Upon graduating from U.Va. in 2011 with a degree in global development studies, Noorali was awarded a Harper Fellowship to continue work in her field of study. She used the funds to spend a year working in a refugee camp in her native Pakistan. One day, a little girl who had acted as her self-appointed tour guide invited Noorali to her home and asked her to take her picture. “I actually feel uncomfortable taking pictures of people at a refugee camp,” Noorali says, “as if it’s some kind of zoo. But the girl insisted.”

After Noorali snapped the photo, the girl’s mother asked how much money Noorali would be sending. People in the camp were used to being photographed, usually by people representing NGOs that could deliver aid money to residents. Yet “that incident deeply disturbed me,” Noorali says. “I had indirectly stolen their dignity by making them think they had to pose for pictures to obtain money. But in those camps they have so little opportunity to sustain themselves. They don’t just need money. They need skills.”

Noorali had originally wanted to work for NGOs in addressing the refugee crisis. Now, she has joined forces with Samia Sekkarie to form S2 (as in “S squared”), an entrepreneurial venture to provide training and skills certification for people living in refugee camps. Sekkarie is enrolled in the MPP program at the Batten School; Noorali is pursuing social entrepreneurship through the U.Va. Community Scholar program. When they discovered each other’s passion for serving refugees, a partnership was born.

Through a growing initiative on social entrepreneurship, known as SE@UVA, their seed of an idea was nurtured. First, Noorali and Sekkarie participated in a “3-Day-Startup” for social ventures workshop. Next, they developed their concept for the Social Entrepreneurship Track of the U.Va. E-Cup— a university-wide competition to foster entrepreneurial efforts by student groups. Finally, as a team, they further honed their pitch at the E-Cup semi-finals. This system of support is helping similar ventures crop up all across Grounds and around the world.

In the public policy space, social entrepreneurship is a relatively new and deeply powerful concept. Innovators are applying methods to social problems that have already proven successful in startup ventures. In doing so, they stand to succeed where larger and more traditional approaches have often fallen short.

“Government is currently not able to solve these problems, and government is not going to become able to solve these problems, because we are in constant deficit,” says Christine Mahoney, Batten School professor and faculty director of the social entrepreneurship initiative. “People are realizing that philanthropy is not going to be sufficient either. If you look at the gap between what is needed and what is given, it is just huge and is never going to be bridged through philanthropy alone.”

Perhaps, then, social entrepreneurship can help provide a third way.

A generation ago, idealistic young people fanned out all over the globe to serve the poor through government-sponsored opportunities such as the Peace Corps. Similar opportunities exist to some extent today, but they are joined by entrepreneurial ventures borne of imagination and innovation.

Founded less than four years ago, SE@UVA itself has entrepreneurial roots. The idea was a part of no one’s master plan but resulted from a few students requesting—if not insisting—that social entrepreneurship find a place on the curricula. Mahoney took up the challenge, discovering that nascent SE-oriented efforts were already underway through the work of several professors across Grounds. A working group agreed to organize the effort under Batten’s leadership, and the initiative was initially funded with a grant from the Jefferson Trust, which was matched by the Provost’s office. Today, SE@UVA offers six classes, some cross-listed under Batten, the Curry School for Education, and the College of Arts and Sciences. Demand exceeds supply: The introductory class has more than 100 names on a waiting list.

One aspect of SE@UVA is a series of speakers brought in to offer practical insights of the life of a social entrepreneur.

“Resilience is a critical quality of this work. If you don’t have it, get out of the business,” said Bill Strickland at a breakfast for students and community leaders. Strickland is CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, a nonprofit initiative to use the arts as an intervention strategy for at-risk youth in Pittsburgh. The group’s programs have shown to double the effective graduation rates at participating inner-city schools within 36 months of introduction.

The key to social innovation, he added, is to maintain the mentality of a business startup. “You’re going to have to find funding,” he explained. “You’re going to have to build a team. You’re going to have to figure out how to sustain yourself through the tough times. And by the way, there will always be tough times.”

In the classroom for SE@UVA, instruction is project-oriented, stressing experiential learning where students develop real solutions to real problems around the world. Solutions are so real that, through extracurricular initiatives sponsored by program, they might become real—put into play anywhere from Charlottesville to India, from Turkey to Tanzania, and elsewhere.

SE@UVA oversees the social entrepreneurship track of the E-Cup. (Other tracks tackle efforts in categories such as healthcare, media, and consumer goods and services.) For the semifinals of the process, Mahoney invited several business and philanthropic leaders to listen to each group’s presentation—just as a donor or investor might hear a pitch—and choose two groups to move on to the final round of competition. Each team was given five minutes to present, with five minutes for questions from the judges.

Among the judges was John Kluge Jr., an “impact investment” philanthropist whose commitment to social entrepreneurship involves those challenges faced by at least 1 billion people around the world. His current area of specialization is global sanitation.

One of the presenters at the E-Cup competition was “Loos by Hoos,” a team of six Batten students in the accelerated MPP program (where students complete a bachelor’s and master’s degree in public policy in five years). Loos by Hoos proposes to promote and market low-cost sustainable toilets in rural India, in an area where cell phones far outnumber sanitary latrines.

“Being at the E-Cup was such an amazing experience,” says Mayura Iyer, one of the Loos for Hoos presenters. “Everyone had a great cause. It gives a sense of the culture at U.Va., where everyone is so passionate about what they are trying to do.”

