Six Lenses of Social Entrepreneurship
Story
Seen, Valued, and Celebrated
Social impact leaders often emphasize how the stories they remember from childhood (of experiencing an injustice, observing an act of kindness, or facing a hard-to-solve problem) became a formational tool for making a lifetime of difference. We ensure our students receive early exposure to all forms of story—reading, telling, and listening. We challenge them with interactive platforms like StoryCorps and Better World Ed. We line our bookshelves with literature centered around social impact. Our Grandparents' Day Story Lab and alumni interviews connect us across generations. Together we're building the skills to be responsible storytellers and empathetic story listeners because we know story is the entry point to a deep, meaningful partnership.
Civics
Find Your People
Civics is about knowing what communities you're a part of and understanding how day-to-day participation shapes those communities. Here at the Scott Center, some dedicated middle school students along with a crew of dedicated lower school supporters find their roles as community changemakers through the Social Impact Lunch Club. During meetings, students have created pop-up stationery studio and sent cards to students returning to school after the California wildfires. We've counted the trees on campus and affixed "These Come From Trees" stickers to campus paper towel dispensers. As a club, we take action, and we also create a safe space for students to grapple with our core questions: What matters to you? What are you doing about it?
Finance
Your Money is a Vote
Talk about money can be difficult because it illuminates complexities around privilege, race, geography, and family. We believe because we live within a shared system of finance, all of us—regardless of age—should understand our life-long agency to shape that system and the way it assigns value locally and globally through social, economic, and cultural capital. For our JK-8th grade students, studying finance means making Kiva loans and interviewing B Corporations. It also means planning fundraisers, practicing "fair trade" style playground negotiations, and starting a financial literacy podcast series. As part of a design challenge in a 6th grade elective, students even created an original social capital currency called "Hillbucks" to assign value to the causes that matter most to us.
agency
Sustaining the Changemaker
Agency requires taking steps to address the local and global effects of your actions. When we took 14 students to the Island School in Cape Eleuthera, Bahamas, we brought both individual and community agency to life by observing the impact of people on the planet. We learned the practices of sustainability: everything from aquaponics to green architecture to two-minute cold showers! We delved into the field of ocean preservation research, examining the impact of tourism and the best fishing practices for invasive species. Some students were so moved by their experience that they began projects of their own, like a social media movement to save our seas or a proposal for Disney World: Blue, an experience focused on sustainability through play and imagination.
Design
Ideas into Impact
Designing for good is about finding specific, inventive ways to make people feel valued, respected, honored, and seen. We strive to transform ideas into actions by channeling the imaginations of our students and educators. More than 40 representatives from 15 different schools and organizations created original social impact curriculum prototypes when we hosted a half-day workshop at the Savannah College of Art and Design in partnership with the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation. Scott Center educators had a chance to design with people, planet, and our own students in mind! Several of these prototypes ended up in our Reach Beyond Block programming back on campus, including "Fashion for People and Planet", a course that explored fashion and ethical design.
Systems
Reshaping the World
Systems change means re-shaping social and environmental structures that perpetuate injustice. During the Reach Beyond Block course, Sports Beyond Borders, middle school students considered the question: How can the system of athletics be used as a tool for social change? To deepen our understanding, we visited the Power of Protest exhibit featuring Olympic protestors at San Jose State University. Later, students interviewed Hillbrook alumna, Aly Wagner, about being the first female broadcaster for the men's World Cup and her work as an equal pay advocate. They also presented about current events in which athletes used their status to challenge systemic biases. Lively class discussions intersected topics of race, gender, ethnicity, ability, and equity. The takeaway? As long as we make the systems in which we live and work, we all have a role in shaping them.