KINGSTON, New York,
April 16, 2019 /PRNewswire/
-- GCSEN, The Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship
Network (GCSEN Foundation) recently had two of its program alumni,
Ms. Gyana Srivastava and Ms.
Khadeedja Muheto, both of Wheaton College,
Norton MA, participate in the prestigious Draper Competition
for Collegiate Women Entrepreneurs held at Smith College, Northampton MA. GCSEN is dedicated to
spreading the ideas and practice of Social Entrepreneurship to
higher education students and adult learners across the world. The
organization's credo is to "Make Meaning, Make Money, and Move the
World to a Better Place" via Social Entrepreneurship education and
empowerment, and its Social Venture Experience offerings.
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The annual Draper Competition at Smith College is designed to hone the skills that
undergraduate women need, to advance through the process from
venture idea to creation. Through three rounds of tough
competition, students demonstrate an understanding of a business or
social problem, why the problem requires a new venture to address
it, how their idea presents the best solution to the problem, and
what resources, partnerships and activities it would take to
successfully launch the venture. This year over 1000 women from
forty-eight Draper Schools, including Wheaton
College and Vassar College,
applied to participate, with over $100,000 in cash and scholarships awarded to the
winning competitors.
Ms. Gyana Srivastava,
Wheaton College (2021) entered into the
competition's Social Impact Track and reached the Top 75
Competitor's Tier in the overall competition. Her venture, entitled
Gurukul Dance, is an initiative designed to create a dance company
for special needs children in India. An economics and psychology major, she
participated in GCSEN's Social Entrepreneurship Bootcamp at Wheaton
in January 2019. In 2017, Ms.
Srivastava was awarded Wheaton
College's "Next Genius" Scholarship. A student from The
Cathedral and John Connon School in
Mumbai, she was selected from a
pool of 6,000 Indian high school applicants for the full
scholarship. Ms. Srivastava said, "GCSEN gave me the
confidence I needed to think out my idea and turn it into a
professional level pitch deck. The Draper Competition at
Smith College was exciting, and my
social venture is now ready to be actualized in India this summer. It took a lot of work but
was well worth the effort. I really believe in Gurukul and now have
the tools I need to actualize it. Thank you GCSEN!"
Ms. Khadeedja Muheto attended GCSEN's Social Entrepreneurship
Bootcamp at Wheaton College in
January 2018 as a GCSEN intern.
There, she was introduced to the core concepts of 4P social
ventures for People, Planet, Profit and Place. A double major in
math and economics, she graduated from Wheaton
College in 2018 and is currently the College's Coordinator
of Entrepreneurship Programs, WiN Hub and High School Enrichment
Activities. Ms. Muheto acted as mentor
for Ms. Srivastava's Gurukul Dance venture in the
competition. Ms. Muheteo said, "GCSEN was the catalyst that gave me
the confidence to move into the world of social entrepreneurship.
I'm now working for Wheaton College in
our WiN Hub Social Entrepreneurship office. I mentored Gyana's
social venture through the Draper Competition and the feedback we
got from the other competitors and the judges was fantastic!"
The WiN Hub at Wheaton was created in collaboration
with the Diana Davis Spencer '60 Foundation, to introduce the
transformative force of social entrepreneurship to the Wheaton
community. Through programming, events and workshops, students gain
the confidence and competence to follow their passions and launch
their own social enterprises. Under Wheaton's WiN Hub is its Social
Venture Launch Program, which includes GCSEN's Social Venture Boot
Camp experience.
GCSEN Founder & President Mike
Caslin said, "We are ecstatic that participants in our
Social Venture Bootcamps did so well at the Draper Competition.
GCSEN is at the cutting edge of Social Entrepreneurship research,
education and leadership. We saw how hard Ms. Muheto and Ms.
Srivastava worked on this social venture presentation, which will
become a viable business someday. Every campus and business can
benefit from learning what GCSEN has tested and proven.
Participants in our programs consistently rate it as a
life-changing experience, with significant knowledge gains and
ten-time increases in business formulation rates. The positive
ripple effects our programs have on individuals and on campuses has
been dramatic, and we continue to build on our successes."
Since 2015, GCSEN has developed and rolled out a series of
innovative Social Entrepreneurship Experience (SVE) offerings
including its highly regarded Boot Camps for college students and
adult learners, and its on-line blended learning courses with live
coaching, SE 101 & SE 102. These courses earn successful
participants college accreditation and GCSEN's SVE Certification,
as well as access to GCSEN's life-long on-line support community.
The courses have been taught at Wheaton
College, SUNY New Paltz,
Vassar College and Saint Peter's
University (Jersey City) and are
currently under discussion for implementation at other
campuses.
The organization has recently accelerated its offerings by
initiating an intensive "prac-acdemic" two-day Fellowship
experience specifically designed for college faculty, key
administrators and business leaders. Called the Social Venture
Research Institute (SVRI) program, it features innovative learning
experiences using new methodology in collaboration with best
practices, fostering the growth of "4P" Social Entrepreneurship,
for People, Planet, Profit and Place. The goal is to enable
enrollees to be prepared and inspired to train the next generation
of Social Entrepreneurs across the globe.
GCSEN Founder & President Mike
Caslin is an internationally recognized thought leader of
Social Entrepreneurship, currently lecturing at SUNY New Paltz
Business School (NY), and St. Peter's University Business School
(Jersey City, NJ). He is a past
faculty member of Babson College,
CUNY-Baruch College Zicklin School of
Business, Marist College School of
Business and Manhattanville College. He
has spent the last three decades studying, lecturing and
facilitating efforts to promote social entrepreneurship on a global
scale. GCSEN's leadership and influence in the field of Social
Entrepreneurship in Higher Education continues to build, as seen in
its support of Wheaton College's
successful effort in 2017 to create enhanced social entrepreneur
programming, facilitated by a grant of $10M from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation of
Bethesda, MD.
Caslin is a graduate of Babson
College's prestigious Fast-Track MBA Program at the Olin
Graduate School, considered one of the top-ten in the world. The
Founder and President of GCSEN Foundation, he was co-founder and
CEO of NFTE (Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship) from 1988-2008.
Caslin has been a featured lecturer at the Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School
of Business, Dartmouth Tuck School of Business, Columbia Univ.
Business School Eugene Lang Center for Entrepreneurship, the
International Association of Jesuit Business Schools Conferences,
and The Fund for American Studies events, where he inspires college
students annually from over seventy different campuses.
Mike Caslin has also been a Subject
Matter Expert Witness for the United Nations, the U.S. Congress and
The White House. The GCSEN Foundation is an IRS-approved 501(c-3)
not-for-profit organization, accelerating social entrepreneurship
around the world.
For more information about GCSEN, or for an interview with
Mike Caslin,
call 212-444-2071;
e-mail mike@gcsen.com & visit www.gcsen.com
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