Social Entrepreneurship: A Needed Tool for Contemporary Community Development Education

Community development education (CDE) can learn from the field of social entrepreneurship to catalyze transformational change in communities. Social entrepreneurship does not aim to incrementally improve unjust equilibriums, but aims to transform them into new and more just equilibriums. As CDE seeks to instruct students to address social, economic, and environmental change, social entrepreneurship supplies another tool for instructor, student, and professional toolkits to improve community well-being. This article begins by outlining fundamental concepts from the fields of community development and social entrepreneurship. Intersections in the respective literatures for each of the fields are then discussed. This article continues with aims to inform an emerging national research agenda for CDE. In that light, Martin and Osberg’s (2015) social entrepreneurship process is presented alongside examples that can be used by students, instructors, and professionals in courses and in the field. Furthermore, the article highlights critical perspectives to help both fields get beyond better – to disrupt unjust social equilibriums. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.