University of Michigan students enrolled in the Intro to Social Entrepreneurship class work on a class exercise. Courtesy of Nick Tobier

When University of Michigan student Sam Beck was in Indonesia helping to start a church, he came to a realization — he wanted to find some way he could put his faith, passion and interests all to work.

When he came back to the United States, he found a class that could help him on that journey — Intro to Social Entrepreneurship.

“The description of developing and evaluating possible social entrepreneurship ideas, working in a like-minded, multi-disciplinary team, and being able to make an impact before I left college captured my attention, and I was determined to take it since,” he said.

Beck is among 40 students from a variety of majors taking the class, which is taught by Moses Lee and Nick Tobier.

“It’s about combining entrepreneurship, social need, technology and business,” Lee said. ‘The goal is to build a sustainable company that helps to solve a social need.”

In addition to classroom work, the students are on teams that are spending hours in Ann Arbor’s Bryant neighborhood. They're working with residents in the neighborhood, which is the poorest in Ann Arbor, to identify problems and develop businesses to address them. Next semester, they'll work on launching the business.

It’s an approach that worked in Detroit last year, where a company called Get Fresh Detroit is getting fresh produce into Detroit stores so neighborhoods have access to fruit and vegetables.

It was a deliberate choice by Lee and Tobier to work in Bryant this year.

“We want (the students) to understand that they don’t have to go to Detroit for poverty,” Lee said. “Ann Arbor has this veneer of (money), but there’s real poverty here.”

Student Candice Ammori is on a team working with the Bryant Community Center to help find a way to better manage the data their programs generate.

“Our goal is to give the BCC a simple, quick, and efficient central database system so they can record more data and be more competitive for grants in the future,” she said. “This is especially exciting because we plan on developing a standardized data system that (food banks) can provide to the hundred or so agencies that it works with for food distributions. That way, (food banks) can get demographic data, but also data on individuals. They can then cater their programs based on what they find in this data. It would also give lots of other agencies, like the BCC, access to a database system they can use to record their other activities as well.”

Ammori is in the public policy undergraduate program, but said she wanted to learn about business.

“I thought that it seemed like a broad enough topic that I could learn a little bit about the business world before delving deeper into the topics I found interesting,” she said. “I wanted to develop my entrepreneurial mindset. Besides from being a great entry into the business world, this seemed like a great opportunity to learn how to use business to advocate for and create social change."

Ammori said she sees overlaps between public policy and social entrepreneurship. She called the class unique for being able to bring students from across campus together.

"The point of social entrepreneurship is to make something that helps people but is also self-sustainable. Part of that equation is making enough money to continue to create and distribute the product or service," she said. "But another key component might be getting the government to back an effort. That's where my public policy comes into play. I also think that both concentrations heavily rely on communication skills. I want to persuade someone to agree that my policy is the best option, and I also want someone to agree that my social venture is the best solution."

Other students said they enjoy not being stuck in a classroom just learning theory.

“The idea was incredibly appealing for a few reasons,” said Jeff Ong. “On some level, we all have a certain desire to impact the world, to do something great with our lives — Social E seemed like an outlet to do that. As a business student, I saw the class (and Social E in general) as an incredible opportunity to leverage business skills to affect meaningful change in the world.

“At the same time, the class offered a chance to really get my hands 'dirty' in the process of creating a business. The hands-on approach to learning was attractive, coming from an education that's mostly consisted of learning the theory and little real-world application.”

David Jesse covers higher education for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at davidjesse@annarbor.com or at 734-623-2534.