The Academies for Social Entrepreneurship is a project of Social & Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE), a foundation dedicated to providing resources and support services for projects that address social justice and environmental issues.  To read more about SEE and the foundation's mission, we invite you to visit their website at www.saveourplanet.org.

ASE promotes the development of social enterprises, business ventures which address social problems. Social enterprises are more-than-profit businesses that use blended-value models to create a revenue-generating business with a social-value generating element. 

Although our work to date has been focused on not-for-profit organizations, including churches, our programs are designed to serve a broad range of social entrepreneurs.

 

Our core program is the Social Enterprise Academy, which provides training and mentoring, as well as the opportunity to compete in a venture competition.  Since ASE began, working with a variety of strategic partners, ASE has produced over two thirty-two Social Enterprise Academies. The unique program has expanded capacity for over 300 social entrepreneurs, generating over $10 million dollars in new investment and earned income streams.  In post-program evaluation reports, 65% of the participants generated new revenue within a year of participating and 94% said that their participation in the Academy had a valuable and significant impact on the way that they manage their business. 

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A Social Enterprise Academy nurtures entrepreneurship and innovation with cohorts of not-for-profit organizations. Taking place over three to six months, the goals are three-fold:

1. Enable not-for-profit organizations to develop the skill sets and resources that will enable them to attract growth capital and increase revenue from earned, rather than donated, income.

2. Build overall organizational capacity. (Academies enable not-for-profit organizations to improve organizational performance by applying business practices and analytical thinking to their every day operations).

3. Create community-based change in the broader local not-for-profit marketplace by promoting convergence between the best practices of business and philanthropy.