Donor ‘Adopts’ Wagner Class In Social Entrepreneurship

By Robert Polner

      A successful financial consultant, Ira W. Miller had already determined he wanted to give something back to society when, on a plane trip last fall, he first met Ellen McGrath, a clinical psychologist whose extensive professional background spans work as a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine Medical School, psychology expert on ABC’s Good Morning America, and consultant for a number of Fortune 500 companies.
      When the two started to chat, McGrath was leading a course at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service called “The Fundamentals of Social Entrepreneurship.” She told him she was infusing the syllabus with skill-building techniques drawn from applied psychology, enabling her students to pick up skills to transform themselves as they learned about sound, business-minded approaches to making effective and lasting social change.
      Miller was so impressed by what he heard about the dual approach that he decided to “adopt” the advanced seminar taught during the spring semester, “Advanced Social Entrepreneurs,” by making a $15,000 contribution. The money is used creatively to support the social entrepreneurship projects of the students, and McGrath keeps Miller, who has attended some of the classes, on top of new developments related to the students and their work. She feels that the “Adopt-a-Class” concept could, and should, catch on.
      “When I met Ellen, her description of her work at Wagner just struck a chord with me,” says Miller, the great grandson of a New York City shoe designer, Israel Miller, whose series of I. Miller stores in Manhattan set the pace for fashionable footwear in the 1920s and 1930s. Miller, who is a native of Roslyn, N.Y. now living in Southern California, is the founder and sole owner of Zone Capital Partners. He continued, “I’m passionate about New York and about the fact that young people have to be entrepreneurs now.”
      Entrepreneurs they are. McGrath says students in the fundamentals class develop an original blueprint for solving a social problem and then, over the course of the semester in the advanced class, a business plan for turning that idea into a reality. In the advanced class, 24 students are currently focused on designing and furthering the potential of their projects and are expected to present some kind of a deliverable by the end of the term and to continue development work afterward. One student, Nick Jensen, is creating an organization called “Youth in the Booth” to increase civic engagement and voter participation; another, Jason Fullen, is designing a record company for music aimed at catalyzing social change; and Alex Hu will start a clothing line encompassing the spectrum of human skin pigments and partner with organizations that fight racial injustice. Rachael Rho and Jordann Wine are semifinalists in the Dell Social Innovations Competition for their “Build Our Village” social network platform for social innovators.
      “I don’t want the class to be only theoretical in nature,” says McGrath, who notes that Wagner is the home base of the NYU Reynolds Program for Social Entrepreneurship, with its extensive support and activities to undergraduate and graduate students with a track record of tackling public problems that others perceive as intractable. “I want the students to know how to do it, and how to really put their best foot forward, so they can change the world.”