It is a great pleasure to be blogging for Public Innovators and alongside folks who are working so hard to bridge the gap between social entrepreneurs and public sector leadership. 
 

For this first post, I'll briefly describe what we are up to here in Virginia through the Phoenix Project and, in particular, how we are engaging public officials in our work.  The Phoenix Project (www.phoenixproject.org) is an independent 501(c)(3) organization founded in January 2006.  We have four full-time and nine part-time employees at present working in several offices throughout Virginia.  Our mission is to find new ways to alleviate poverty for the 750,000 (and growing) Virginians who live and work in these conditions, so our interest in social entrepreneurship is not as an end unto itself, but as a necessary means.  
 
To connect the dots between the sometimes ephemeral concepts of social entrepreneurship and the too-real communities facing severe economic distress, we are trying a couple of things.  First, since so few public, private or nonprofit sector leaders are really familiar with social entrepreneurship, we are convening a series of statewide gatherings to get all these leaders on the same page.  Our "Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship in Virginia" conferences are drawing hundreds of folks, largely because Virginia's top public officials have agreed to be our co-conveners.  The Governor has a way of drawing a crowd and attention. 
 
Second, since Virginia, like most other states, has not previously been out in front in identifying and preparing our next generation of social entrepreneurs to think differently about challenges such as poverty, we are designing cutting edge leadership programs to do just that.  Our second annual Nonprofit Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship Program class includes 30 top undergraduate and graduate students selected from a competitive statewide pool of applicants.  They hail from fifteen Virginia universities and will participate in the credit-bearing six week program that includes an intensive classroom experience followed by opportunities to test their entrepreneurial mettle alongside leaders of a very distressed community on the front lines of change.  Public officials are integrated into the faculty of the program both to provide content to the students and to become engaged in the larger mission of identifying our next generation of agents of sustainable social change. 
 
Third, because we believe that universities are under-utilized as capacity-building resources for building social enterprises in economically distressed communities, we are building deep and balanced partnerships between new consortia of universities and communities as a proving ground for new innovative solutions.  We have three such partnerships now, and more than 42 of Virginia's universities have signed up for some aspect of this adventure.  They are involved for many reasons, but public universities, especially, are cognizant that some of the public officials who support our effort are the same ones that ask them to prove the value of investing tax dollars in higher education.
 
Even while social enterprise often speaks to ways to devise solutions to public challenges derived from the market instead of government, it is difficult to imagine our humble efforts in Virginia would have come so far so fast without the active involvement in public officials.    

 
Greg Werkheiser is Executive Director of The Phoenix Project, which seeks to alleviate poverty in Virginia by building a sustainable partnership between higher education and the Commonwealth's most distressed communities.