As many of you may or may not have heard, Tulane will proudly host the AshokaU Exchange in 2016. This honor is HUGE as AshokaU is the largest gathering for social entrepreneurship in higher-level education around. We could not be more excited as a socially-minded campus community.

In this year’s news, our TU cohort returned from AshokaU 2015 last week. This news is just as exciting because we had 8 TU community members presenting (2 students and 6 faculty and staff members). Participation ranged from sitting in on a panel discussion about the role and goals of social entrepreneurship education at universities to presenting our own successful social innovation programming, such as the Changemaker Institute.

Jenny McNulty, Senior Programming Coordinator at CELT-SI, comments on her experience presenting about the Changemaker Institute: “Presenting Changemaker Institute at the AshokaU Exchange expanded my sense of purpose. I had previously thought about our incubator’s impact mainly in terms of student learning and the immediate communities our students’ ventures serve. After presenting at the Exchange, especially when we provided our templates and materials to the audience at our session, I felt that we were contributing to a movement. There were seventy people at our session, including folks from Scotland, Turkey, Mexico, India and more; they represented a global community of educators concerned with developing the next generation of changemakers. I was energized by the idea exchange we shared. It is invigorating to be part of a collective leveraging students’ power to solve problems.”

I believe I speak for myself as well as the rest of the Tulane community that we can not wait for AshokaU on campus next spring. From speaking to the AshokaU 2015 presenters from Tulane, it seems the conversations at the conference have a powerful energy that will spread throughout our campus’ social innovation and social entrepreneurship initiatives. Let the countdown begin…