Social Entrepreneurship Courses

Spring 2008 Courses

Social Venture Fund Practicum (B55.3335.30, 3.0 credits)
Professor Matthew Klein
Wednesdays 6:00pm - 9:00pm

The NYU Student Social Venture Fund Practicum Course is designed to give students the opportunity to learn about venture philanthropy and social entrepreneurship through engaged grant-making. Class members will function as the staff of a real fund – supervising the Fund’s operations, conducting due diligence on applicants, making grant recommendations, and providing management assistance to grantees. The focus of the Fund will be to support New York City-based new and emerging institutions and new revenue-generating subsidiaries of existing nonprofits. The course involves academic instruction, readings, case studies and guest lectures. Professor Klein is the executive director of the Blue Ridge Foundation New York.

Course enrollment is capped at 20 students. Enrollment by application only.  Email resume and one paragraph description of interest to  mklein@brfny.org.

Social Enterprise Development (B65.2128.30, 1.5 credits)
Professor Julius Walls
Mondays 6:00pm - 9:00pm (first half of semester only)

As many nonprofits work to become more self-sustaining by diversifying their revenue streams beyond traditional foundation and government support, organizations are creating business ventures and corporate partnerships.  This course is designed not only to educate students about the models and practices currently being pursued by these organizations, but also to provide practical tools that foster new innovations in this area.   Guest lecturers have included Alan Khazei of City Year; Jeff Swartz, of Timberland; Charles King of Housing Works; Clara Miller of Nonprofit Finance Fund; and Ed Skloot of the Surdna Foundation. 

Social Venture Capital: Finance with a Double Bottom Line (B40.3148.30, 1.5 credits)
Professor Kerwin Tesdell
Mondays 6:00pm - 9:00pm (second half of semester only)

This course explores a spectrum of financial tools used to create social value. It examines the social capital markets and financial instruments designed to produce not only financial returns, but also social returns; these instruments are commonly known as “double bottom line” investments. The course will explore the structures, social missions, and effectiveness of these types of investment organizations and also will consider the challenges of quantifying the social returns. Guest lecturers will likely include executives from the Nonprofit Finance Fund, the Ford Foundation, Underdog Ventures, and the Rockefeller Foundation. A national speaker and writer on such investments, Professor Tesdell is the president of the Community Development Venture Capital Alliance. This course is open to all students who have completed the Social Enterprise Development course or those with prior permission from the professor.

Fall 2007 Courses

Foundations of Entrepreneurship: Social Entrepreneurship Section (B65.3335.10,  3.0 credits),
Professor Jeffrey A. Robinson, PhD
Thursdays 6:00pm - 9:00pm

As part of our ongoing effort to build our social entrepreneurship curriculum at NYU Stern, we have launched a special section of Foundations of Entrepreneurship that will focus on social entrepreneurship. We define social entrepreneurship as the process of using business skills to create innovative approaches to societal problems. These nonprofit and for profit ventures have a social mission and also aim to be financially self-sustainable or profitable.

Related NYU Stern Courses

Leading Sustainable Enterprises
This three credit course is about creating, leading, and managing business enterprises that seek to contribute to facilitating sustainable development. In particular, we will look at issues regarding potential roles for business in contributing to sustainability, measuring the effectiveness of an organization in terms of sustainability indices, examples of firms that are creating and executing strategies for competing in a sustainable manner, managing stakeholders, innovating forms of business enterprises (e.g., micro-finance), methods for fostering innovation and change inside the organization that could contribute to sustainability goals as well as the role of leadership. Taught by Prof. Frances Milliken & Mark Tercek (Dir. of Goldman Sachs’ Environmental Markets Initiative).

Corporate Branding and Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate social responsibility (CSR), which was once a differentiation strategy for niche marketers, has become a central concern of mainstream Fortune 500 corporations. Students learn the theoretical and strategic overview of CSR in the context of corporate branding derived from a number of “live” cases with leaders drawn from corporations, NGOs and investment management firms.

Energy and the Environment - Business As Usual or Ripe For Revolution?
Students gain an overview of the economics and politics of the interlinked fields of energy and the environment. The course will investigate why change tends to come slowly in these industries, ask whether the world is at an energy crossroads and examine the rapidly evolving landscape of oil and cars that powered the prosperity seen in the 20th century, but which also contribute mightily to the health, environmental and foreign policy problems associated with energy.