Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship In Silicon Valley
BELMONT, California, April 27, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The academic and administrative leadership of Notre Dame de Namur University and the GCSEN Foundation met today to chart a course to accelerate by 10X the Bay Area's College Millennial Social Enterprises by 2027.
Notre Dame de Namur University (NDNU), which was founded by the Sisters of Notre Dame, is California's third oldest university. The Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship Network (GCSEN Foundation) is a 501(c)3 education charity dedicated to accelerating Social Entrepreneurship in Higher Education through innovative programs and learning technologies. GCSEN offers proven systems of support for its higher education campus partners.
Craig Brewer, Dean of the NDNU School of Business and Management, said, "In order to create a Social Entrepreneurship acceleration in the Bay Area, NDNU is looking to establish leading programs in Social Entrepreneurship in collaboration with the GCSEN Foundation. We are excited to work with the GCSEN Foundation and to leverage its globally recognized leadership and expertise of Mike Caslin, Founder and CEO and the GCSEN team including Tony DiMarco, Managing Director of Global Platforms. This week we have met to create a shared vision that will enable Notre Dame de Namur Business School and our college students to explore proven and practical ways to go from 'Start Up to Transformative Scale' Bay Area Social Entrepreneurs. As we succeed with the GCSEN Foundation, we hope to share this highly innovative and collaborative platform with other Bay Area academic partners, their faculty and students."
- Who is a Social Entrepreneur? A Social Entrepreneur who acts with Purpose for People, Profit, Planet and Place.
- What do Social Entrepreneurs do? They make meaning and make money.
- What is the end game? To use Social Enterprises, both for-profit and non-profit, to move the world to a better place.
What better way to predict the future of a sustainable Bay Area local economy than to create it together now?
The founding sponsors of the GCSEN Foundation include the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation and Sheri Sobrato-Brisson, the visionary Bay Area philanthropist and acclaimed leader of Digging Deep, and the Sobrato-Brisson Trust with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The goal is to bring GCSEN's globally recognized, millennial focused, practical and highly rigorous MBA level Social Entrepreneurship programming first to the campus of NDNU, a long time grant-recipient of the Sobrato Family Foundation, and then to campuses throughout the Bay Area. Over time, the GCSEN Foundation intends to support NDNU as a leading regional hub of its network of campuses around the world that collaborate, innovate and work together to achieve a 10X increase in the number of millennials launching "4P Impact businesses" designed to strengthen people, profit, planet and place in the Bay Area and beyond.
Mike Caslin, aka "Professor Caz" by his students, is Founder and CEO of GCSEN Foundation has taught at Babson College—ranked #1 in Entrepreneurship—for over a decade and created Social Entrepreneurship IP and courseware that powers GCSEN today. A past lecturer at Stanford, Harvard, Duke, Hong Kong, Prague School of Business, he was also recognized in two Harvard Business School Case Studies that were written about the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) on which he served as CEO and co-founder for 20 years before retiring to teach in higher education. "It is my firm belief from nearly 4 decades of work around the world," says Caslin, "that businesses with a 4P impact intention are the most practical, pragmatic and peaceful force for good in the world. They have a holistic, systemic and powerful capacity to achieve a more productive, prosperous, just and inclusive society, locally, regionally and nationally." GCSEN not only provides the know-how, know who, and know what to do, they are building a network of "Certified Meaning Makers" known as THEOS: "Together Helping Each Other Succeed."
For more information go to www.GCSEN.com or call Mike Caslin, Founder & CEO of GCSEN Foundation at (212) 444-2071 or email at mike@gcsen.com or Craig Brewer, Dean of the NDNU School of Business and Management at (650) 508-3684 or email at cbrewer@ndnu.edu.
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