Campus Compact is delighted to welcome Dr. Sandra Enos, Associate Professor of Sociology at Bryant University, as a Scholar-in-Residence this spring. Dr. Enos will support Campus Compact by examining and maximizing the connection between the work of our member campuses and existing trends in the field. Dr. Enos will examine the connections and disjunctures between community-based learning and social entrepreneurship by tracing the history and development of these fields, documenting how programs are organized on campuses, assessing the limitations and challenges of institutionalizing both community-based learning and social entrepreneurship in the academy, and proposing a way forward for integrating how these philosophies and practices in civic skill development. We look forward to sharing her work with members through Compact place-based and virtual offerings.

Background

As documented by Ashoka U, there has been steady growth in the number of campuses, here and abroad, offering courses or programs of study in social entrepreneurship. This field has attracted much interest and considerable funding. Like community-based learning/service-learning, social entrepreneurship is defined in varying ways. It shares some characteristics with civic engagement efforts—the focus on engaged learning, orientation to social problems, and concern about the larger community–and in other respects, social entrepreneurship offers a different view and practice of engagement. Both can contribute to the development of civic skills. As a Scholar-in-Residence, Dr. Enos will examine the challenges these divergent approaches present to civic engagement practitioners and the opportunities for integrating them productively.

More on Sandra Enos

Enos earned her doctorate in sociology at the University of Connecticut at Storrs in 1998 after a long career in public and nonprofit service. Her dissertation research, published by SUNY Press and titled Mothering from the Inside: Parenting in a Women’s Prison, relied on qualitative and observational research to examine how women inmates manage mothering while incarcerated. Prior to joining the faculty at Rhode Island College in 1998, Professor Enos worked in child welfare, corrections, higher education reform and nonprofit management, and served on the executive staff of the Rhode Island’s Governor as a policy aide. At the national office of the Campus Compact, she led the Project on Integrating Service with Academic Study and worked with academic departments and campuses to more closely connect community work with academic content. With colleagues, she helped to organized a well-received AAHE series on service-learning in the disciplines. She has also worked in the area of child welfare history, tracing the development of policy using a socio-historical perspective. Her recent article on the impact of mass incarceration and women appeared in the Journal of Interdisciplinary of Feminist Thought. She serves as Associate Professor of Sociology at Bryant University, where she led the establishment of the major in service-learning on campus and has founded the new concentration in social entrepreneurship. She is a nationally recognized leader in the field of service-learning and has published several articles and chapter contributions in this field. She is the founder of Brains.Toys.Games, a social enterprise focused on the issue of toy deserts, which refers to the lack of good quality teaching toys and enriching play opportunities in poor communities.