Social Enterprise Serves as Essential Course for MAA Students
In Fall 2024, all students in the Master of Arts Administration (MAA) program, alongside students from other majors at OHIO university, were enrolled in the Social Entrepreneurship course. The course is housed in the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs. This semester, the course was co-taught by Faith Knutsen, Voinovich School Director of Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship, and Dr. Allison Ricket, Assistant Research Professor and Director of Analytics, Impact Measurement and Management with Voinovich, who holds the highest credentialing in the topic in the nation. Social Entrepreneurship is a required course for all MAA students and is readily discussed as an essential course by program alumni.
The course traces a lineage of the term ‘social enterprise’ through recent western economics and culminates in students executing ‘pitches’ of original business ideas. These ideated businesses must fall under the social enterprise umbrella and are presented to a panel of external experts, including professional entrepreneurs and business coaches. Knutsen notes that “a ‘social enterprise’ is a mission-driven enterprise (which can be for-profit or nonprofit) that also makes money. Examples (among hundreds) would include a sliding-fee-scale dance studio for kids who wouldn’t otherwise ever experience such a thing; incorporating mixed media art into a facility serving the developmentally disadvantaged; and addressing a local concern about youth disaffection by starting a senior/youth co-mentoring initiative bringing two ends of the age spectrum into meaningful and extended contact.”
Pitch groups (typically 2-5 students) are tasked with tackling issues they are passionate about through this mission and money model. This semester, those missions included hyper-local environmental concerns, substance use and recovery, domestic violence, music education, rural arts access, and more. MAA student, Caroline Murphy, is working with a group to develop a full-service graphic design studio focused on small businesses in the Appalachian Ohio region. Murphy, who hails from West Virginia, said “in Social Entrepreneurship, I feel like I’m thinking more creatively than in some of my arts-centric classes! Together, we have begun to delve into the basics of understanding business to both utilize and rewrite the rules to really and truly benefit community members.”
Groups spend the full semester undertaking intensive preparation work to develop a social enterprise. This work includes researching similar endeavors and funding avenues, learning the language of mission-driven business creation - from SROI (social return on investment) to quadruple-bottom-line (people, planet, purpose, and prosperity/profit), and applying business models to their idea. All this work was met with ongoing feedback from Knutsen. In week eleven of the semester, students completed the all-important mock “Pitch Day,” introducing their business ideas to the class cohort and a panel of professionals in the field of development and business ideation. This format mimics funding pitches that new businesses undergo, preparing students for the field with firm time limits and real-time feedback from the panel.
The semester-length course was initially ideated in 2020 by Knutsen and the late John Glazer, then-Senior Executive in Residence for Strategic Development at the Voinovich School. The syllabus included readings ranging from Andrew Carnegie’s 19th century Gospel of Wealth to Now We’re All Measuring Impact but is Anything Really Changing? published in June of this year by the Griffith Center for Systems Innovation - and nearly everything in between. Throughout the term, the course also welcomed over twenty guest speakers working in the field, including foundation funders, nonprofit executive directors, and local public servants. Because of this multifaceted curricular approach, students engage with examples of evolving business models, economic bubbles, impediments to rural prosperity, and where they themselves may fit, professionally, all while addressing real-life problems head on.
This course is particularly relevant to the future work of MAA graduates since, as Knutsen shared, “Arts Administrators are often at the forefront of solutions to the greatest of society’s challenges, which at its baseline is about how to create and sustain community.”