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Fox School conference dedicated to alternative bottom line: Doing good

On April 11, 2006 The Fox School's inaugural Conference on Social Entrepreneurship will unite academic experts, business leaders and the Temple community in pursuit of a different kind of bottom line - doing good.

"The conference goes beyond the student audience. We want to facilitate discussion between the community and nonprofit leaders," said T.L. Hill, the Enterprise Management Consulting project faculty director who will serve as moderator.

This conference, sponsored by The Fox School's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute, will feature speakers from for-profit and nonprofit companies:

Chip Roach, the former chair of Prudential Fox & Roach Realtors. Temple has been providing Roach with space at TUCC to develop A Better Philadelphia, an organization he started to end youth violence.


Sister Mary Scullion, co-founder and executive director of Project Home, an organization with which The Fox School has close ties. Every year, Temple's Phi Beta Lambda, the collegiate-level chapter of Future Business Leaders of America, runs a Thanksgiving food drive for Project Home. For last year's drive, the students collected about 3,000 food items.


Neil Batiancila, a Fox M.B.A. student and the deputy director of operations for City Year Philadelphia, a group dedicated to mobilizing students in the Philadelphia School District for community service.

The Fox School's emphasis on social entrepreneurship extends beyond the conference. One-third of the Enterprise Management Consulting projects, for which students consult for real companies, are for social endeavors such as the Natural Lands Trust.

Also, currently The Fox School offers a graduate course in sustainable business practices, which emphasizes respect by business for the environment. And next year, as part of the school's proactive stance on ethics, a new graduate-level course will debut on social entrepreneurship.

"We will explore not just how to be an ethical businessperson, but also how the structure, ownership and operations of a firm can affect its impact in a community," Hill said. "A dynamic organization - whether for-profit or nonprofit - uses business disciplines to do well while doing good."