Going global for the greater good: Colorado college students are learning to become social entrepreneurs.

• Author: Clark, Cassi
• Position: PLANET-PROFIT REPORT

Ngyen Norbu, Matthew Martin, Carolyn Davidson and Jessica Rawlcy are learning how to start a company called Taka Energy that creates energy from waste and money from energy.

Norbu came to Colorado a year ago because he felt connected to Colorado State University's Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise master's program.

"I flew all the way from Bhutan to study this program, and I'm really glad that I got the opportunity," says Norbu, whose team now has a waste-energy business and feasibility plan to take back to Bhutan and nearby countries.

Norbu, Martin, Davidson and Rawley represent the new breed of students taking on the global problems of poverty, disease and environmental degradation. They call themselves social entrepreneurs, and the Colorado institutions they are graduating from are leading the way.

College students in Colorado are taking classes like Social Entrepreneurship and Microfinance at the University of Denver. Christina Couppis, a second-year International MBA student, went to the Republic of Georgia with the class to audit a microfinance institution funded by Deutsche Bank.

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"The best part was to see the microfinance institutions actually doing good things," she says.

Boston Nyer, the first Building Systems student within Civil Engineering in the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities at the University of Colorado, liked the Sustainable Community Development class because of the opportunity to interact with some social entrepreneur pioneers.

"You get to spend some time with Bernard Amadai (faculty director of the MC-EDC and founder of Engineers without Borders) and David Silver (international development consultant and assistant clinical professor at the CU School of Public Health), and they both have a lot of experience," Nyer says. "And it's nice to just work through problems around them. It helps you gain confidence in your approach and gives you some extra insight."

Students are graduating with concentrations in Social Entrepreneurship from DU, certificates in Socially Responsible Enterprise and Engineering for Developing Communities from CU, MBAs in Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise from Colorado State University, and minors in Humanitarian Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.

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"The draw for me is taking something that I love to learn about and love to do, and making it a good thing for other people as well," Couppis says.

The curriculum is not universal, but is drawn from course plans created individually by social entrepreneurs who have worked in developing communities and now teach at Colorado institutions.

"There's no formula for a program like this. What's happening is people are just learning as we go along," says Nyer, who will work part-time next year with the MC-EDC to continue heading up the Building Systems side of the program. "For example, the Sustainable...