BC Students Compete in $1 Million Social Enterprise Comp.
A team of graduate students from Boston College joined together for the annual Hult Prize Foundation $1 Million Social Enterprise Competition. Five BC students from the Carroll School of Management, the Lynch School of Education, and the School of Social Work worked together to compete for the prize. The competition works to identify and launch the most compelling social business ideas to tackle serious social issues that affect millions of people.
The BC team competed in five cities around the world for a chance to secure $1 million in start-up funding to launch a sustainable social venture. The team created the idea of a low-cost, scalable solution to distribute cloth tote bags, which they named DialogBag, combined with community-based training sessions. The DialogBag would double as a play mat to be used for educational games that promote the necessary and essential adult-child interactions.
The Hult Prize Foundation $1 Million Social Enterprise Competition is sponsored by the Clinton Global Initiative. The competition begins with the regional finals. During the regional finals, 300 teams pitching their ideas in Boston and four other cities around the world. The second phase of the competition is the Hult Prize Accelerator. During this phase, six regional finalist teams attend a six-week program of intensive entrepreneurial seminars hosted by Hult International Business School.
After the Hult Prize Accelerator, winning teams present their ideas during the Global Finals, held during the Clinton Global Innitiative’s annual meeting. Those in attendance at the meeting will choose the winner of the $1 million prize. CGI will start working with the winning team immediately to implement their social initiative plan.
Unfortunately, the BC team did not advance past the regional finals but the team said that the experience was awesome and rewarding. ““No one on our team had ever done anything like that. It was very rewarding for us to go through the process together and address the challenge with a grassroots approach, instead of a top-down policy approach,” team leader Dana Loatman said.
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Erin Purcell
Staff Writer, covering MetroMBA's news beat for New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
