Curt DeBerg

Recent Activity

• 

  Curt signed the petition | over 1 year ago

  End Youth Unemployment With Web Social Entrepreneurship
• 

  Curt commented on the article | over 3 years ago

  Barack Obama and the American Spirit of Social Entrepreneurship

  Hello, All:
  
  One way to achieve the "scale" we need is to help create a new generation of entrepreneurial leaders whose innovations and social enterprises address our world’s major unmet needs. The “social entrepreneurship attitude” can be taught, and it starts in the public school system. How do I know? I have created a program called SAGE-Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship-that provides high school and university students with a platform on which to create social enterprises (see http://sageglobal.org/). To see where Obama stands on this, I encourage to read the transcript from the recent ServiceNation Presidential Forum at Columbia University, where both candidates answered questions posed by Judy Woodruff. One of Woodruff's questions: “Young people who are interested in the Peace Corps, Teach for America, not all of them can afford, frankly, to come out of school and take a very low-paying job, no matter how much they want to serve. What would be the responsibility of the government and others to make it easier?”
  
  Obama replied, “Well, first of all, I think Senator McCain is right, that income does not determine whether or not people serve. You can go into small rural towns and people are really scraping by, and yet they are helping each other in all sorts of ways. But what I agree is that the choices that we provide young people right now are too constrained. You know, when I graduated from Columbia, I had a choice. I could pursue a lucrative career on Wall Street or go immediately to law school, or I could follow through on the inspiration that I had drawn from the civil rights movement and from the Kennedy era, and try to work in the community. And I chose the latter, but it was tough. I made $12,000 a year plus car expenses in Chicago, working with churches, to set up job training programs for the unemployed and after-school programs for youth, trying to make the community better. It was the best education I ever had. But ironically, it was harder for me to find that job than it was for me to find a job on Wall Street. And I think there are a lot of young people out there who are interested in making that same choice, and we should be encouraging them. The government’s going to have a role. Look, young people can’t afford college right now. And one of my central platforms in this campaign is we’re going to provide a $4,000 tuition credit every student, every year, but in exchange for giving something back. And so, young people of modest means, who are interested in going to college, this gives them an opportunity to serve and at the same time, pay for their college education. I think there are a lot of creative ways where we can provide opportunities than exist right now.” One creative way is for every university student to give back to their alma mater high school, by helping the high school student TEAMS create, deliver and assess their social enterprises. At the end of the year, the teams must describe their stories to a panel of external judges from the business and civic communities. Also, maybe if we can INTEGRATE service into the curriculum, instead of waiting until after high school or college, we could help Obama create the kind of sweeping change in attitudes that he hopes for.