Hiram College is partnering with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., to make entrepreneurship education a common and accessible campus-wide opportunity for college students. It’s part of the Foundation’s $35 million commitment to colleges and universities across the country, according to Thomas V. Chema, Hiram president.

As part of the Foundation’s Kauffman Campuses initiative, Hiram was among numerous colleges, universities or university systems invited to submit proposals outlining their plans to encourage entrepreneurship across their campuses. This initiative began in 2003 with $25 million in funding to eight schools that provided entrepreneurship education within liberal arts, engineering and other non-business programs. “The grant will allow us to proceed with planning to infuse entrepreneurship education across the curriculum, including the creation of an entrepreneurship minor,” Chema said.

The Burton D. Morgan Foundation of Hudson also is partnering with Hiram and the Kauffman Foundation, and matching funds with the Foundation to introduce a collegiate entrepreneurship program at Hiram and elsewhere in northeast Ohio. “In order to ensure that entrepreneurship maintains a lasting place in academia, we will continue to feed the flame of cross-campus entrepreneurship,” said Deborah D. Hoover, executive vice president and treasurer of the Morgan Foundation. “By collaborating on this Northeast Ohio Collegiate Entrepreneurship Program, our two foundations hope to strengthen this wave of activity that is central to the economic and social well-being of this country and our region.”

Other Ohio schools invited to submit proposals were: Baldwin-Wallace College, College of Wooster, John Carroll University, Denison University, Kenyon College, Lake Erie College, Oberlin College and Walsh University. The prospective Kauffman Campuses schools were selected based on a series of criteria, including the ability to generate a partnership with other foundations and funders, and the potential to create new representative models. “Our initiative is creating a cultural change and making the entire university system more entrepreneurial,” said Carl Schramm, chief executive officer of Kauffman. “We want all students, not just those in business schools, to see the value of thinking like entrepreneurs. We want them to be able to recognize and seize opportunity when it presents itself, no matter what field they find themselves in.”

Hiram College was given a planning grant to develop its proposal, which will be presented to an independent panel of judges in December. Each participating school is eligible to receive a grant if the judges determine its proposal is innovative and sustainable. The grant amount will be based on each school’s commitment to entrepreneurship education across all academic fields, its unique needs and the scope of its proposal.
“We’re looking forward to the presentations, and the subsequent programs that will come out of those proposals,” said Judith Cone, Kauffman Foundation vice president of entrepreneurship. “We know from our previous Kauffman Campuses that students benefit from learning to think entrepreneurially. It helps them see what’s possible when one thinks innovatively about combining their passion and resources to create opportunity.”

Visit Hiram College: www.hiram.edu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 1:57 am and is filed under College Grant, Education, Financial Aid, Scholarship. Tags: College, Education, Grant, Student. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.