Financial Management for Nonprofit Organizations: Uses and Applications in a Social Entrepreneurship Curriculum

Social Entrepreneurship (SE) programs have been expanding over the past decade. The emergence of this new discipline can be attributed to two overlapping factors. Students (particularly business students) have expressed an increased desire to blend values, ethics and social causes into their own vocations. At the same time, the nonprofit and public sectors are rapidly adopting the language, practices and paradigms of business. These two forces have set the stage for a rapid expansion of SE programs across US universities. A review of colleges and universities reveals more than 500 professors teaching courses related to SE. Additionally, over the past five years, the Dell Social Innovation Challenge has logged more than 15,000 student competitors from 105 countries. Despite its expansion, a core body of knowledge is not yet solidified for this emerging field. SE is still an interdisciplinary exercise; drawing from business, public policy, and the social sciences. Consequently, there is still enormous variation across universities in program goals, content coverage, and teaching methodology. Specialized academic conferences, new journals, and countless numbers of papers, are all attempting to define the boundaries of the discipline, standardize content coverage, and explore useful pedagogical tools to move the discipline forward. This paper contributes to this ongoing conversation by describing the SE program at Samford University's Brock School of Business. The first section of the paper offers a brief overview of the program including its philosophy and core elements. The second section describes in more detail one key piece of our curriculum, the Financial Management for Nonprofit Organizations course. This course was a more recent addition to our SE program. The paper concludes by summarizing the contributions of this course to the strategic goals of Samford's SE program.