Business Skills for Do-Gooders
Robert Lucas holds one of the new Harvard fellowships for social entrepreneurs funded recently by a $10 million grant from the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation. Lucas got his B.A. at Harvard in 2003 and spent two years as a sixth grade teacher in North Carolina. Now he’s back for a masters, working on a business plan for a Web site for teachers nationwide to share lesson plans. He envisions a site that will be easy for any teacher to add content to—similar to how the online encyclopedia Wikipedia operates.
“The idea came from my frustration that I wasn’t able to build on the best work that other teachers had done,” Lucas told NRTA Live & Learn. His initial experiment to facilitate online sharing among teachers helped him qualify for the new Harvard program, which includes special business classes on top of his education courses. He plans to launch a more robust and professional site for teachers in September 2006 under the rubric “Great lessons change lives.”
“I’m not pursing my project as a for-profit,” Lucas says, “but we are looking for ways that we can have earned revenue sources, so that if a grant runs out we won’t have to fold the site.” He sees the mix of commercial and nonprofit work as the essence of social entrepreneurship—and as, simply, pragmatic. “It enables us to do whatever we want to do in the world.”
That’s exactly the lesson the entrepreneur Catherine B. Reynolds hopes to teach a generation of young people who want to do good.
About the Author
Leslie Brokaw writes for the Boston Globe and many national magazines.
This article originally appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Spring 2006.