Loos for Hoos did not advance in the E-Cup, but immediately after the competition the group was approached by Kluge, who wanted to help them make connections and turn their dream into reality. “We fully intend to pursue it,” Iyer says. The group’s goal is to be laying the groundwork in India by December 2015.

S2 also made a pitch at the E-Cup for its system of training and certification in refugee camps. Many refugee camps are, in essence, functioning cities that can persist for 20 years or more. These informal economies trade in bartered services using skills learned before refugees arrive in camp. A lot of people trapped there have valuable skills, but they can’t prove it, Mahoney says. “If you are running for your life, you don’t grab your diploma.”

The plan is to sharpen or develop those skills through training that ranges from garment making to first aid to the building trades—with actual training done in the camps by local experts in the given field. Then, with certification, these refugees might not only exchange services within the camp but also build a career after resettlement.

S2 has already obtained training materials in some skills areas and is seeking U.S.-based experts in other areas to help develop more. The group plans to translate and deploy them after relocating to Turkey in August 2015 to begin working with Syrian refugees.

S2 was not chosen for the finals of the E-Cup. Yet also like Loos for Hoos, S2 founders were immediately contacted by an event officer with an offer to help.

Alselmo Canfora is a professor in the U.Va. School of Architecture, renown for his work in developing sustainable transitional housing for disaster victims in Haiti and elsewhere. He was serving as timekeeper for the competition. He approached Sekkarie and Noorali to offer help in developing training materials for the building trades—an effort some of his students had already undertaken.

“A number of our students have taken on this challenge,” Canfora says. They have applied this to projects we’re working on in Uganda and Nicaragua.”

When E-Cup officials enthusiastically support even those groups that don’t advance, that support speaks volumes about the quality of the competing groups. “I was really proud of them,” Mahoney says. “They showcased the best of U.Va. for our judges.”

Mahoney estimates that more than half of the groups will take their extracurricular ideas and create on-the-ground ventures. Such innovation, she said, is a perfect fit for the Batten School.

“We are a school of public policy but we are also a school of leadership. When Mr. Batten donated the funds to start the school, he wanted us to train enlightened and ethical citizen leaders. That perfectly describes the best social entrepreneurs.”

Further, the movement toward social entrepreneurship stands to create exciting public policy outcomes through the proliferation of innovative ideas. Rather than policy ideas always flowing from the top down, social innovation through small, independent groups can produce, in essence, an informal policy marketplace.

“Policy schools are solution-oriented. We can’t just look at the world, say it’s a total mess and end there,” Mahoney says. “If you are in a policy school, you are required to come up with strategies for moving forward.”

As with any marketplace, a policy market that can emerge from a proliferation of social innovation rewards success. Ideas that work can be scaled up through impact investing or funded by enlightened leaders within government. Ideas that don’t work will contribute in their own way. Social entrepreneurs—like any other innovators—learn from their mistakes and “pivot” to emerge stronger from the experience to try something else. In either case, the idea of emerging policy choices resonates with one of the founding adages of the Batten School: Policy is everywhere.

“The Batten School teaches you to have the practical skills to see policy in everything and use those skills to fight real problems in the world,” Iyer says. “Social entrepreneurship encompasses all that I wanted to do but didn’t have a word for until I came here. That really shapes my worldview now."

The parents of today’s university students were shaped by a mix of triumph and tragedy—on one hand, the moon landings and the civil rights movement; on the other, Vietnam and Watergate. Today’s young people are not so balanced in their experiences.

“This is a generation that saw failure in a war in Afghanistan, failure in Iraq, failure in the economy during the 2008 market collapse,” Mahoney says. “There is a mistrust of big institutions, with good reasons. While institutions cannot be changed quickly, social ventures grow as fast as silicone valley start-ups and can be nimble enough to evolve with changing conditions.”

Studies show that many members of the millennial generation are committed to careers that make a difference. For example, in a 2012 survey by the nonprofit Net Impact, 45 percent of students about to enter the workforce said they are willing to take a pay cut for a job that makes a positive social or environmental impact. Further, today’s generation has access to unprecedented information in real time.

“If an earthquake happens in Haiti,” Mahoney explains, “they see tweets and video about it immediately. It shortens the distance between people and events around the world. Like no generation before them, they know that there are gang rapes going on in India and people being killed on the Somali border—and it weighs on them.”

Yet current technology also makes the tools of entrepreneurship broadly available at lower cost: websites, of course, but also things like crowd-sourced funding, remote meeting capability, 3D printing. It has never been easier to pursue an entrepreneurial idea.

Culture is perhaps as powerful as technology—especially the culture of unimpeded learning that’s fostered throughout Mr. Jefferson’s Academical Village. “Thomas Jefferson was an innovator,” Mahoney says. “He was not afraid to fail. He tried new things, and if they did not work out, he would pivot. That’s the essence of an entrepreneur.”

“I’m very encouraged to see how this is developing across multiple schools on Grounds,” Canfora says. “I think there is a real desire to work together across disciplines. It’s in our DNA. We were founded by someone who was profoundly compelled by service and citizenship.”

“This is really a fantastic university,” Noorali adds. “The commitment to social entrepreneurship is a coherent effort, from so many disciplines—all caring equally for the same goal. I think that’s extremely rare.”

Thomas Jefferson helped redefine the relationship between citizen and government. His life and experiences were so varied that he chose not to mention “President of the United States” on his gravestone. Yet he did list his founding of the University of Virginia. Today this university is helping a new generation redefine the scope and promise of entrepreneurship through the social enterprise movement.

SPRING 2015 CONTENTS