Green Entrepreneurship & Research

CLEI 99/199: Green Entrepreneurship & Research

“Developing Green Entrepreneurship” is College Eight’s education and mentoring program designed to empower students to create a more sustainable world. If our planet and society are to flourish, the organization and conduct of education, business, politics and policy must radically change. This will happen only if a new generation can apply its capabilities and imagination to changing environmentally destructive practices. Our new year-long tutorial will extend existing efforts at College Eight and across the UC Santa Cruz campus to nurture green entrepreneurs and sustainability professionals. Its goal is to provide students with the interdisciplinary skills and knowledge, complementary to their majors, to conceptualize and establish green projects, organizations and businesses.

The three-quarter sequence will introduce students to the concepts, methods and practices of conceptualizing and conducting research into sustainable energy, resources and food production, to developing green entrepreneurial capabilities and to writing business plans and grant proposal to support their projects. The sequence offers two units of academic credit in each of three quarters, followed by the opportunity to compete for a summer research award. Faculty and community mentors will teach in the classroom; research projects will be supervised by faculty, mentors and project teams from advanced courses.

Fall Quarter: Students will receive 90 minutes of classroom instruction each week, and participate in 2 to 3 hours of applied labs, field research, data analysis, problem solving and design. Both classroom and field research will take place at the Sustainable Living Center, located in the Lower Quarry, which is the site for a planned sustainability district. In the classroom, students will learn the basics of resources and energy concepts, measurements surveying and assessment, building energy and resource auditing, energy system sizing, testing, installation and operation, water supply, demand and distribution, and intensive food urban production. They will design and conduct their own supervised research projects at the site, observe and measure resource use, install and operate energy monitors and data loggers, conduct behavioral surveys of Village residents and designprogram to alter residents behaviors and practices.

Winter Quarter: Students will continue field research in the Village and will learn how to design and develop green entrepreneurial projects, under the direction of faculty and community mentors. Students will study both successful and unsuccessful efforts to develop green products, businesses and services, listen and meet with guest speakers who have entrepreneurial experience and have launched successful businesses and organizations. They will study the nuts-and-bolts of business plans and legal requirements for profitmaking and non-profit enterprises and how to develop collaborations and social networks.

Spring Quarter: Students will learn how to write and present business plans to potential funders and investors, how to write grant proposals for submission to funding agencies (including those on- campus), and how to manage their enterprises. They will be expected to write one or more grants for submission to on-campus funding sources. They will also continue their field research.

Summer and beyond: Students who successfully complete the three-quarter tutorial sequence can apply competitively for summer research awards that will allow them to pursue and, ideally, launch their projects. These “sustainability research and green entrepreneurship fellows” will be expected to mentor a new cadre of students enrolling in the tutorial during the next academic year. Students who are successful in launching