Community Entrepreneurship Development

Often, a client will come to us with a problem that goes beyond the needs of a single individual or organization and affects a much larger community: inadequate infrastructure, unemployment or underemployment, poor educational outcomes, lack of neighborhood cohesiveness, disaster recovery, and so on. Our Community Entrepreneurship Development (CED) model is a holistic, field-proven approach to transforming an entire community.

In the CED model, the specific socioeconomic problem that is highly resistant to resolution, which the client presents to ISE, becomes our point of departure for a desk-based and field-based inquiry into its root causes and related dynamics (current state, gaps, desired state). Our research then helps us co-design operational activities with participants that are tailored to the local context.

The model proposes a framework based on making positive, meaningful, measurable, and sustainable impacts in four key areas:

We provide training, capacity building, and mentoring from our social entrepreneurial perspective. We make sure our clients understand both the costs and financial returns involved, the skills needed to accomplish desired tasks, major market and financial risks, and steps to mitigate those risks.