By James Irwin
Ethan Nava hopes to attend the next annual meeting of Clinton Global Initiative University for a number of reasons. Chief among them is his belief that social enterprise is a sustainable route to solving pressing global issues.
“A lot of times nonprofit organizations have huge trustee funds they work with, but once those funds run out, that’s the end of the project,” said Mr. Nava, a sophomore in the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. “The thing about social enterprise is if you keep the model working on its own, you don’t rely on external funds as much.”
Mr. Nava, working alongside a group of former high school classmates from Singapore on an international development project that tackles education and health care issues in Cambodia, is applying to attend the eighth annual meeting of CGI U, March 6-8 at the University of Miami. The meeting brings students, university representatives, topic experts and celebrities together to develop solutions to global challenges.
The CGI U application deadline is Dec. 1.
A member of the CGI U Network, GW recently installed new support programs for students exploring social entrepreneurship, including a grant in partnership with a Silicon Valley nonprofit organization and a series of on-campus workshops designed to help students launch social change projects.
D-Prize, an organization that expands access to poverty-alleviation solutions in the developing world, is working with GW to provide a $5,000 travel grant for students to pilot “known” solutions to poverty in specific communities. These solutions are usually in need of refinement for mass implementation, said Melanie Fedri, coordinator for social entrepreneurship in the Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service.
“There’s a specific angle of the model that still needs work,” Ms. Fedri said. “For example, solar lights—to replace kerosene lamps—are rugged, durable, well-designed and affordable, yet they still aren’t getting to people at a massive scale. There’s something missing. Hopefully, students can use their knowledge of local communities and business skills or cultural knowledge to help make these solutions work better.”
As a member of the CGI U Network, GW provides resources to students interested in creating social enterprise solutions to community issues. A $5,000 travel grant from the university and the nonprofit organization D-Prize is being awarded this year to pilot solutions to poverty.
The workshops, held in monthly series by GWupstart Social Innovation Lab, provide training in project management and budgeting to take projects from idea to pilot. Last week’s workshop focused on speaking to potential beneficiaries about community-specific problems and building rapid prototypes to better explain a potential solution without first spending months creating the product.
“For example, if you are holding an event, you could make a poster with all the event details you are thinking of and get feedback on the idea from the community,” said Kristen Pinto, a junior in the Milken Institute School of Public Health who attended CGI U last year. “You keep presenting it until you have a product that will work.”
Ms. Pinto has worked with the D.C. nonprofit organization Little Friends for Peace for more than two years. Her project, “Perform for Peace,” is a series of workshops to teach children how theater and conflict resolution go together. She’s been testing the program with Little Friends for Peace this semester.
The GWupstart workshops, she and Mr. Nava said, help narrow concepts.
“I like to come up with loads of ideas to solve whatever problems I see around me,” Mr. Nava said. “The problem is sometimes you don’t think enough about the feasibility of carrying it out or putting it down on paper.”
GW sent 15 students to last year’s CGI U meeting in Arizona. The university hosted the 2012 conference, where a GW-created project won the event’s bracket challenge—and an endorsement from President Bill Clinton. That project, Pedal Forward (formerly Panda Cycles), aims to provide a sustainable solution to transportation issues, by manufacturing and selling bamboo bicycles domestically and abroad.
Matt Wilkins, B.S. ’12, M.S. ’14, then a student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, was part of that group. He now teaches a class at GW, “Makeshift Innovation and Engineering in the Third World," that focuses on ingenuity and engineering in developing countries.
“There’s a big issue regarding development projects when things break—build a well, something in the well breaks and you can’t use it anymore,” Ms. Fedri said. “It’s all about creating solutions that are extremely durable and cheap.”
The idea of taking existing solutions and modifying them to fit a new setting is at the heart of innovation, said Mr. Nava, who plans to apply for the D-Prize competition.
“To an extent, everything we think of has been abstracted from somewhere else—changed and modified to fit the context you are working in,” he said. “That’s already innovation.”
