.png)
We believe that service-learning and community engagement are the foundation for successful study and research of social entrepreneurship for undergraduate students. Over the past five years, the Phoenix Project has developed expertise in fostering mutually beneficial partnerships between universities and communities. In Virginia, for example, the Phoenix Project, working in the communities of Petersburg, Southeast Newport News, and along the Route 1 Corridor in Fairfax County, has matched resources from dozens of universities with community-identified projects, contributing time and talent valued at more than $5 million to more than two hundred and fifty community organizations. In addition to these pro bono efforts, the Mason Center offers fee-for-service consulting through Social Innovation Professionals to universities throughout the region and nationally who seek to deepen and improve their engagement with communities. We have a particular expertise in leveraging these partnerships for the advancement of social entrepreneurship.
We focus on facilitating skills-based projects that employ innovative strategies for persistent organizational problems. Such projects have involved marketing, fundraising, program development and evaluation, research, legal compliance, volunteer recruitment, technology assistance, and strategic planning, among others. Community partners have included nonprofit organizations and municipal agencies working in areas of economic development, housing, literacy, public health, education, crime and public safety, the arts, and the environment, among many others.
Petersburg
In 2006, Phoenix set out to build a model university-community partnership that engaged a growing consortium of colleges and universities in social enterprise-driven economic and community development in the City of Petersburg. The aim of our Petersburg Partnership is to provide the community with a sustained infusion of capacity-building human and intellectual resources to address its critical challenges and opportunities and partner higher education institutions, their administrators, faculty, and students, with improved opportunities for teaching, research and service, with a particular emphasis on social entrepreneurship in the context of severe economic distress. Petersburg, a city of 33,000 residents, is arguably the most distressed community in the Virginia and among the most distressed in the nation. With one of the highest unemployment rates and lowest home ownership rates in Virginia, Petersburg struggles with a continuing loss of jobs and the widespread abandonment of houses. The city suffers Virginia’s highest rates of illiteracy, teen pregnancy, HIV infection, and also the highest high school drop-out rate. A recent study revealed that the life expectancy of children born in Petersburg is the eighth shortest of more than 3,300 municipalities in the U.S.
The Petersburg Partnership engages Virginia State University, an HBCU located just north of the City, and the College of William and Mary, located one hour east of the City, as anchor partners in a consortium of higher education institutions committed to economic development and social entrepreneurship in the City. Beginning in January 2006, Phoenix staff conducted a robust, nine-month long needs assessment of the City, interviewing more than 300 community leaders to determine their highest priorities for economic revitalization and identifying their hopes and concerns for university engagement. We conducted a pilot program with a dozen William and Mary students in the summer of 2006, completing more than 20 capacity-building projects for Petersburg nonprofits and municipal agencies while developing a social entrepreneurship-based curriculum to train the students as future innovators and the community organizations to think more dynamically about their own organizational goals.
Through our facilitation of university and community-based strategic planning processes, we identified three chief opportunities for engagement: attacking low home-ownership rates in the City and rampant vacant and blighted properties; redevelopment of Route 36, a key corridor linking the City with the rapidly expanding Fort Lee, a once-in-a-generation economic development opportunity; and expanding the civic capacity of the community by infusing local nonprofits with extra hands and minds from the university as well as tailored training in social entrepreneurship principles and practice. Over the past five years, more than 1,000 Virginia students, faculty, administrators and alumni have logged more than 50,000 hours of service to the Petersburg community, working with more than 80 nonprofits and municipal agencies to complete critical capacity-building projects. Working with our university partners, we have raised more than $2 million to support the partnership.
In addition to facilitating these projects year round in the City, Phoenix developed its Social Innovation Program as a centerpiece of the partnership. Students engaged in a pedagogy recognized by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as among the most effective in training future leaders during the academic session, and then they were deployed in teams as pro bono social entrepreneurship consultants to community organizations in Petersburg. Social Innovation Program students, supervised by Phoenix’s clinical faculty, have assisted nonprofits in creating new business plans, conducting needs assessments, evaluating business development opportunities, and forging new partnerships. The Social Innovation Program has become the Virginia social sector’s pipeline for talented young leaders. Graduates emerge prepared to apply entrepreneurial approaches to civic challenges, through nonprofit, public, or private-sector organizations. Students report increases of 67-313% in knowledge and efficacy in 25 key measures of organizational leadership and social entrepreneurship.
