Innovative Extracurricular Student Engagement: The Community Problem Solving Challenge

The Community Problem Solving Challenge Program is an innovative extracurricular learning program that engages university students with high school students from inner city, economically distressed neighborhoods to develop entrepreneurial solutions for complex socio-economic problems identified by community leaders. Examples of problems addressed by students in the past include drug use among students and members of the community, the transition of incarcerated population to civil society, food deserts, and mobility. This program overcomes the limitations of the outsider-driven top-down model of community development. In this instance, community “insiders”—the high school students—collaborate with “outsiders”—the university students—to develop entrepreneurial solutions to live problems in their communities. The program illustrates how activities designed using entrepreneurship pedagogy theories can provide engaging, enriching, and effective outcomes. The program benefits all stakeholders participating in it. For example, high school students develop an entrepreneurial mindset, learn entrepreneurship principles by application of frameworks to real-world problems, achieve self-efficacy as they discover that they have agency to transform their communities, and by bringing together community leaders, faculty, college, and high school students the program fosters networks, that according to student feedback, increases the likelihood of the high school participants pursuing a college degree. This paper elaborates on the impact for all stakeholders.