December 10, 2006 -- Oberlin has received a $1,126,382 grant from the Burton D. Morgan Foundation of Hudson, Ohio, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Missouri, as part of a five-year project to develop campus-wide entrepreneurship initiatives in Northeast Ohio.

"The idea," said Deborah Hoover of the Burton D. Morgan Foundation, "is to expose students of all disciplines—music, art, economics—to entrepreneurial thinking and to provide the spark to help them transform a passion into a new venture."

“The Creativity and Leadership Program (CLP) is designed to reflect Oberlin’s musical and artistic excellence and its rigorous liberal arts curriculum, as well as its longstanding commitment to preparing students for leadership and civic engagement,” says President Nancy Dye. “It will draw on and interweave students’ intellectual interests, innovative ideas and aspirations, experiential learning, and co-curricular activities.”

An interdisciplinary committee of faculty, administrators, alumni, and northeast Ohio entrepreneurs will oversee the program, which will build on two successful campus projects: the Oberlin Business Scholars program and the Conservatory’s winter-term performance projects.

According to Conservatory Associate Dean of Academic Affairs Andrea Kalyn, who will direct the grant, the CLP will feature concept development grants awarded on a competitive basis to individual students or teams of students from all majors, who will spend the year after graduation moving their ideas from theory to implementation.

The program also will offer semester and half-semester courses, mentored experiential opportunities, workshops, and lectures by alumni and northeastern Ohio entrepreneurs to prepare students for the challenges of implementing their projects.  Entrepreneurial Oberlin College and Conservatory alumni will mentor students in their experiential projects.

Oberlin was one of five colleges selected to share a total of $6.6 million in grants through the foundations’ Northeast Ohio Collegiate Entrepreneurship program; the others are Baldwin-Wallace College, Hiram College, Lake Erie College, and The College of Wooster. The funded colleges will share their models nationally, and the foundations hope to expand the program across the country if it is successful.

Burton D. Morgan believed the free enterprise system to be America’s greatest asset and established the private foundation based in Akron, Ohio, in 1967 to strengthen the system by investing in organizations and institutions that foster the entrepreneurial spirit.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Missouri, was established in the mid-1960s by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman.  It is a private, nonpartisan foundation that works with partners to advance entrepreneurship in America and improve the education of children and youth.