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George Mason University, in partnership with The Phoenix Project, a not-for-profit corporation and catalyst for social innovation, launched the Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship in March 2011. Aiming to spark scalable and entrepreneurial solutions to our world’s greatest social challenges while developing and preparing the next generation of leaders, the Center leverages its unique strengths:
Proven Experience
The Center’s creation reflects more than five years of proven success in the field. The Phoenix Project has been recognized for its groundbreaking social entrepreneurship programs by Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, the Aspen Institute, Root Cause, and others. Mason has for many years developed and refined academic and programmatic contributions to the social entrepreneurship movement, which led to its recognition as an Ashoka Changemaker Campus in 2008, further catalyzing the university’s growth as a leader in social innovation. The partnership between Phoenix and Mason, two established contributors to the field, creates synergy that allows the Center to achieve an impact greater than the sum of its parts. Learn more about the track record of these partners at the bottom of this page.
Innovative Approach
We promote social entrepreneurial principles in all of our endeavors, with clients we serve and in our own organization. We follow an innovative and sustainable business model that combines knowledge and best practices from several industries and includes both earned income and reliance on strategic partnerships. Indeed, the very creation of the Center, merging two complementary entities and including partners from diverse backgrounds, is indicative of our commitment to this approach.
University-Wide Collaboration
Unlike many comparable Centers across the country, the Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship is a university-wide Center not housed in any one department or school. This university-wide perspective allows us to infuse social entrepreneurship into the curriculum and practice of every department while engaging a large pool of students, faculty, and staff. Our unique positioning also allows for multidisciplinary research and programming, essential in the growing field of social entrepreneurship.
Mason’s Culture
George Mason University is an ideal home for the Center. Known for its emphasis on innovation, Mason was named in the top five national universities to watch by the U.S. News & World Report consecutively for the past three years. Mason’s commitment to innovation ensures sustainable high-level support for the Center, promising continuous growth and impact across the university and beyond.
Location
Our prime location in the National Capital Region, a hub of social innovation and world-class information technology, allows us to form and maintain crucial relationships with the business, social, and public sectors, providing daily access to the leaders and organizations that are changing the world. This unique collaboration allows our research and programming to be informed by and contribute to relevant, pressing social issues.
People
The Center is led and advised by individuals with expertise in numerous diverse fields, bringing a breadth of knowledge, talents, and experience that allows the Center to thrive in the cross-sector, multidisciplinary field of social entrepreneurship. See our staff, board, and advisors pages for more information.
About the Phoenix Project
The Phoenix Project, a not-for-profit corporation, tries to model the very social entrepreneurship principles we promote. Our initiatives, which include leadership and educational programs, conferences, service-learning technologies, consulting, and university-community partnerships are designed with transformational impact, scalability, and sustainability in mind. We prove the viability of our programs in Virginia, where we are headquartered, and then make them available for replication globally.
Phoenix is led by a team with substantial experience in the fields of leadership education, entrepreneurship, organizational development, and community revitalization, including staff and board members hailing from leadership positions in the nonprofit, public and private sectors and from academia.
Founded in 2006, the Phoenix Project has launched and led one of the nation’s premier efforts to prepare and engage university students as our next generation of citizen leaders and social entrepreneurs. Our accomplishments include:
Designed the curriculum and pedagogy of the Social Innovation Program, the nation’s first statewide social entrepreneurship education initiative now in its 6th year: an annual, six-week academic and experiential institute from which have graduated 5 classes of top students from dozens of universities.- Convened three annual Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship conferences attracting 600 cross-sector leaders, including governors, corporate CEOs, presidents, provosts, faculty, and students from 40 universities, to devise new strategies for preparing future social and civic entrepreneurs and scaling their transformative ideas. Co-convened with the Corporation for National and Community Service, the 2009 conference was held at The George Washington University and streamed via the web for participants worldwide.
- Launched groundbreaking university-community partnerships between twelve higher education institutions and three economically distressed communities; 700 faculty, staff, students, and alumni have completed 250 community-identified capacity building projects for more than 75 nonprofits and municipal agencies, contributing nearly $5 million in free labor.
- Partnered with Craigslist Foundation, TRUiST, and Learn & Serve America to design AVAIL - a next generation social media platform to engage university students and faculty in social-entrepreneurship focused service learning work for community agencies.
- Counseled five universities on the design and sustainability strategies for campus centers for social entrepreneurship and civic engagement, and public service.
- Led development efforts resulting in more than $6 million in cash and in-kind contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations.
Social Entrepreneurship at Mason
At the heart of our vision is the pursuit of innovative and entrepreneurial solutions to pressing challenges and social problems both at home and internationally. The Mason Center for Social Entrepreneurship fits well within a larger vision of entrepreneurship at the university that includes distinct programs in technology transfer and more traditional entrepreneurship pursuits. Within this vision, social entrepreneurship as a field of practice and an emerging area of scholarship has a distinct profile while overlapping with traditional entrepreneurship, philanthropy, nonprofit management, and service-learning. Our unique strengths include our ability to develop students through teaching and faculty research and contributing to knowledge-based solutions to social problems. Social entrepreneurship offers students exciting alternate career paths and frames faculty research and teaching in an applied way.
While several faculty at Mason have been working on issues of social entrepreneurship for a number of years, the current momentum for social entrepreneurship was accelerated in 2008 when Ashoka selected Mason through a competitive process as a Changemaker Campus because of its pioneering work in entrepreneurship and leadership for a changing world as well as the university’s commitment to enhancing the student learning experience. This partnership has aimed to advance high quality social entrepreneurship education programming at Mason, and to accelerate the university’s growth as a hub of social innovation. Sponsored by the Office of Research and Economic Development, New Century College, and the Center for Consciousness and Transformation, the Ashoka-Mason partnership has catalyzed significant curricular and co-curricular activities aimed at preparing Mason students for success in an increasingly competitive, interconnected, and globalized world.
The Mason Changemaker team, a group of faculty and students committed to infusing the George Mason University campus with a culture of social entrepreneurship, has focused its efforts both on building awareness about social entrepreneurship and catalyzing interdisciplinary curricular change across six areas of excellence: teaching, scholarship, applied learning, major events, community and culture. This commitment helped to catalyze the creation of a formal Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Mason. Select achievements below demonstrate the important history of social entrepreneurship at Mason:
- Jointly hosted Innovations Journal at George Mason University’s School of Public Policy along with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship.The journal is co-edited by Mason faculty member Philip Auerswald.
- Several books and journal articles written by Mason faculty. Please see the "Recent Publications" page for more details.
- Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index, created by Professor Zoltan Acs.
- Creation of several student organizations, such as Social Venture Consulting (SVC) Group, which provides high-impact learning opportunities for Mason students who provide pro bono consulting services to nonprofits providing services locally and globally. SVC is advised by Booz Allen Hamilton, Ashoka, and members of Mason’s faculty.
- Campus-wide panels, symposiums, move nights, and luncheons focused on social entrepreneurship. These events have celebrated and attracted some of the nation’s leading social entrepreneurs, such as Derek Ellerman of the Polaris Project.
- Mutually beneficial partnerships with several leading social entrepreneurship organizations headquartered in the National Capital Region, such as the Phoenix Project and Ashoka.
- Widespread support for social entrepreneurship in the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP)