Where the Jobs Are: Social Entrepreneurship
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
6-7:30 PM E314 (Nosh will be served)

How to Change the World!

Join career services in welcoming a panel of experts who will share their experience and their passion about social entrepreneurship.

Sasha Muench, Director, Social Innovation, Mercy Corps
Sasha Muench is currently Director for Social Innovations at Mercy Corps. In this role, she supports the development of innovative programming that blends methods from mphilanthropy, business, and government to create sustained social impacts at scale.

Sasha also manages the Our World, Our Family Pilot Progam with Western Union. In 2007 she was an Adjunct Professor and Practitioner in Residence at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, teaching microfinance and conducting independent research on post-emergency economic recovery issues. Before that, Sasha spent four years in Indonesia with Mercy Corps where she supported the development of local microfinance capacity and later because Aceh Deputy Director, managing a group of programs covering economic development, access to finance, community recovery, and children's health. She has also developed microfinance programs in Bosnia and Herzegovina and supported a range of microfinance, enterprise, and community development, women's empowerment and local capacity-building activities in Kosovo, Serbia, Kyrgystan, the Philippines, and Gaza.

Sasha has a B.A. in economics and international relations from Claremont McKenna College and an M.A. in economics from the University of British Columbia.

Shane Endicott, The Rebuilding Center/Our United Villages
Shane Endicott is the executive director of Our United Villages, a local non-profit organization. Shane co-founded Our United Villages and its first project, The Rebuilding Center, in 1997 as an all-volunteer effort. Soon after, the organization established DeConstruction Services and ReFind Furniture.

Our United Villages operations are one hundred percent financially self-sustained from earned income with an annual budget of nearly three million dollars. Our United Villages has over forty full time employees and hosts over eight hundred volunteers annually. The organization is a model of the convergence of entrepreneurial drive, creativity, passion and action to achieve the triple bottom line of sustainability and to produce lasting social change that empowers and directly benefits a live community.

Shane was born and raised in Oregon and is a strong advocate for social and environmentally responsible practices throughout the region and beyond. He has spent the last seventeen years engaged in a wide range of activities to reduce waste to benefit our environment and to apply asset based approaches to solve social problems at the grassroots level. Shane served as chair of the Citizen Advisory Committee for the Multnomah County Juvenile Justice Department, and on the boards of the Children’s Museum and Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. Shane has made a lifetime commitment to creating a world where people value one another and their environment. He enjoys spending time with his family and friends. He loves to travel, explore, imagine, write, and give.

Amy Pearl, Executive Director, CEO, Co-Founder of Springboard Innovation
Amy Pearl is the executive director, CEO, and co-founder of Springboard Innovation. She draws on extensive experience in the education, corporate, and social sectors to shape her vision of addressing global challenges with interdisciplinary problem solving. By designing learning experiences to teach worldwide, she hopes to build a more equitable, innovative, and capable society. Her own career has taken her from the classroom and school district to the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, to managing international education initiatives online for Intel.

Springboard Innovation was formed in 2004. Its programs and initiatives invite people to engage in transformative social & environmental change. “We teach, convene, fund, and build towards social innovations that create new opportunities and benefits through a sequence and system that moves community members and entrepreneurs from potential leaders to effective change agents.” 

Amy has a B.S. in anthropology and an M.A.T. from Willamette University.

Paul Osterlund, Abundance Farming Project
Paul Osterlund is the founder and executive director of the Abundance Farming Project, an Oregon-based nonprofit organization providing innovative water-harvesting technology to subsistence farmers in drought regions around the world in partnership with Absorbent Technologies Inc, the developer & manufacturer of Zeba a super-absorbent material. Current projects in India, Africa, China, the Americas.

Paul started working in the electronics industry in the first spin-off from IBM in '70, after attending San Jose State in Industrial Design for 2-3 years. He then worked for Intel Corporation in creative design and project management for over 23 years. When he 'retired' he realized he could put his skills to good use and began working with Springboard Innovation, helping social entrepreneurs create new, sustainable nonprofits. Paul created his own nonprofit, Abundance Farming Project, in 2009 and continues to serve on the board of Springboard Innovation.