Social Innovator of the Year Award 2008


At this year's award banquet, we honored Stephen and Bette Gibson, a husband and wife team who started The Academy for Creating Enterprise. This school, located in Cebu, Phillipines, gives returned missionaries training to help them begin their own businesses.

Stephen W. and Bette Gibson


SteveBetteSteve and Bette Gibson met at BYU. Soon after their marriage, Steve was drafted into the US Army and served in Germany for some time. Following the military service and after a four-year stint at the Deseret News, the family relocated to Littleton, Colorado where they lived for 21 years, as they raised their three sons and one daughter.  Steve owned several Colorado businesses, including Barclays Oxygen Homecare Inc., which had eight offices in six states.  He sold Barclays to Lincare Homecare company in 1993 after it was recognized as one of the 500 fastest growing privately held companies in the United States

After the sale, Bette was recruited by Brigham Young University to join their Early Childhood department, so the family relocated to Provo.

While Bette taught on BYU Campus, Steve volunteered for five years at the BYU Center for Entrepreneurship. It was during that time that the Center was first ranked in the top 25 centers of entrepreneurship in the United States.  

In 1998, Steve was the founding partner of Utah’s first angel investment group, the UtahAngels.org, in 1998 which now has 19 members who collectively have invested more than $20 million in Utah County business start-ups.  He was personally the first investor in 1-800-Contacts, Ancestry.com and Omniture.

The Gibsons moved to Cebu, in the Philippines in 1999 for nineteen months to start the Academy for Creating Enterprise, which teaches primarily returned missionaries, who have been home an average of four years, how to start and grow MicroEnterprises.  More than one thousand small businesses have resulted from the training.

Upon returning from Cebu, Steve was hired as a Marriott School faculty member where he has pioneered a basic Entrepreneur Course for non-business majors.  Students are required to start small businesses during the semester. Steve also introduced the same course at Brigham Young University-Hawaii, where the couple served for 10 months during 2007-2008 as Entrepreneurs in Residence.  Bette taught Book of Mormon classes to students from 17 different countries.

The couple return often to Cebu to work with the 1,375 Academy alumni who are now organized into 17 chapters, scattered among the 7,107 islands. 

The Academy for Creating Enterprise


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The Academy for Creating Enterprise is a not-for-profit learning center established by Stephen W. and Bette Gibson in November of 1999 on Cebu Island in the Philippines.  Returned missionaries, who have been home an average of four years, travel by boat, car, taxi, plane and motorbike to Cebu and move into the Academy for eight weeks where they are trained in enterprise development, computers and business English.  The students pay an average of $50US to attend, the rest of the eight week costs are paid by the Called2Serve Foundation. Thirteen hundred and seventy five have now graduated and more than one thousand have started small MicroEnterprise business.

 




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These businesses ranges from small stalls selling food
products to IslandProperties.com, which sells real estate and has sixteen Academy graduates as representatives living and working throughout the country.  The nations largest cell phone franchise, with 34 locations, is also owned and managed by Academy associates.  One graduate and her husband own a temporary employee business with more than 200 employees.  Another graduate has exported containers of their coconut shell products to Amsterdam, Holland