Social Entrepreneurship is Finding a Home at Dartmouth

At a recent Rockefeller Center Board of Visitors meeting, four students who completed PBPL 43/ECON 77 Social Entrepreneurship,  Hoi Wong '17, Elijah Moreno '15, Avery Feingold '17, and Katherine McAvoy '17 talked abut their course experience and the resulting project. Photo by Hung Nguyen '18.

For eleven years, economics professor Andrew Samwick has directed the Rockefeller Center to motivate and inspire the next generation of public policy leaders. After realizing that social entrepreneurship was necessary in the world beyond Hanover, he designed and launched a course in which students could hit three crucial points necessary for their futures — the study of poverty and its causes and consequences, the nature and style of innovation and innovation itself, with a project in which students would design a concept for a social venture addressing poverty. By the end of the course, called “Social Entrepreneurship,” projects would be ready for competitions and pitches, leading students to think of ideas and giving them the resources to expand on them. Samwick describes the value of educating students in this field. “'You have to be relentlessly focused on creating value for the people,” Samwick said. “That’s a very humbling experience, to be so focused on a something that’s greater than you.