DAILY LOBO new mexico
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tuesday February 26, 2013
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
Students to go abroad, help start local businesses by John Tyczkowski news@dailylobo.com
UNM students now have the chance to make a difference in the economies of countries throughout Latin America and Africa. UNM is the first university in the Southwest to join a social enterprise group consisting of 11 universities nationwide, including Notre Dame, Georgetown and the University of Connecticut.
On Monday afternoon, UNM was inducted into the Social Entrepreneur Corps. The group offers students internships in countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru and South Africa where they jumpstart economies at the micro level. They do this by providing several services, including business plans, startup investment and local artisan support. “The internships are for all majors and interested students, not just business students,” said
Mark Grace / Daily Lobo Greg Van Kirk listens to Ahdina Zunkel, director of artist development for the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. Van Kirk is the co-founder of the Social Entrepreneur Corps, a group that organizes internships worldwide in which students to lend expertise to local businesses.
Felipe Acosta, vice chair of International Business Students Global, the UNM organization that sponsored the induction. “It’s for whoever wants to get actively involved with the development of these countries’ communities.” Manuel Montoya, the faculty adviser for IBSG, said the students’ experiences in those countries can directly benefit New Mexico. “It’s important to have a series of programs that allow students to go all around the world and do social business programs in other countries and bring that back here,” Montoya said. Montoya also said that the Social Entrepreneur Corps is a good fit for what he called UNM’s “hungry” business students. “It takes a certain type of student to go to Kenya and to want to take a man selling seeds from a wheelbarrow and turn that into a 5-milliondollar business,” he said. Provost Chaouki Abdallah, Anderson School of Management Dean Doug Brown, Social Entrepreneur Corps co-founder Greg Van Kirk and Acosta signed a memorandum of understanding to solidify the partnership between IBSG and the Social Entrepreneur Corps and to formally induct UNM into the organization. Afterward, Van Kirk spoke about his personal experiences with social entrepreneurship. In the early 2000s, Van Kirk spent five years in a small village in Guatemala with the Peace Corps, where he helped establish a rural Internet center and provided small loans to local borrowers with no credit. Van Kirk said he became interested in social entrepreneurship when he created a local business, grew it, then gave it back to the locals and used the proceeds to fund local development programs. “I decided to start up a restaurant in the village, even though I knew nothing about
restaurants,” Van Kirk said. “The restaurant would eventually be turned over to local leadership, and profits would be donated to local projects.” Van Kirk went on to pioneer the MicroConsignment Model in which an outside investor, such as the Social Entrepreneur Corps, assumes the initial financial risk to help a local entrepreneur set up a business in a relatively uncertain market. “It’s about engaging the local people to solve their own problems and taking an empathetic approach to problem solving,” Van Kirk said. “Being directly involved with the communities is where the real value of social entrepreneurship is going to come from.” Business administration major Jill Loniewski said that hearing Van Kirk speak made her want internship with the organization. “I think they’re giving students an amazing chance with this program. It’s not just the normal study abroad anymore,” Loniewski said. “It’s all about empowering people, like putting a seed in the ground and watching it grow.” Acosta said that though it took a lot of work to create IBSG and to petition the Social Entrepreneur Corps for membership, it was worth it. “It all really pays off when you actually get students to go and do meaningful work in other countries,” Acosta said.
Social Entrepreneur Corps internship informational meeting
Thursday at 5 p.m. Jackson Student Center in the Anderson School of Management Email Roxanne Blair at rmcblair@unm.edu for more information
‘People want to volunteer’
UNM hosts national service learning conference by Ardee Napolitano news@dailylobo.com
The IMPACT Conference, a national student conference focused on community service learning, visited the Western U.S. for the first time in 22 years last Thursday. Community Engagement Center intern Jason Fuller said about 550 students from universities nationwide attended the event. He said the conference has focused mainly on the East Coast in previous years, and that this year’s event brings the focus back to community service approaches in the West. “This is an opportunity for the West to actually regain the spotlight in terms of that which we do here in New Mexico and to show everyone what’s really being done everywhere,” he said. “The state of New Mexico has so much more to offer and we have many methods that are foreign to outsiders who are advocates of community service.” Fuller said the conference was helpful not only to students who came from out of state, but also to UNM’s service learning efforts, which are focused on community gardens throughout the city. He said the center gave and received ideas
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from conference attendees on how to improve the project. This backand-forth culminated in a plan to add 10 gardens throughout the city. Fuller said the center maintains 30 community gardens throughout Albuquerque. He said the gardens, which were first opened in the summer of 2010, aim to decrease hunger in New Mexico. “New Mexico is ranked as one of the hungriest states in the U.S.,” he said. “The poverty rate here in New Mexico is one of the worst in the states.” Fuller said the University started to address service learning two years ago by offering community service courses during the spring and summer semesters. He said that although the Community Engagement Center often organizes service learning, other departments, such as the communication and journalism department and environmental studies collaborate with the center. Stewart Bova, a Virginia Commonwealth University student who attended the conference, said UNM is doing a good job in terms of service learning. He said service learning is an effective way to help impoverished communities. “People want to volunteer, but if you just do random acts of kindness, it doesn’t really do much,” he said. “But if you create a mutually ben-
Rachel Toraño-Mark / Daily Lobo About 550 students from colleges all over the U.S. gathered at UNM to discuss service learning at the 29th annual IMPACT Conference. The conference, held Thursday through Sunday, hasn’t come to the western United States for 22 years. eficial partnership, we learn from them and they can learn from us.” Fuller said that although UNM is already committed to service learning, he urges the University to establish a major and a minor in community service learning connected to UNM’s ethnic studies program because he said the problems that service learning deals with are often connected to issues of race. Fuller said improving service
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learning at UNM will make Albuquerque a better community. “Once you are able to see individuals eye to eye on many issues, it allows us to treat people like people,” he said. “It allows us to see people for who they are and that everyone is really not that different.” Although various community service organizations helped to organize the event, which ran Thursday through Sunday, UNM’s Community Engagement Center
led the effort. The center started organizing the event last year. Fuller said the conference demonstrated to other universities that UNM is committed to service learning. “It puts the University of New Mexico on a platform,” he said. “On Thursday, it was snowing but we still had our community service events. They were all just blown away by that.”
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