus and community.

Foster new social entrepreneurship activities, in and out of the classroom and across disciplines that will attract new partnerships, students, and donors.

Develop special events that will engage the campus and community.

The Common Theme offers opportunities and benefits for:

active learning

service learning

study/service abroad

research

publication, including Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL)

case studies

classroom discussions

collaboration across the campus and community How the Steering Committee plans to help:

Inventory and celebrate social entrepreneurship activities on campus.

Collect research and stories about activities into an open access journal, hosted by University Library.

Offer a clearinghouse of resources to direct people for information, guidance, and assistance - including UROP, MURI, Solution Center, CSL, and Signature Centers - to connect and pursue their ideas.

Develop ―creation stations‖ - virtual and physical spaces for students, faculty, and staff to explore and develop their ideas and build a sense of community across campus silos.

Change Your World:

The Power of New Ideas

2011 - 2013

Change Your World:

The Power of New Ideas

2011 - 2013

2011 - 2013 IUPUI COMMON THEME: OVERVIEW

Kathleen A. Hanna, Associate Librarian This is . . . about people who solve social problems on a large scale. Most . . . are not famous. They are not politicians or industrialists. Some are doctors, lawyers and engineers. Others are management consultants, social workers, teachers, and journalists. Others began as parents. What unites them is their role as social innovators, or social entrepreneurs. They have powerful ideas to improve people’s lives and they have implemented them across cities, countries, and, in some cases, the world.* The 2011 - 2013 Common Theme is inspired by the stories and principles described in the book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein. It is about ordinary people from extremely diverse backgrounds and from nearly every continent who have applied social entrepreneurship principles in the areas of education, medicine and health care, human rights, environmental issues, access to technology, literacy, sustainable development, poverty and homelessness, small and micro-business development, women’s and children’s rights, and infrastructure development. Social entrepreneurship is a relatively new international movement, and now academic discipline, that is gaining momentum in a global economy in which governments are unable to sustain efforts to develop solutions to a burgeoning range of social problems. Bornstein defines social entrepreneurship as ―. . . a process by which citizens build or transform institutions to advance solutions to social problems, such as poverty, illness, illiteracy, environmental destruction, human rights abuses and corruption, in order to make life better for many.‖ It goes beyond a business or a social activism philosophy; it encompasses a multidisciplinary, holistic worldview. Social entrepreneurs ―readily cross disciplinary boundaries, pulling together people from different spheres, with different kinds of experience and expertise, who can, together, build workable solutions that are qualitatively new.‖ Change Your World: The Power of New Ideas will be part celebration and part challenge. The IUPUI campus and its individual units are renowned for service learning and social outreach activities. This Common Theme will allow us to recognize and celebrate our successes as well as challenge us to find new ways to make an impact in our community. It will introduce the campus and community to local social entrepreneurs who are willing to share their stories and engage students, faculty, and staff in events and activities that will encourage thought, debate, research, and innovation. This multidisciplinary and multicultural Theme presents many opportunities for cross-campus research, interaction with international students and faculty, and expanding study abroad programs. It generates myriad ways to incorporate service and experiential learning at the campus, community, or global level by building on current partnerships and establishing new ones that will evolve beyond IUPUI. Our greatest strengths are our highly diverse and creative population, broad range of disciplines and partnerships, and access to resources, which make IUPUI uniquely situated to engage in a Common Theme that has the potential to affect social change both great and small, locally and globally, giving everyone the potential to truly be a changemaker. *Bornstein, David. How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Bornstein, David and Susan Davis. Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Change Your World:

The Power of New Ideas

2011 - 2013

WHAT’S A SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR/ENTREPRENEURSHIP?

Social entrepreneurship is a process by which citizens build or transform institutions to advance solutions to social problems, such as poverty, illness, illiteracy, environmental destruction, human rights abuses and corruption, in order to make life better for many.

Bornstein, David and Susan Davis. Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else. Each social entrepreneur presents ideas that are user-friendly, understandable, ethical, and engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement with it. In other words, every leading social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers—a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything. Over the past two decades, the citizen sector [people who care and take action to serve others and cause needed change] has discovered what the business sector learned long ago: There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.

―What is a Social Entrepreneur?‖ Ashoka.org. 2010. 15 December 2010 <http://ashoka.org/social_entrepreneur>.

We define social entrepreneurship as having the following three components: (1) identifying a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve any transformative benefit on its own; (2) identifying an opportunity in this unjust equilibrium, developing a social value proposition, and bringing to bear inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude, thereby challenging the stable state’s hegemony; and (3) forging a new, stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or alleviates the suffering of the targeted group, and through imitation and the creation of a stable ecosystem around the new equilibrium ensuring a better future for the targeted group and even society at large.

Martin, Roger L. and Sally Osberg. ―Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for

Definition.‖ Stanford Social Innovation Review Spring 2007: 29 - 39.

ARE WE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS? YES!

Change Your World:

The Power of New Ideas

2011 - 2013

EXAMPLES OF WHAT OTHER LIBERAL ARTS STUDENTS AND

PROFESSIONALS ARE DOING AS SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS