Cause Case Study

Michael Cobb, Caitlin Rosser, and Andreas Vailakis

There are lots of books and articles about successful social enterprises. They’re motivating and inspirational, but sometimes even more can be learned from the ones that fail.

That’s what three Social Enterprise Masters students – Michael Cobb, Caitlin Rosser and Andreas Vailakis –  thought in the wake of the closing of Cause, DC’s first philanthropub.  Cause was a bar and restaurant that planned to give all its profits to charity.

Except there weren’t any…

So our students created an independent study course around their research to figure out what went wrong. And the case study they wrote – sort of an organizational autopsy – was good enough to be published in the top journal in our field: the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Click here to read their article and see what they found.