CASE News

Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award Winner Named
Wendy Kopp, Founder and CEO of Teach for America, has been named the 2005 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award Winner. In recognition of this honor, on Tuesday, April 12, Ms. Kopp will address the Fuqua and Duke communities and the general public in Geneen Auditorium at 10:30 am.

Teach For America is building the movement to eliminate educational inequity in this country. Since 1990, more than 12,000 exceptional individuals have joined Teach For America, committing two years to teach in low-income rural and urban communities. Following this experience, many have become committed leaders in the effort to expand opportunities for all children. Teach For America has 22 regional sites across the country.

In 1989, Wendy Kopp proposed in her undergraduate senior thesis the creation of a new national corps called Teach For America that would enlist her generation's most promising future leaders in the movement to end educational inequity. Teach For America would inspire outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors and career interests to commit two years to teach in the nation's neediest urban and rural public schools and to become lifelong leaders for expanding educational opportunity. Kopp made her plan a reality.

Kopp serves on the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation, the Boards of The New Teacher Project and the KIPP Foundation, and the Advisory Boards of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and the National Council on Teacher Quality. Kopp holds honorary doctorate degrees from Pace University (2004), Mercy College (2004), Smith College (2001), Princeton University (2000), Connecticut College (1995), and Drew University (1995). She is the youngest person and the first woman to receive Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award (1993), the highest honor the school confers on its undergraduate alumni. In 1994, Time Magazine recognized her as one of the forty most promising leaders under 40. Kopp has also been recognized with the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award (2004), Child magazine's Children's Champion Award (2003), the Clinton Center Award for Leadership and National Service (2003), the Schwab Foundation's Outstanding Social Entrepreneur Award (2003), Aetna's Voice of Conscience Award (1994), the Citizen Activist Award from the Gleitsman Foundation (1994), and the Jefferson Award for Public Service (1991).

For more information about this event, see the Events section of the CASE website.

Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation Comes to Fuqua
Fuqua's Social Impact Club and CASE recently hosted Jeffrey Hollender, Founder, President and Corporate Responsibility Officer of Seventh Generation, the leading brand of natural household products in the United States. Hollender spoke with students from Fuqua, the Sanford Institute, the Nicholas School of the Environment and others in the community about his new book, What Matters Most. In it, he asks tough corporate social responsibility questions, and he brought these before the audience at Fuqua: When do core values conflict with goals and commitments? Does being a responsible business really cost shareholders more money? How can reputation become a corporate pressure point? Hollender is a member and former Director of the Social Venture Network. He was a co-founder and a Director of Community Capital Bank, a New York financial institution that invests in affordable housing and community development. He is also the former Chairperson of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, which, with almost 500 members, is the largest state organization of its kind.

CASE Receives Research Funding from Skoll and W.K. Kellogg Foundations
The Skoll Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation have granted CASE funds for research into "Scaling Social Impact: Mental Models, Existing Alternatives, and New Opportunities." The goal of this project is to provide social entrepreneurs, resource providers and thought leaders with new ways of thinking about and pursuing scale, thus creating greater opportunities to achieve high impact and systemic change. The research will occur over multiple stages, beginning with a broad-based survey and multiple in-depth interviews which will help surface meaningful case study examples. Through these mechanisms, CASE aims to better understand beliefs about scale in the social sector, delve into the underlying assumptions that are driving them, identify some compelling counter-examples, and gain further insight into the range of scaling options available to social entrepreneurs and those supporting them.

Wachovia Foundation Donates $250,000 for CASE Scholarship Program
With support from the Wachovia Foundation, the Fuqua School of Business will offer two scholarships each year to Daytime MBA students with nonprofit backgrounds who are looking to acquire business skills for use in their pursuit of social impact. In response to the increasing demand for business skills in the social sector, these merit-based scholarships will be awarded to students who have demonstrated their capacity for and commitment to applying their MBA education for social good.

The CASE Social Sector Scholarship Program will commence with Fuqua's Daytime MBA Class of 2007. Awardees must gain admission to Fuqua and will be selected by CASE through a separate application process. All recipients will be required to participate in the CASE Summer Internship Program as well as to commit to pursuing a social sector career upon graduation. In total, scholarship recipients will be eligible for $25,000 in financial support, two years of scholarship support at $10,000 per year and one summer internship support at up to $5,000.

In conjunction with the scholarship program, funding from the Wachovia Foundation will also provide some support for CASE's Summer Internship Program. The CASE Summer Internship Program enables students to learn about the rewards and challenges of social sector management without making a significant financial sacrifice. In 2003 and 2004, CASE helped fund 12 social sector internships. Students applied their MBA skills at organizations such as Center for Community Self Help, Common Good Ventures, KaBOOM!, PBS, Physicians for Peace, and Sustainable Jobs Development Corporation. CASE requires that hiring organizations pay a portion of the student’s salary and agrees to match this amount up to $5,000, with the total compensation not to exceed $10,000.

The Wachovia Foundation is providing support for this program part of a $1 million grant to Duke University. More information on the scholarship is available in the Student section of the CASE website.

CASE Welcomes New Associate Director, Matt Nash
CASE is pleased to announce the hiring of Matt Nash as its first associate director.

A graduate of the Yale School of Management (SOM), Matt brings to Fuqua extensive domestic and international social and public sector experience. He was previously a senior consultant in Strategy and Change Solutions with the Public Sector Practice at IBM Business Consulting Services. In this position and previous consulting capacities, he has served a diverse set of clients ranging from local organizations, including a nonprofit resource center, a community housing board, and a disabilities rights coalition, to large agencies such as World Vision, UNICEF and the U.S. Agency for International Development. While obtaining his MBA, Matt also worked as the leadership institute manager at Yale's Center for Public Service and chaired the nonprofit student interest group at the Yale SOM. Prior to attending business school, he volunteered with the U.S. Peace Corps in Romania after graduating from Yale College, where he received the graduation prize for public service.

CASE to Co-Host Conference on Social Enterprise
On Wednesday, June 1, CASE will partner with the Duke Law Community Enterprise Clinic to host a conference on the theme, “Developing Earned Income Strategies to Enhance Social and Community Impact.”

Many organizations are looking for new sources of money to support their charitable work, and the idea of generating ongoing streams of revenue from fees, cause-related marketing, or actual business ventures is appealing. Yet for many nonprofit organizations, engaging in social enterprise is new territory, and navigating it successfully requires different skills, resources, and even organizational cultures. Even organizations already pursuing social enterprise face challenges and opportunities as the environment changes, new ideas emerge, and operations fail, meet, or exceed expectations. Regardless, it is critical that nonprofits approach this topic not as a financial issue, but rather from a mission-driven perspective. (See CASE Corner in this issue of CASEconnection)

The goal of this conference is to help participants understand the opportunities and challenges of developing earned income strategies to enhance social and community impact. This conference will provide practical professional development for organizations seriously considering or currently pursuing social enterprise activity. Participants are expected to include up to 125 nonprofit staff, board members, funders, community leaders and professionals serving organizations engaged in social enterprise. Presenters will be leaders in the field from North Carolina, as well as a nationally-renowned social enterprise consultant.

The all-day conference will convene at 8:30 am at Duke's Fuqua School of Business in Durham. For more information on the conference, including registration details, visit the conference website at www.ncsocialenterprise.org.