On Creativity, Critique and Being a Student Entrepreneur

This is part 3 of an 11-part series on Undergraduate Social Entrepreneurship coordinated by the Social Innovation Initiative at Brown University. This post was written by Catie Whelan, Co-Founder and Co-Director of The Merasi School.

The best ideas are like taffy: they should only be consumed after rigorous pulling, stretching and challenging.  The ideas behind social movements rarely emerge fully baked and ready for publication -- rather, they are born from countless, often painful hours of sculpting and re-sculpting.  When I first started forming some thoughts about education in India into a more coherent idea of a school for a community of lower-caste musicians, I became convinced that I was sitting on a goldmine, largely because my intentions were so good. Who could argue that starting a school for a community that was denied access to education wasn't a good thing to do? But I soon realized that having good intentions was not justification for a poor idea and, ultimately, inhibited the idea from ever graduating into something really great.

So where does a plucky young entrepreneur at Brown University go to translate good intentions into good ideas, and good ideas into good actions? Not too far. Turns out, there was a community of like-minded students who decided one night over chips and salsa that we should formalize our hunger for support into a coherent network of entrepreneurship. Over the course of many brainstorms and cups of coffee, we fleshed out a multi-tiered network that had points of entry for everyone, from the seasoned entrepreneur to the fresh-faced novice. This network has since turned into a full-fledged student group called the Social Innovation Initiative.

The Merasi project fell into the grayish area where the work was up and running, but the next stages were hazy. I knew I had a good foundation to work with, but I desperately needed sounding boards -- someone with whom I could explore wild, reckless ideas without being judged, and then people with whom I could take my new ideas out for a test run. The first came to me in the form of Alan Harlam, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at Brown, who provided me with a cutting room floor where, as Fitzgerald would say, orphan ideas are killed, and authentic innovation is cultivated.  The second was my peer group, who dug into the issues and unearthed deep-seated tensions between the problems and my solutions, forcing me to regularly reevaluate what I was doing and why. It was terrifically painful. But I stuck with the idea because, with each assault on my undertaking, what my peers were communicating was, "Your idea is worthwhile. We wouldn't spend time destroying it if we didn't think you couldn't rebuild it to be stronger and better."

Through this formalized support network, now called SII, my smattering of ideas and actions cohered into The Merasi School, a community-powered educational initiative for a population of severely marginalized musicians living in northwestern India. Through peer critique and strong faculty support, I was forced to continually knead and nurture my mission, fundraising schemes and strategic action plan. No element of the work could ever be idle for long.

Being an entrepreneur is like being an art student during a critique: you have to be ruthlessly committed to your work and still be open to total reconstruction of your concept for the betterment of the final product. I think the equation for a healthy social entrepreneur is two parts complete investment, and one part external support. The presence of a pre-existing infrastructure to nurture entrepreneurial endeavors not only enhances the idea development and cultivation, but becomes an entrepreneurial venture unto itself, as different personalities and intellects shape it further into what they want it to be.

Photo Credit: brian glanz