Social Entrepreneurs in Education: Students, Faculty Members and the Community Working Together to Improve Education in New Orleans

By Carol Whelan and Laura White

This semester students in Education in a Diverse Society (EDLA 2000) are having the unique opportunity to develop innovative ways to improve education. Working with a public service fellow, Laura White, students and professors are identifying educational problems and identifying innovative ways to address them. With her background in social innovation work with Ashoka and the TU Changemakers program, Laura is working with Professor Whelan and her students to bring an awareness and knowledge of how we can all become "social innovators". Laura White is a junior Political Economy major, as well as a Teacher Certification candidate. Prior to coming to Tulane, and in response to high drowning rates and few after-school opportunities for at-risk youth in her community, Laura started a nonprofit (now called Swim 4 Success) that provides free swimming lessons to low-income kids. The program has been expanded to Tulane. Now, Laura works with the TUchangemakers program to bring social innovation and social entrepreneurship programming to campus. Laura also co-initiatiated the Changemaker Education Collaborative, which aims to help catalyze each person's capacity for creating social change through unique learning methods and tools.

The Tulane teacher certification students, through their public service assignments in the local schools, are in a unique position to experience and become social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem, such as educational disparities, and identifies creative and innovative approaches to address the problem. One example of a student who demonstrated this was my public service fellow for the past three years, Kirsten Hill. Kirsten worked with the For the Children Program at Banneker Elementary School while taking the  Education in a Diverse Society class. The next semester, she expanded her work to develop a reading program at Lafayette Charter School. She is now a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania. Her model, the Lafayette Reading Room has recently been adopted by the Roosevelt Institute as a national model and will be used by other universities to start similar programs.

In October Earl Phalen, a leading social innovator and one of the NewDay Social Entrepreneurship Distinguished Speakers Series met with the Education in a Diverse Society class. He is CEO of Reach Out and Read and Founder of Summer Advantage, USA. He shared his own experiences, challenges, insights, thoughts, and recommendations to students and the community.  The Office of Social Entrepreneurship at Tulane provides the speaker series. It is a great opportunity to meet and engage with some of the most remarkable people working in the area of social entrepreneurship today. Additional information about Tulane’s social entrepreneurship initiatives can be found on the Tulane website at http://tulane.edu/socialentrepreneurship/index.cfm.

We are all enjoying learning about social innovation in education through the collaborative partnerships with Ms Branche, the principal at Banneker Elementary, Marie Gould, Site Coordinator of the For the Children Program and Tulane students and faculty in Education in  a Diverse Society.