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During their freshman year at Georgetown University, Neil Shah was starting a fair trade tea company while Arthur Woods was founding a farmer’s market delivery service. Neil’s venture aimed to create hope and prosperity for fair trade tea farmers in El Salvador. Arthur’s aspired to boost the local economy by supporting family farmers in the Mid-Atlantic. Both students had a passion to use business as an agent for social change. They discovered, however, that the social component of business was a mere afterthought in their college education. The two faced significant uphill battles in attaining institutional support for their social businesses, and neither could identify an established community to strengthen their efforts. Both businesses ultimately failed.

Neil and Arthur walked away from this experience with the vision of a strong support community for student social entrepreneurs. They imagined a fine-tuned, student-led training program that would inspire social innovation amongst passionate college students, and would also instill within each student the skills necessary to create sustainable social businesses. This vision sparked the creation of the Compass Fellowship program. Neil and Arthur teamed with a passionate player in the environmental movement, Michael Durante, and a student with an affinity for education, Marissa Siefkes, to create the program. During the same time, Aaron Hollub, an operations and information management major at Georgetown, led efforts to create the Compass Incubator, a social business incubator which has now supported the start of over 20 student-led businesses.

Following the development of a pilot curriculum for the Compass Fellowship, which applied the core aspects of social business education that each of the four felt they were missing, the group pitched this program to the Prudential Foundation and attained the funds necessary to pilot the program at one school.

Beginning in the fall of 2009, the Compass Fellowship launched its first program at Georgetown University. A bold initiative, the pilot program was conceptualized as a scalable, student-operated model of holistic social entrepreneurship education for college campuses. In this short time, the Georgetown chapter of the Compass Fellowship has drastically changed the lives of everyone involved. The fellows have become engaged in their collegiate education experience in ways that are unattainable at other schools. Through passion, the mentors have translated their experiences and relationships into a valuable community around entrepreneurship, with the fellows at the center. Seeing the significant impact of this program at one school, the team is now passionate to spread it across the country.