Elizabethtown College has established the Social Enterprise Institute (SEI) to offer another channel through which members of the Etown community can use their talents and skills to benefit the community. The Institute fulfills the College’s promise to “Educate for Service,” offering faculty and staff members, business partners and students the opportunity to integrate sponsored projects with their community-oriented goals.
The Institute, which is completely sponsored by investors unaffiliated with Etown, was established to pair an institution of higher education with organizations that desire to promote the most positive elements of society. The SEI feels that this business model starts from the bottom up, recognizing the importance of undergraduate institutions to the development of social enterprise. Etown provided the perfect platform. The school’s “Brethren heritage, stewardship values, culture encouraging multidiscipline teams of faculty and students, emphasis on real world learning and signature learning experiences provide the platform for the SEI at Elizabethtown College to act as a backbone organization for collaborative research, development and commercialization of solutions to persistent social problems empowering a much larger collective impact,” Jim Reeb said.
Reeb, a local impact banker who has over 30 years of business consulting and advisory experience, is at the helm of the Institute, having brought the idea to the College. Reeb has worked with 85 Fortune 500 companies and is a managing principal with TAG Impact Partners in York.
Rick Basom, the executive director of sponsored research in the College’s Office of Sponsored Research and Programs, said that the best part of introducing a project like the SEI to Etown “is that it brings opportunities for real-world learning experiences to campus and at the same time has the potential to eradicate persistent social problems.”
Reeb’s expertise — along with Basom’s supervision — will allow the Etown community to extend beyond the campus and reach those it otherwise may not have.
“The reach of the SEI has no geographic boundaries; it can go where its work is most needed,” Basom said.
The Institute looks to raise funding so that partners can address social problems that may generate attention but are not necessarily helped appropriately.
“Social enterprises differ from common for-profit businesses and non-profit organizations in that they combine the business goal of making money with the fundamental intent of solving persistent social problems,” Etown adjunct professor of engineering faculty member Bill Gordon, the project manager for the SEI, said.
Currently, the team is engaged in projects with Trucker Wellness Centers, Inc., Farmacy, Empower Africa Inc. and Sierra Leone Health Organization. Their corporate partners are P&G, Coventry Truck, NASCAR, Walmart, Travel Centers of America, Old English Trucking, Target, Hershey and Wilderwood Service Dogs.
Future plans of the SEI include establishing partnerships with other institutions of higher education and non-governmental organizations. The Institute also looks forward to supporting and celebrating its own members’ connections and abilities.
“I am excited to work with faculty, students, and community partners on meaningful projects that seek to address economic, environmental, and social issues through the application of sound business strategies,” said Gordon. “With hard work and a little luck, we will help innovative organizations generate sustainable revenue streams to ‘do good’ in the world.”
