Acknowledging the entrepreneurial spirit of the University of Rochester, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has selected the University as one of eight institutions across the country—and the only one in the Northeast—to receive a major, multi-year grant to make entrepreneurship education an even deeper ingredient of academic activity.

The foundation has awarded the University $3.5 million, which with matching funds will be part of a $10.5 million program over the next five years to embed entrepreneurship into programs across the disciplines and schools—thus affecting students and faculty in the Eastman School of Music, Warner School of Education and Human Development, and School of Nursing, as well as the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, Simon School of Business Administration, and School of Medicine and Dentistry.

This initiative will also include the creation of a University Center for Entrepreneurship to identify new partnerships with alumni, local businesses, and nonprofit organizations, to encourage faculty to design coursework and programs, and to advance research into "best practices" in entrepreneurship education.

Among other programs, a tuition-free "Kauffman Take Five Entrepreneurial Year" will be created for selected undergraduates, modeled on the College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering's well-known "Take Five Scholars Program" that provides a tuition-free fifth year of undergraduate study. Further, the College will work to develop an interdepartmental major in entrepreneurship and to design a new "cluster" in its landmark curriculum.

The Eastman School of Music's groundbreaking Institute for Music Leadership, designed to enable students, alumni, and professional musicians to become versatile music leaders shaping the musical and cultural future, will now include a new focus in "music entrepreneurship."

Direct benefits to the Greater Rochester community will come in the form of summer and year-long programs for area junior and senior high school students and for area educators.

"Great entrepreneurs are laced into the history of our University—in technology, the sciences, medicine and nursing, the arts—and that entrepreneurial spirit continues strongly today on campus," said President Thomas H. Jackson. "It is broadly evident across the disciplines, manifesting itself among our faculty and students in many different, powerful ways.

"The support of the Kauffman Foundation will have a transforming effect on our ability to have all of our constituencies become even more entrepreneurial than they are right now," he added.

Kauffman Campuses Initiatives Grants also went to Washington University in St. Louis, Wake Forest University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, University of Texas at El Paso, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Howard University, and Florida International University in Miami.

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation (www.kauffman.org), based in Kansas City, works with partners to advance entrepreneurship in America and improve the education of children and youth. The foundation was established in the mid-1960s by the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Ewing Marion Kauffman.


A Partial List of New Entrepreneurial Programs through the Kauffman Foundation "Campus Initiatives" Program

Overall

Faculty

Undergraduate Curricular Initiatives

Curricular Initiatives in the Professions

Other student programs

External audiences