Back to School: Social Entrepreneurship at University of Texas

My partner Courtney Morris and I are enrolled in a social innovations course at the University of Texas, offered through the LBJ School of Public Policy and sponsored by the RGK Institute for Philanthropy and Public Affairs. We're two weeks deep and the class is giving me a lot of critical insight into the development of Passport:ATX and the nonprofit world in general, which is quite a bit different from the music/entertainment industry that I've been navigating for the past twelve years.


There are about 17 students in the class, all with some great ideas and serious motivation. The class is taught by seasoned pros and the readings are very good. I especially like the case studies that we've been reading. Last week we compared two non-profits: the WEF (World Economic Forum) and the Aravind Eye Institute.

This week, we focused on the idea of a mission, and drafting the mission statement. The one I had been working with so far (and have submitted to two granting institutions) is:

The mission of Passport: ATX is to connect youth to culture and to partner Austin’s technological, transportation, and civic and cultural institutions as a collaborative partners in a community education network.

For this week's class exercise, I was inspired by Peter Drucker's exhortation to "make it fit on a t-shirt" and I decided to try out with this nine-word mission:

"Community mobilizing and empowering youth through the arts and technology"

Reflecting on the latter mission statement, it's a lot more vague, and centers on ideas of community-based arts education stuff. I think the first one would have gone over better with the workshop group and is better in general. It is more descriptive and dynamic, despite being a mouthful and not reading well on a t-shirt. I need to figure out at one point in the basic framework whether to work in the scalability (i.e. we can connect 40 to 40,000 students) and exportability (after incubating the concept in Austin, we can consider applying this model to Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles).

We also discussed old school vs. new school mission statements. Older school ones tended not to have values statements embedded into them, and tended to be shorter, more vague. Newer ones had all types of combinations of the mission (the lofty, inspirational) and operational mission: brief description of HOW this mission might be achieved.

I need to figure out how to make or embed the following point early on: Mass transit, libraries, and museums are stuff that the public has already paid for. When many American students are stuck in substandard schools suffering from massive funding cuts in arts and culture, why shouldn't we put to good use the best of what our cities already have to offer to meet the needs of our youth?