It’s hard to not get excited and inspired when the founder of the Centre for Social Initiatives and Management (CSIM) says that he “wants to create a pandemic of social entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid”! How can a modest program from a small and privileged liberal arts school even begin to measure up? That was my first thought. Then I said to myself, “Calm down, it’s not a competition. It’s a partnership. We all want the same thing. Change agents for the global good.”
First some background:
What is CSIM?
CSIM is a decentralized social entrepreneurship training solution in four major Indian cities: Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Bangalore. Each CSIM office has its own local board of directors picked from the local community and is self-funded. Each CSIM office reports to the MSDS trust. The Trust recognizes social entrepreneurs with an award, empowers agents for social change with its teaching curriculum, and also engages in venture philanthropy for social entrepreneurs.
What is CSIM-Bangalore doing?
CSIM Bangalore is the youngest of the four offices. It currently has a four month part-time social entrepreneurship training program (SEOP). This program shares many similarities to ours. Students attend classes on Saturdays. They are exposed to SE in two modules. The first is an introduction to SE and the second contains tools for social entrepreneurs. Tools that are taught include: venture philanthropy, social marketing, organizational planning, project management, and finance, among others. It seems clear that this course is a more in-depth version of our SE course. Our SE program is tilted more towards experiential learning, and SEOP seems geared towards plugging students into a local SE networks by introducing and developing their appreciation for the concept of SE. One really intriguing part of the SEOP course is that every student is required to develop a project proposal at the end of the course. Some internships have also been planned. We met many students that wanted to start their own non-profits. Most students that participate are either people that work in the corporate or NGO sector.
Now for the questions:
How could our program work with them?
There are many possibilities. The most simple would be for CSIM-Banglore to act as a local-sounding board for ideas as our program develops. From then on, the only challenges would be logistics. For example, we could see SEOP students working alongside Wooster students in their internship. We could also see Wooster students taking a semester off to attend the four-month course in addition to other volunteer activities in Bangalore and so on. These were the few options we discussed.
Are there other resource organizations?
It seems like there are few resource organizations like CSIM. Traditional academic institutions do exist in Bangalore and we did meet with them. For us, the potential synergy that could come from our students working alongside SE practitioners who are further along or closer to launching their SE venture would be neat.
Can CSIM scale up their program?
This remains to be seen. Our meeting with the founder of CSIM and the CSIM Bangalore board, all seasoned veterans of the corporate and non-profit sectors made us believe they can. Now we have to figure out how Wooster can be part of this.
Right now we are still sort of in the “Pre-GSE” stage, though the on-the-ground trip has been completed. The next step is sending out a questionnaire and a timeline along with thank you notes to the organizations (our goal is to finish this today!).
In the meantime, we’re currently scheduling meetings with different people on campus/in Wooster (including Shila and Grant) while also looking ahead to the grant-writing process. 🙂
The class is shaping up to be very awesome, though! We are going to be reading Nandan Nilekani’s book Imagining India. We’ll also hopefully have tons of awesome speakers (maybe we can convince Andrew Baird to do a workshop for us on cultural literacy? :D).
You + me + Moledina should have a conference call sometime so we can tell you moreee!!
the possibilities for getting our program to work with them are great. The semester off sounds the best in this case. However, otherwise, we could probably fix up mentorships between our students going abroad in the summer for 8 weeks and the ones at CSIM-B. So this student that plans to go abroad in the summer, can learn about the tools of social entrepreneurship in India through the tutorials, of which the mentorship program is a part. This is just another way we can be connected with CSIM even if we cant get our students to enroll in their programs for the 4 month period.
So, I was wondering, where does GSE stand in terms of the way it was divided into its 4 stages: Pre-GSE, GSE semianrs, GSE abroad and Post GSE.
now, that Pre-GSE is done, what do the prospects for GSE seminars look like?