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OB 490 Becoming a Global Change Agent

This is the syllabus for a course I teach on change agentry and social entrepreneurship. I have taught the class for over a decade, and out of it my students and I have designed and implemented a number of projects which linked theory with real world problems. Some 16 of these became social enterprises or NGOs, mostly doing microfinance in Third World nations. Students learn organizational behavior concepts, action research, project design skills, change theories, and start-up tools, as well as management and growth strategies for new systems with which to build civil society. From these projects we have mobilized, trained and sent overseas some 600 college students, mostly from BYU, but others from Stanford, Washington, Boston College, VA Tech, Arizona State, and a number of other universities as social entrepreneurs. While much of our work focuses on microcredit to empower the poorest of the poor, we have also engaged in other interventions: literacy, healthcare, square-foot gardening and other appropriate technologies, worker-owned cooperatives, rebuilding houses after floods and earthquakes, teaching small farming methods, anti-HIV/AIDS training, sustainability, and various humanitarian methods for use in health clinics, orphanages, and services for street children throughout the developing world. In 2007 alone our largest 16 NGOs spun off from BYU as an incubator over the years raised $28 million, trained more than 200,000 microentrepreneurs, and grew to a global microfinance client base of 3 million families.