Before her last semester of college Emily Núñez Cavness never imagined starting her own business. On a frigid Vermont evening in late January 2012 the French literature and international studies major attended Middlebury College’s inaugural social entrepreneurship symposium purely out of curiosity. Sitting in the campus’s storied 99-year-old chapel, Cavness listened to keynote speaker Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of nonprofit VC fund Acumen, share examples of social enterprises, including one that recycled coffee waste into fertilisers.
Cavness, an Army ROTC cadet who grew up in a military family, immediately thought of the huge piles of military surplus she saw at the various bases she visited. What if that discarded material could be turned into something beautiful, even salable? What if such a recycling project could bridge the divide between the military and civilians—a handbag or backpack as a constant, functional reminder?
As a liberal arts student, Cavness had little real-world experience, but her elder sister, Betsy, encour- aged her to enter MiddChallenge, Middlebury’s business-plan competition. “I didn’t really know what a business plan was. It was daunting,” Cavness recalls. But her team won first place—and was rewarded with a $3,000 grant.
Since that initial boost, Cavness has taken her ecommerce startup, Sword & Plough, from an idea to a real social enterprise that has sold more than 7,000 stylish bags and accessories, while recycling over 25,000 pounds of military surplus products, supporting 38 new jobs for veterans and donating 10 percent of profits to charitable causes. “Without Middlebury and the Center for Social Entrepreneurship, Sword & Plough would have remained just another interesting idea rather than an exciting reality,” says Cavness, 25, now a first lieutenant.
With annual symposiums, mentorship programmes and funding competitions, Middlebury is one of many small liberal arts colleges reinventing themselves as modern- day startup incubators—geared toward for-profit enterprises and nonprofits alike. Driven by market demand and the idea of teaching practical skills that would create larger impacts outside of traditional liberal arts classrooms, these colleges are encouraging students to pursue entrepreneurship—in particular, social entrepreneurship. Success stories like Sword & Plough are proving that business is no longer the exclusive territory of research universities and specialty colleges.
(This story appears in the 04 September, 2015 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)