Social Impact Entrepreneurship Meets Mass Incarceration

Catalog description

This course is an integral part of the Penn Restorative Entrepreneurship Program (PREP )https://www.sp2.upenn.edu/research/special-projects/prep/ and will offer a group of previously incarcerated people intensive training on developing a new business. Students from SP2, Wharton, and Penn Law, and others will work with returning citizens on teams throughout the semester which will learn to craft a viable business plan while also engaging in critical analysis of the limits of social impact entrepreneurship in addressing longstanding social problems such as mass incarceration. In the final meeting, the teams will make pitches to a panel of angel investors who are recruited to provide additional supports to the most promising proposals. This ABCS (Academically-Based Community Service) course aims to not only play an important role in reducing recidivism but to also enable Penn students the opportunity to connect with members of our broader community and engage in meaningful social change in a cross-disciplinary setting where the expectation is that all of us has something to learn from and to teach to everyone else.