As we kicked through the snow on our way up Decker’s Creek Trail, the runner next to me told me about a project for preteen girls that she leads. The girls in the program, who all scored high on the Adverse Childhood Experiences test, meet for an adventure, a meal, and friendship. Their leader, a social work student, also slips in some education about healthy self-development and coping strategies.

The girls and the leader love the program, but they have a challenge: The program lost grant funding due to some past administrative issues, and their leader struggles to keep it going while still being able to pay her rent.

Social Entrepreneurship for West Virginia

I started training in and teaching entrepreneurship because I hear versions of this story all the time. West Virginians are ready and willing to support and advocate for each other, but we need a little more oomph to keep programs running.

The geniuses of entrepreneurship have developed awesome methods for identifying problems, generating solutions, and figuring out which ideas they can build and sustain — all in lightning-fast time and with very few resources invested.

For example, in Entrepreneurship for Lawyers this week, we watched this TED talk by Tom Chi, a Silicon Valley veteran and master of rapid prototyping.

In one of Chi’s projects, workshop participants went through the rapid prototyping process, from idea generation to prototyping to refinement to launch, four times in a single day. The results Chi described were remarkable: One participant developed a product, posted a website, and earned $1500 in sales that very day. Another devised a way to use former child soldiers as workers on cacao farms, launched the project the same day, and had chocolate for sale a week later.

WVU IDEA Faculty Fellows and Social Entrepreneurs

I’m grateful to WVU for seeing the need for entrepreneurship education several years ago and launching the IDEA Faculty Fellows program. As a participant in that program, I received training at Babson College — which awards only two degrees, a Bachelor’s or a Master’s in Entrepreneurship — and learned from the projects of my IDEA Fellows cohort. That training led to the Entrepreneurship for Lawyers class I’m teaching now.

Much entrepreneurship training focuses on products for profit, but the same principles can work for social enterprises too (and there’s no bright line distinction between the two). I hope we can continue the push — even uphill in the snow — to learn from the best entrepreneurial methods to make West Virginia more Wild and Wonderful than ever before.