The mission of the Penn Social Entrepreneurship Initiative is to make Penn a leading educator in social enterprise by improving its academic and career offerings in the sector at the University of Pennsylvania. It was launched in 2008 as a University-wide Initiative, and aims to achieve its goal through a three-pronged effort:

1) Penn Social Entrepreneurship Mentoring (SEM) Program

The flagship Program of the Penn Social Entrepreneurship Initiative attaches Penn students over the summer months to successful social entrepreneurs who have had the experience of founding and leading social enterprises. The Penn SEM Program is differentiated from standard summer internships  because it offers students the opportunity to be mentored directly by a successful social entrepreneur leading one of our partner organizations.

2) Penn Social Entrepreneurship Speaker Series

The Penn Social Entrepreneurship Speaker Series will bring in top leaders in the field of Social Entrepreneurship to share their experiences in starting and leading successful social enterprises with Penn students.

The Speaker Series will be held every Fall and Spring semester and draw upon a critical mass of students that is deeply interested in social impact sector.

It will complement the Penn SEM Program well by offering students a consistent opportunity to interact with successful Social Entrepreneurs over the course of the semester. PennSEM aims to bring in 3 speakers per semester, and “headline” each Speaker Series with the participation of a top-tier social enterprise. For 2009, our “headline” social enterprise will be The Grameen Foundation, whose CEO Mr. Alex Counts will speak at Penn. In future years, potential “headline” organizations include Ashoka, The Skoll Foundation and The Schwab Foundation.

3) Collaboration with Social Enterprises to enhance Penn’s academic capabilities

This component of our program will foster collaboration between Penn faculty with research and teaching interests in Social Entrepreneurship, and successful Social Entrepreneurs with practical experience in the field.

Participants could perform research together with Penn faculty and co-publish concerning Social Entrepreneurship to enhance Penn's and Wharton's knowledge generation capibilities in the field of social entrepreneurship while helping our partner social enterprises gain more visibility and credibility.

In addition, our partner social entrepreneurs could be brought in for guest lectures during faculty's classes, which would provide excellent networking opportunities for students interested in moving into the social enterprise sector, and allow them to see how concepts they learn in class are applied in the real world.

Furthermore, Penn’s faculty could draw on their interactions with our partner social entrepreneurs to design more relevant courses in the fields of social entrepreneurship and sustainable development that could would tie in perfectly with Penn’s existing initiatives to grow academic offerings in the sectors, like the College’s new International Development Minor and Wharton’s upcoming concentration in Non-Profit Leadership.