Get Herald RSSBrown's Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations submitted a grant proposal Monday for a $2 million share of the $35 million the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is allocating to colleges over the next five years to encourage entrepreneurial education.
In June, the Kauffman Foundation, a nonprofit organization aimed at developing youth education and entrepreneurship, invited Brown, along with 16 other "entrepreneurial entities," including several colleges across the country, to submit grant proposals under its 2006 Kauffman Campuses Initiative, said Judith Cone, vice president of entrepreneurial initiatives for the foundation.
Cone said the initiative's primary aim is to "infuse entrepreneurial conversation throughout campuses by encouraging students to take action and be creative."
In 2003, the initiative's inaugural year, it awarded eight colleges a total of $25 million to develop their grant proposals, according to the Kauffman Foundation's Web site. This year, the Kauffman Foundation is extending a second round of proposal invitations to those schools that have developed entrepreneurial education on their campuses since 2003.
The University will present its grant proposal in December to an independent panel of judges, according to the Kauffman Foundation's Web site. The judges will evaluate the proposals based on the applicants' "abilities to create a culture of entrepreneurship that permeates the campus, to create new representative models, and to partner with other foundations and funders," according to a June 27 Kauffman Foundation press release.
Brown was invited to apply for the 2006 grant because "entrepreneurial spirit fits so well with Brown's culture," Cone said. "We're very excited that Brown is (participating) in this initiative."
The grant, however, would not just be a boon for Brown. The Kauffman Foundation considers its grant program to be a charitable investment. "We expect returns on those dollars," Cone said.
According to Cone, the foundation is not restricting individual grants to a certain size. She said there is not a set number of colleges that will receive grants, and the initiative is not meant to be a competition. Instead, the foundation will approve all grants that offer strong proposals.
"We're focusing on quality, not quantity," Cone said.
The aims of the proposal that Brown will present in December are three-fold, according to Mary Hanifin, Brown's associate director of corporate and foundation relations, who worked on the proposal. First, the proposal seeks to expand and enhance the University's entrepreneurship curriculum and extracurricular opportunities for entrepreneurship education. Second, it proposes to increase opportunities for research in support of entrepreneurial education. Lastly, it would create tools for teaching entrepreneurship.
Brown's Entrepreneurship Program would likely play a role in expanded extracurricular opportunities for entrepreneurial education. According to its Web site, EP's three-fold mission is to support entrepreneurial learning among students, enable and encourage students to create entrepreneurial ventures and create a close-knit entrepreneurial community of students, faculty and alums.
EP aims to achieve its mission by providing a place where students can translate their entrepreneurial studies - primarily relating to study in Brown's Commerce, Organizations, and Entrepreneurship concentration - into practice, said Robert Klaber '07, co-director of EP.
Members of EP, which was endowed with $100,000 by a Brown alum last year, hope the University will use some of the funding from the potential grant to further develop entrepreneurial classes and to expand EP's reach nationally, Klaber said. The latter initiative will entail networking with successful entrepreneurs from around the country and attracting financial assistance through individual and corporate sponsorship, he added.
Klaber pointed to Brown's recent development of the COE concentration as well as the strength of EP and an open curriculum as reasons the Kauffman Foundation chose the University as one of its potential grant recipients.
According to Dean of Engineering Gregory Crawford, who is the principal investigator of the Kauffman grant, the funding would foster collaborative entrepreneurship efforts among students, faculty and alums.
"Entrepreneurship research will be elevated to the forefront of the academic enterprise, and will create new and innovative opportunities, both curricular and practical, for students, faculty and alumni," Crawford wrote in an e-mail to The Herald.