Both the College of William and Mary and Virginia State University have institutionalized their engagement in permanent efforts focused on capacity-building and innovation. William and Mary has developed academic courses that focus on the community, fostered a student organization that plans regular engagement opportunities (including alternative spring breaks) in Petersburg, and has made the entrepreneurial engagement in Petersburg a hallmark of the institution. Virginia State University has, with guidance from Phoenix, reinvigorated a long-dormant and sometimes frosty working relationship with city leaders, created a new community development corporation that is focused on rehabilitating housing in the city, deployed its faculty to lead a consortium of youth-focused programs, and a host of other efforts that are making a real impact on both the city and the university community.
Southeast Newport News
Christopher Newport University (CNU) contracted the Phoenix Project to build the foundation of a vibrant partnership with the economically distressed Southeast Newport News community in late 2007. Southeast Newport News is in severe social and economic distress. More than 50 percent of Southeast adults live below the poverty level, which is almost twice the number in the rest of the city. Twenty-five percent of adults age twenty-five or older in Southeast do not have a high-school diploma, compared with sixteen percent citywide. Southeast residents also suffer severe health complications, with more cases of cancer, diabetes, asthma, heart diseases or strokes than residents of almost any other part of the state. Poor diets, exercise, alcohol and tobacco use spur some of the problems, but severe infrastructure problems also aggravate the situation. The City of Newport News is one of the largest coal hubs in the world and large amounts of soot enter the air. The local sewer system has been known to break down during heavy rains and high tides, causing raw sewage to leak out into the streets and periodically shut down Southeast pumping stations. Residents are largely uninsured, and the area contains only a fragmented low-income medical network. CNU engaged Phoenix to conduct a community needs assessment, identify opportunities for partnership, and advise the university in creating a new center focused on service-learning and social entrepreneurship.
Over a period of fourteen months, Phoenix staff identified and interviewed key community leaders, trained university faculty, students and administrators to engage in a respectful and mutually beneficial manner with community residents, and formed and institutionalized community and university steering committees for the partnership. Among the first projects facilitated by the partnership was the founding of a new health clinic in Southeast to address the myriad health challenges faced by residents. We also assisted faculty in launching the new Center for Service Learning and Social Entrepreneurship at CNU that now serves as a dynamic hub for campus community engagement and social entrepreneurship, and a resource for community partners seeking more innovative solutions.
Route 1
George Mason University contracted with Phoenix to develop a sustainable and mutually beneficial relationship between the university and distressed communities along the Route 1 corridor in Northern Virginia and to catalyze corporate and social investment in nonprofit agencies serving Fairfax County, where Route 1 is located. Though known nationally for its prosperity, Northern Virginia is not without communities of significant distress, many of which are located along this corridor. It is estimated that one in every eight children in Fairfax County lives in poverty and most of them along Route 1.
Beginning in late 2007, Phoenix staff conducted a needs assessment of the Route 1 corridor, interviewing community stakeholders, researching available data and identifying opportunities for engagement, which included increasing affordable housing, public transportation accessibility, and youth services. Phoenix then identified and engaged faculty and administrators in developing projects that were mutually beneficial to the community and the research agenda of the university. In an extension of the partnership’s activities, in 2008 Phoenix sought out the County of Fairfax as a chief partner and worked with County staff and university faculty to facilitate a strategic planning process for increasing philanthropy in the region, particularly in the wake of the United Way National Capital Region’s diminished capacity following a money mismanagement scandal. Phoenix’s engagement with George Mason University has been an impetus for the creation of the university-wide Center for Social Entrepreneurship.
Morven
The University of Virginia Foundation has contracted with the Center’s Senior Advisor, Marion Werkheiser, to conduct a needs assessment, market and feasibility study, and development plan and to outline a strategic plan. The Foundation was gifted a 7,000 acre property called Morven which adjoins Jefferson’s Monticello with the understanding that University students, faculty and staff would be engaged to make the property a place for entrepreneurial work that improved the world. Ms. Werkheiser was engaged to help inventory and then evaluate the many strategies suggested for meeting this charge, and when the list of strategies was narrowed, was engaged to evaluate the marketplace comprised of comparable venues. Now she is assisting key stakeholders at the University with identifying development prospects and strategies so that their best ideas can be funded and sustained.