Innovation & Impact: Cultivating Food Equity

How can we create a course for all Columbia students in which students connect entrepreneurial thinking to their own creative processes as well as larger systemic problems related to equity and justice?

I co-created the upper-level course, “Innovation and Impact” that all Columbia College Chicago students take. In this class, students employ an entrepreneurial mindset to understand how equity-focused innovation can drive sustained social, economic, and cultural impact. By using entrepreneurial thinking to generate ideas and put those ideas into action, students will learn to recognize and cultivate opportunities for a range of innovative projects such as business ventures, social and civic services, and creative projects in media, arts, and design.

Designed as a transformative DEI educational experience, the class will offer structures for students to assess, leverage and add to their own skills sets through transdisciplinary collaboration and proactive self-evaluation practices. Beginning with the critical interrogation of case studies and sites, students will employ methodologies connected with business, technology and communications in order to create a proposal/portfolio deliverable for a new business, social venture, and/or speculative enterprise.

I teach a section of this course, “Cultivating Food Equity,” which focuses on inequities in the food system. Using entrepreneurial thinking to generate ideas that imagine a more equitable future food system, students learn to recognize and cultivate opportunities for a range of innovative projects such as business ventures, social and civic services, and creative projects in media, arts, and design. Designed as a transformative DEI educational experience, the class offers structures for students to assess, leverage and add to their own skills sets through transdisciplinary collaboration and proactive self-evaluation practices.