This month, the
School for Social Entrepreneurs Ontario (SSE-O) is choosing 20 students who will join them for their very first nine-month fellowship program.
The 20 students will form the inaugural cohort for a new kind of Ontario school, one that favours "action learning" over classroom learning and whose application process favours "drive and values" over educational or career background. Once selected, the 20 SSE-O fellows will participate in a nine-month course that will help them build the resources and connections they need to get their social ventures off the ground.
Classes will be organized around particular themes, ranging from marketing to business planning to communications, and will be taught by experienced social entrepreneurs. Unlike traditional schools, class will only held once a week. The rest of the time, students will be engaging in something called "action learning," the crux of the SSE program.
"Action learning is about students taking real-world action, reflecting on their actions, and refining the course of action that they're going to take," says SSE-O director Marjorie Brans. "We're really pushing that they go out there and do something."
Located in the Regent Park neighbourhood, at 540 Dundas Street East, SSE-O celebrated its launch in late June, and will begin its first term this September. While the SSE is new to Canada, the model has a proven track-record around the world; the first SSE school was launched more than a 15 years ago in London, England. The model has since been replicated in SSE schoold in eight cities across the UK and four years ago was expanded to Melbourne and Sydney in Australia.
The Ontario location is the result of a collaboration between the
MaRS Discovery District,
Regent Park's Centre for Community Learning and Development,
ACCESS Community Capital and led by the
Housing Services Corp. The program is funded by a three-year $500,000 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Brans says that while the educational model may be transportable, the social ventures SSE-O students will pursue will be local and community-based.
"By the very nature of the solution seeker, this will reflect Ontario's reality. So, for example, we see there's a lot of talk about shootings and gang violence. We have a number of people who have applied to the school come from communities that have experienced gang violence and have ideas of how they want to address that."
"We know the model in general works. Here is Canada, the task will be to take what had already proven a robust model and apply it to a Canadian context.... Canada has a long history of social entrepreneurship. That's not new. I think what SSE-O adds to the mix, it lowers the barrier to entry for people who want to do this.... What SSE does is try to make [social entrepreneurship] an easier process for people who may not have all the connections and the societal stamp that says, 'Yes, this person is a legitimate solution-seeker and has all the right credentials,' and so we're going to support this person."
Writer: Katia Snukal
Source: Marjorie Brans, Director, SSE-O