Students for Social Entrepreneurship's Internship Program Provides Practical Experience

How do you actively engage students in a field of study that most know little about? That's the question married BYU students Curtis and Misty Lefrandt asked themselves early last year when they founded Students for Social Entrepreneurship.

"We learned about social entrepreneurship from another student," Curtis says. "We're both really interested in giving back and this just clicked. It is the movement with the greatest potential for making a big difference in social issues."

Now in it's first full year of operation, the club has an email list with more than 600 interested students, and hosts educational events and networking events on and off campus. The biggest surprise, however, has been the wildly successful on-campus internship program that connects students with organizations working in the cross-disciplinary field of social entrepreneurship. Paired with notable organizations like Kiva, Teach for America, Unitus, Acumen Fund, and the Peery Foundation, student teams complete real projects while earning university credit.

The inspiration for the program came from while the couple was interning at Bay Area social venture Virgance. Enjoying their experience so much, they wondered how to provide other students with a similar opportunity. After bouncing around the idea of creating student consulting projects, the Lefrandts stumbled on something bigger: creating an internship program that allowed students to work closely with senior executives at actual social ventures.

"Students like taking ownership of projects," Misty says. "We didn't have anything to lose."

But a great idea did not mean the program was easy to get started. All of the companies they approached had never heard of anything like it, and it took multiple conversations to get everyone on the same page.

With all the initial uncertainty, the Lefrandts did not anticipate how busy launching the program would keep them or how quickly it would grow. During the inaugural semester, more than 100 students applied for about thirty positions and the Lefrandts each spend about thirty unpaid hours a week managing the program.

"It has definitely been hard and a for couple of weeks straight I only got one or two hours of sleep each night," Curtis says.

To them, however, the sacrifices have been worth it.

"Students tend to evangelize about it," Misty says. "They tell me 'I've always wanted to be involved in something like this, but I didn't know how.'"

In fact, several of the participating students have already set up summer internships with the organizations they completed their on-campus internship for, and even more are expected to as the program grows from six organizations to twelve during winter semester.

After the Lefrandts graduate and move on, both are confident the program they started will be in good hands.

"We've got a great leadership team," Curtis says.

"We just want to make sure to leave a strong program institutionalized at the university, and we have a file of crazy ideas to pass to the next presidency," Misty says. "It will be fun to see what this program turns into down the road."

Originally founded in 2008 by Misty and Curtis Lefrandt as The Meaningful Life Club, Students for Social Entrepreneurship provides students with educational events, internships, and networking opportunities on and off campus. Students for Social Entrepreneurship works closely with the BYU Center for Economic Self-Reliance to run their programs. To learn more, please visit http://studentsforsocent.org/.