F
or nearly 40 years, the Coleman Foundation has supported the growth of post-secondary entrepreneurship education through a number of grant streams. Over ten years the Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows Program helped entrepreneurship professors in business schools work with faculty in other departments to address this need.
The following report describes the goals of the Coleman Foundation for the Fellows Program, how the Program was brought it to life, its development, and some of the most important lessons from its ten years of activity.
Letter from the President and CEO
Created by two successful entrepreneurs, the Coleman Foundation
has made entrepreneurship education a central focus of its
grantmaking since 1981. Coleman Foundation resources have
anchored entrepreneurship teaching in many U.S. universities and
colleges. Our most recent initiative, the Coleman Foundation Faculty
Entrepreneurship Fellows Program, is the subject of this report.
Post-secondary Entrepreneurship Education
The Fellows Program leaves two main
legacies:
- multidisciplinary faculty from 33 colleges and universities who have embedded the teaching of entrepreneurship skills and knowledge in their coursework; and
- tens of thousands of students who have learned about entrepreneurship as a possibility for themselves and acquired skills that can help them respond to opportunities.
Fertile Earth: Entrepreneurship Education Groundwork
The hub of entrepreneurship education
on campuses is the business school and,
more recently, the entrepreneurship center.
Students who don’t think of themselves as
business people or entrepreneurs may never
set foot in either. Even those who recognize
that an introduction to entrepreneurship
would be valuable often find it difficult
to make time for such electives without
extending their studies beyond four years.
Building Community: Coffee With Colleagues
The Coleman
Foundation Entrepreneurship Community of
Practice (and informally “the Coffee Cup”). The
Coffee Cup included a handful of ingredients:
face-to-face and web-enabled meetings, a
website, and support for external professional
development for Fellows.
Students: The Real Test
As Program Coordinator Joe Roberts
discovered, students were eager for the
learning opportunities provided by Project
Directors and Fellows. “Listen, it’s not
about us,” he said. “It’s about the success
of students. The students were already
thinking about entrepreneurship. We were
talking about doing this and doing that. The
students were saying, ‘Hey, guys, whether
you do it or not, I’m already there.’”
Program Ends: Infusion of Modules Method for Education Thrives
Early in 2018, the Coleman Foundation
announced that it would sunset the
Entrepreneurship Fellows Program in the
2018-2019 academic year. The decision was
based on the Foundation’s sense that the
Program’s original goals had been achieved,
as well as the desire of Board members to
explore supporting local, community-based
programs.
Program Assessment
Measuring the impact of any foundation grant
tends to be challenging for a host of real-world
reasons. For the Fellows program, one major
impediment was pointed out by the Program
Coordinator: “There is no proven method to test
entrepreneurship [education].
Foundation Resources
The Coleman Foundation is proud of its lean approach to funding the Program, and hoped that the
relatively low annual cost of the Program would help make it possible for Project Directors to replenish
their budgets from other sources. Over ten years, the Foundation invested $4.7 million in the Coleman
Fellows Program.
Lessons Learned and Recommendations
Early in 2018, the Coleman Foundation
announced that it would sunset the
Entrepreneurship Fellows Program in the
2018-2019 academic year. The decision was
based on the Foundation’s sense that the
Program’s original goals had been achieved,
as well as the desire of Board members to
explore supporting local, community-based
programs.