Discussion: View Thread

Dear Service-Learning and Entrepreneurship Colleagues:

As a university business professor at California State University, Chico, I have long been interested in the powerful formula of social entrepreneurship, service learning, and civic engagement, and how we can use this formula to enlist a virtual untapped army that can apply textbook theories to real-world problems. The recruits for this army are university students-mostly business majors-who work as coaches to teams of innovative and industrious high school students.

With today's technology, the university and high school students are beginning to build a worldwide network of business colleagues and friends, leading to the creation of economic, social and political capital. This capital can increase the standard of living for the entire world.

In fact, this social capital is already being created through a youth entrepreneurship program that I founded in 2002 called Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship--SAGE (http://sageglobal.org). On March 6, I made a three-minute pitch at the Social Venture Partners of Sacramento Fast Pitch event at the McGeorge School of Law and won the top $10,000 prize from the judges. This money is being rolled back into Sacramento schools who start SAGE programs.

The SAGE idea is modeled after interscholastic sports. It works like this.

A team of innovative high school students is formed, either by the students themselves or in conjunction with an entrepreneurial teacher. The team can be part of an existing class, or it can be co-curricular. At the end of the academic year, the teams travel to a tournament to present the results of their innovations to a panel of jurists recruited from the business and civic community.

The ticket to enter the tournament? A SAGE team of at least three teens must start and operate one commercial (and socially-responsible) business during the year or one social enterprise.

The reward? The right to travel to a national tournament, where the top two teams go on to represent their country at the SAGE World Cup (the SAGE USA Tournament is at UC-Berkeley on June 5). This summer, from August 7-11, teams from 20 countries will be vying to be this year's champion. The event takes place in Seoul, South Africa. Now in its 13th year, the SAGE World Cup host city the past seven years have been Shanghai, Odessa, Abuja, Brasilia, Cape Town, Buffalo, and Moscow.

Of the 20 countries, seven of them are from Africa: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia. Our SAGE Africa ambassador is Ndaba Mandela, the second oldest grandson of the late Nelson Mandela.

To encourage businesses to support this youth education program, we have enlisted partners from the private sector to sponsor special competitions that encourage ventures in clean technology, as well as social enterprises that address the Millennium Development Goals. U.S. partners include Deloitte, the Ken Grossman family of Chico (Grossman is the founder of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, nationally recognized as a company at the vanguard of environmental sustainability), Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Umpqua Bank, and the Arata Brothers Trust of Sacramento. Deloitte plans to send over 100 partners and senior managers to serve as SAGE judges as part of its National Impact Day on June 5 at UC-Berkeley.

Last year's SAGE World Cup took place in Moscow. To staff the event, I brought five Chico State students and four alumni. The champion team of teen entrepreneurs, in the socially-responsible business category, came from Shanghai. Their company, Powerstep, inserts a device into the soles of shoes, recharging batteries with every step. The champion team in the social enterprise category was Greener Globe Company, near Dublin, Ireland. These teens made a timed showerhead that reduces average household water consumption by 144 gallons per week

As another example, a team from Mindanao, Philippines won first place in the best environmental venture category.  In search of an alternative that would arrest the rising cost of construction materials and to answer the environmental and health problems caused by palm fronds burning, palm frond cement cement-bonded block (PFCBB) was developed. This technology utilizes the inner portion of the frond as a substitute aggregate in fabricating concrete blocks while the cleaned frond is utilized as a substitute for plywood. PFCBB is best recommended for non-load bearing walls like partition walls, fences and pig pens.

These examples show the power of youth to improve themselves, and their communities.

The United Nations' Millennium Development Goal 8 recognizes the importance of cooperation to develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth. In Friedman's book, The World Is Flat, he commented on the importance of youth empowerment. His comments apply to SAGE: "Give young people a context where they can translate a positive imagination into reality, give them a context in which someone with a grievance can have it adjudicated in a court of law without having to bribe the judge with a goat, give them a context in which they can pursue an entrepreneurial idea and become the richest or the most creative or most respected people in their own country, no matter what their background, give them a context in which any complaint or idea can be published in the newspaper, give them a context in which anyone can run for office-and guess what? They usually don't want to blow up the world. They usually want to be part of it."

We invite any business, civic, or education leaders to UC-Berkeley to observe the SAGE USA competition. For details, contact me at cdeberg@csuchico.edu or 530.520.7370.

Miles of Smiles,

Curt

Dr. Curtis L. DeBerg

College of Business

California State University, Chico

Chico, CA 95929-0011

530-898-4824 (phone)

cdeberg@csuchico.edu

Skype: cdeberg

Founder, SAGEGLOBAL (http://sageglobal.org)