Education Not all volunteer opportunities are created equal. Instead of sending volunteers overseas to paint classrooms or hand out food – projects with ephemeral impact, Jane Reitsma makes sure the impact lasts. Jane’s vision is to help secondary students learn and make a difference through international community development. It is the crux of her mission [...]
The following is a guest post by Maria Hayden. Maria heads public relations at Compass Partners and is enrolled as a junior in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. What are 60 Georgetown University students doing to making a difference? Inspiring, enabling and sustaining a new generation of socially conscious entrepreneurs through a one-of-a-kind social venture [...]
Back-to-back with their recent Financial Times honors, Sparkseed has just accepted seven new student-led social enterprises into its highly selective incubator program. The incoming class of student leaders will receive seed funding, personal business coaching, hand-matched mentors, pro-bono legal services, extensive skill-building workshops, and a four-day networking summit in Silicon Valley. Sparkseed works exclusively with undergraduate [...]
The University of Washington, Tufts University, Purdue University and the University of Texas at Austin all have yearly Social Entrepreneurship competitions in place to spur social innovation into action on college campuses. You can now add the University of Villanova to the list. The Villanova Social Entrepreneurship Competition (VSEC) was started in 2009 by two [...]
I know, I know, I know. You already have your backpack burping out loose socks and cowboy hats for your great Asian adventure – there is NO WAY you can fit anything more in there and still be able to hoist it on your back. But then you realize you’ve forgot extremely important – in [...]
On the subject of charities, comedian Ben Stiller has come a long way from his days of “Derek Zoolander Center For Children Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too” to arrive at something quite possibly even funnier: STILLERSTRONG. His organization to ameliorate poverty in Haiti proudly boasts the slogan: [...]
One of the greatest challenges of being a teacher is trying to convince your students why they should care about anything that you write on the blackboard. You have to bridge the gap between their current boredom and ten years later, when they will finally appreciate the utility of what they are learning. Yet there [...]
I’m just now getting around to watching my TED talks…Author and publisher, Dave Eggers, and his “Once Upon A School” presentation so far takes the cake. I have been a fan of Eggers ever since his best-selling, quirky memoir, entitled: “The Heartbreaking Working of a Staggering Genius” came out in 2000. Ten years later, his [...]
The following is from the beautifully articulated TBD email by All Day Buffet. If you ran the world, what would you do? Go ahead, think for a sec. (Aside from buying an island off of Thailand and/or making someone bake you a pie every morning.) How about something as audacious as saving the world? Now [...]
In honor of the weekend and all of the mind-boggling, free-thinking that is coming out of the TED conference, I wanted to provide you with a little perspective on just how far we’ve come. “A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything” is a biro-pen hatched, animated flip book that more or less summarizes how far [...]
The social entrepreneurship crew generally likes to poo poo traditional development. And why not? It is an easy target given the widely held belief that aid doesn’t work and evidence showing the wholesale ineffectiveness of many development projects. We are increasingly convinced that aid donors – institutional and individual – have dumped incalculable sums down [...]
When I watch the shiny, intent faces of my Basque students as they stumble awkwardly over their English vocabulary in thick accents, it’s impossible to fathom that any of them could become a serious danger to society. Granted, they have to barricade the ground floor of windows to prevent the weekend prowlers from making a [...]
Besides working on the coolest blog ever, I also work on Box Tops for Education at General Mills. Within this program, I lead the new ventures desk. I get to think of and work on innovative and effective ways Box Tops for Education can continue to expand and serve K-8 teachers across the United States. [...]
