The Coleman Foundation Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows Program
The Foundation’s current leading initiative within its Entrepreneurship funding area is its Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows Program. While self-employment education has become broadly accepted as a valid field of study within academia, it remains constrained by its historical roots in the school of business. Many aspiring entrepreneurs concentrate in departments outside the school of business and rarely, if ever, explore business courses.
The Coleman Fellows program intends to advance three grant strategies from the Entrepreneurship Education Impact Plan. These include:
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Improve academic curriculum’s ability to build core self-employment skills (e.g. vision, opportunity recognition, network and team development, financial management, marketing, technology utilization, sales, leadership)
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Increase the quality and frequency of experiential, co-curricular activities (e.g. direct quality time with business owners, mentorships, internships, incubation/acceleration, alumni engagement, entrepreneurs-in-residence, opportunities to practice applied skills)
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Increase frequency and quality of interdisciplinary learning of entrepreneurship concepts.
The goals of the Fellows Program are 1) to build support for entrepreneurship education in non-business departments across campuses of participating schools; 2) to advance the Coleman Foundation’s Definition of Entrepreneurship with focus on business creation; and 3) to cultivate cohorts of entrepreneurship educators on individual campuses and across many disciplines outside the school of business.
Fellows are college and university faculty who teach in disciplines outside the school of business. Recipients of one-year fellowships, they work in close collaboration with an experienced entrepreneurship educator on campus, engaging in projects which advance self-employment education and strengthening the entrepreneurship educator’s efforts to grow entrepreneurship education across campus. Projects include developing new courses within their discipline or modified existing ones to incorporate self-employment concepts, or actively contributing to extra-curricular activities in support of entrepreneurship education. Fellows maintain an ongoing connection to the entrepreneurship program at their school after the grant year and continue as part of the Coleman Foundation Entrepreneurship Community of Practice (“Coffee Cup”), a growing national cohort of colleagues which, over time, spread Entrepreneurship education across college and university campuses.
For more information on the Fellows Program, please visit www.colemanfellows.com.
