Consulting

The Social Enterprise Program aims to make a positive contribution to the practice of social entrepreneurship throughout the world.

• It does this by providing graduate-level education to carefully selected students who show promise to be the leaders and major contributors to the future development of this field.

• It also directly serves the social entrepreneurship community by assisting start-up and established enterprises through its Consulting Program.

LOWERING THE WALL BETWEEN THE CAMPUS AND THE REAL WORLD

This assistance is provided through consulting projects staffed by Social Enterprise graduate students and supervised by university faculty. Students’ work on these projects is a central part of the experiential learning component of our curriculum, and is integrated with their coursework. Some of these consulting assignments were part of the student’s initial immersion experience into the Program, others were done for their Capstone Practicum Project. In addition to benefiting clients, consulting projects teach students key skills essential to their careers in social enterprise:

• Diagnosing a problem

• Benchmarking ways other organizations have solved similar issues

• Planning and executing projects on a tight schedule

• Operating effectively in a team

• Drawing on other’s knowledge and resources

• Developing creative solutions

• Creating a realistic implementation plan

• Earning trust and managing client relationships

• Selling ideas