I read this article in USA Today a week ago, but thought it was appropriate to write about it today given that I just gorged myself during Thanksgiving dinner. The article is about how many children go hungry or are at risk of going hungry in the U.S. One of every four children in New Mexico and Texas and one of every five in a dozen other states live in households that struggle to provide enough food at some point during the year. California is in that latter category of one out of five. That's absolutely amazing to me. I suppose I know very little about the problem of poverty in America. Interesting, cause my last post was all about income mobility in America. But indeed, there are millions of Americans, 35 million in fact (about 12% of the population), that fall into that "food insecure" category. The report found that 13 million children are at risk. It was nice to find that 15 million low-income children get free school lunches and 7 million get free breakfasts. And then more than 50,000 take home backpacks on Fridays filled with pounds of healthy food.
I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...
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