Laurel Centre for Social Entrepreneurship

This article originally appeared in the Daily Bulletin, University of Waterloo
– January 25, 2008

‘Social entrepreneurship’ centre opens

A student-led group to be called the Laurel Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, founded after last fall’s Waterloo Conference on Social Entrepreneurship, will offer its first public program next week with the launch of a public lecture series.

 

Laurel will present a January 31 talk by Paul Born (above left), founder and director of Tamarack, an institute for community engagement. He’ll speak at 4:30 that day in Arts Lecture Hall room 116.

 

Suzanne Gardner, who graduated with an arts degree last year, is communications coordinator for the new centre. She says the lectures, which are all open to the public and free of charge, “will bring innovators in entrepreneurship and social change to the enjoyment and education of the local community”.

 

Born’s lecture next Thursday, titled “Fewer Poor, Not Better Poor,” will focus on the cases of social entrepreneurs working to end poverty. Born’s work, says Gardner, was influenced by his own life, as he and his family came to Canada as refugees when he was a child. Since that time, he served as a leader in the creation of Poverty 2000, a Canadian anti-poverty program recognized as one of the 40 best practices by the United Nations, which was later turned into the national campaign of Vibrant Communities Canada.

 

More background: “The Vibrant Communities program, one of Tamarack’s current major projects, works toward vibrant and engaged communities across Canada by inspiring citizens to work together in order to solve major community challenges. The program tests ideas about community building, poverty reduction, collaboration and engagement, and generates knowledge based on what works best in the 15 cities across Canada currently participating in the program, including Edmonton, Montréal, St. John’s, and Waterloo. Born, a founder of the Vibrant Communities program, will be speaking on the program’s successes and challenges.”

 

The Laurel Centre for Social Entrepreneurship was founded “in late 2007”, Gardner says, after the success of the Waterloo Conference on Social Entrepreneurship. That event in November saw more than 200 people come together from around the world “to collaborate on the bridging of the passion for social change together with a business-minded discipline”. (Pictured: Paul Born speaking during that conference.)

Laurel’s leadership team — including chair Andrew Dilts, a graduate student in management sciences — is organizing several other initiatives for later this year, including a mentorship program, a social entrepreneurship “bootcamp”, a research conference, and a second annual conference.

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