This spring, IEE Executive Director Ed Church served as a Mentor for the Global Social Venture Competition, mentoring a Team from the India School of Business via email and Skype. GSVC is a student-run competition to launch the next generation of social enterprise entrepreneurs. GSVC provides aspiring entrepreneurs with mentoring, exposure, and $50,000 in prizes to transform their ideas into businesses with real-world impact. This unique competition, founded at UC Berkeley-Haas School of Business in 1999, is run by students, for students, and connects promising social enterprises to the social impact investment community. Through eight regional partners and six outreach partners, GSVC attracts a diverse group of entrants from around the world.
Last year, Dr. Church shared his knowledge of the social and environmental impacts of business with his mentee group, based in Bogota Colombia, by email and Skype.
For the past three years, IEE Executive Director Edward Church has served as a both Judge and Mentor for the Stanford University Social E-Challenge, created by the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES). This year, Ed has been asked to be a Judge for the first round of the Challenge, held February 5, 2013. Judges included venture capitalists, start-up experts and nonprofit leaders.
BASES is at the center of student entrepreneurship at Stanford and one of the largest and oldest student-run entrepreneurship organizations in the world. Its mission is to promote entrepreneurship education at Stanford University and to empower the next generation of entrepreneurs.
The Social E-Challenge is a business plan competition for entrepreneurial ventures whose primary goal is to effect social and/or environmental change. Participants range from for-profit businesses with a strong sense of social responsibility to nonprofits with sustainable revenue-generation models. The common denominator is that these companies seek to have a positive impact on our society and/or the environment.