Business Fundamentals Team Entrepreneurship and Innovation Changemaker Lab Program – Pathway Level 1: Awakening your passions (4 – 12 Credits FR )

Discovering and awakening one’s passion/ideas is a life-long process of creating connections and identifying what value we can bring to our community. Building this life connection is very effective if done as a process of reflection with others in teams utilizing principles of effective dialog.

Programs in the Business Fundamentals, Team Entrepreneurship and Innovation Changemaker Lab Program introduce early on in learning a system that encourages self-reflection, personal value and search within students. Here the Changemaker Lab Program (CML) begins to pave the way for its students to start working on awakening and identifying their passions and leading thoughts about their careers and consider their learning journeys at Evergreen.  First year, FR students, fully participate in the CML activities. They participate in 4 of the 8 hours of CML training sessions and allocate 4 hours in their first year to the first year experience at Evergreen. They do not take on leadership roles during this year.

Awakening your passions – “What is your path?”

  • We make use of the tool known as Learning Compass, by answering the following questions:
    • Where have I been? Where am I now? Where do I want to go? How am I going to get there? How will I know when I’ve arrived?
  • The program allows participants to consider:
    • The importance of maintaining a “learning diary”.
    • The value proposition canvas and formulating a sustainable common “why”.
    • Reflecting on where you see yourself in this field of study (in essay format?).
    • What are your strengths and weaknesses?
    • If you had to focus on and develop yourself this field for a year, what would you do?
    • How would you make a living out of doing that? Do some hands-on research.
    • Identify opportunities for independent scholarships.
    • Develop a pitch (through the use of speaker-listener dynamic) and practice of dialogue.
    • Practice, get feedback, and evolve your pitch by presenting it to your peers and professors.
    • Read interesting books and hone in on your presentation skills in a caring and supportive environment when you share your newly acquired book knowledge.

This phase is integrated into the different disciplines at Evergreen because we believe that every human being is different and must therefore find their chosen path within themselves. This is why we encourage every discipline to foster and promote the time and space for each student to go through this self-discovering journey and share their ideas with fellow students and faculty in dialogue training sessions utilizing effective dialogue techniques, circles and talking sticks. We are confident that our faculty members are the ideal guides for this phase, as they are the ones who hold the most wholesome knowledge and understanding of each discipline. They are the ones with the references of the field’s role models or influences, specialized niches, networks and skills necessary; they are aware and most connected to the problems needing to be solved, and of potential ways to approach those.

A common “why” and Value Proposition Canvas.

Students are introduced by faculty to various opportunities for creating value around common and sustainable goals in the particular disciplines within which they are doing their programs.

Other elements we introduce that cultivate passions include:

  • Integrating health and well being.
  • Creating active listening spaces.
  • Interaction and communication with entreporeneurship incubator spaces and entrepreneurship incubator hub spaces.

Other supporting activities could include:

  • Learn and practice proper dialogue in “training” seminar sessions sitting in circles or remotely on zoom sessions.
  • Allowing for shared time in the entrepreneurship Houston Calling space where students from all over campus and all over the world can come together and experiment.
  • Introducing faculty workshops to create and encourage new ideas, diversity of feedback, spaces to share best practices and learning from each other.
  • Taking students on field trips, conferences and network-creating events.
  • Organizing student-initiated events, workshops.
  • Introducing Changemaker Lab Program students repeating their second and third years as coach/mentor figures for support  including other faculty, alumni)

During this Foundation year specific workshops in the following areas may be offered to FR students participating in First Year Experience Programs:

  • Becoming a Professional
  • Business Pre Calculus
  • Introduction to Organisations, Enterprise and Management
  • Accounting for the Real World
  • Introduction to Business Law in a Social and Business.

The following are some conditions/resources/learnings that are needed to discover one’s passions: intersecting knowledge, risk-taking, design process, intention and patience, self-love and love for others, self-trust and trust on others, having partners in learning journey, developing models of innovation, team dynamics and skill sets, exploration in supportive environment, networking for feedback, growth mindset and understanding of failure as a learning.

Evergreen is a progressive, public liberal arts and sciences college located in Olympia, Washington, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Learn more.