A good friend of Surgance Program Director Andy Milligan is Dr. James Haywood Rolling, Jr. Dr. Rolling is a dual associate professor in art education and teaching and leadership at Syracuse University. He’s been thinking and writing for several years about how the arts apply to community transformation, social entrepreneurship, social justice and responsibility, youth empowerment, education (art in particular as well as general education), and architecture as a function of community… starting to see any parallels yet? We salute you, Dr. Rolling!

As part of his research he shared how Daniel Bornstein in his book “How to Change the World” defines social entrepreneurs as “people with new ideas to address major problems who are relentless in pursuit of their visions, people who will not take ‘no’ for an answer, who will not give up until they have spread their ideas as far as they possibly can.”

We have used this job description in the past from Ashoka: The “job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.”

Couldn’t say it better ourselves…

Thank you Dr. Rolling, Mr. Bornstein, our friends at Ashoka and all who have worked and are working to change lives for the better. We stand with you.