Author-Scholars Stuart Hart and William Easterly and UN Global Compact Leader Will Visit Campus

DePaul University’s College of Commerce will launch an ambitious three-year program in March to promote the creation of business initiatives that reduce poverty and health care inequities in Chicago as well as in developing nations.

The program reflects the growing trend of business schools becoming agents for social change by educating students and encouraging the corporate world to use commerce as a catalyst for alleviating poverty, advancing peace and protecting the environment.

Sponsored by the college’s Institute for Business & Professional Ethics (IBPE) and supported by a $45,000 grant from Abbott Fund, a charity sponsored by the worldwide health care company Abbott, DePaul’s initiative will begin with a lecture series featuring distinguished scholars who will explore the theme of poverty reduction through profits. During the 2007-2008 academic year, the IBPE will sponsor programs that examine how business could expand health care for the poor and reduce the number of uninsured. In the third year of the project, IBPE’s goal is to develop new, appealing models for the business sector to address urban poverty and health-care access locally and globally.

“While this focus on the for-profit sector is only one of several viable models, it is one that challenges both traditional, classical economic models and the view that only charity or government is capable of addressing poverty,” said Patricia Werhane, Wicklander Chair of Business Ethics and director of the IBPE. “As we will learn from our speakers, models for long-term change can come from for-profit programs that promote dignity, responsibility and self reliance among recipients while creating wealth for both the recipients and the companies that create these programs.”

The lecture series begins March 5 with a talk by William Easterly, author of the best-selling book, “White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.” A professor of economics and Africana studies at New York University, Easterly is a nationally known expert on long-term economic growth and the effectiveness of foreign aid. He worked sixteen years as a research economist at the World Bank and is a fellow of the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C. He has founded and/or edits a number of economic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Growth and the Journal of Development Economics. The lecture begins at 3 p.m. in the DePaul Student Center, Room 314 A&B, 2250 N. Sheffield Ave.

The IBPE also is actively involved in the United Nation’s Global Compact Networks. Created by the United Nations in 2000, Global Compact challenges business leaders and a coalition of U.N. agencies, labor unions, academic institutions and civil society organizations to advance universal principles for human rights, fair labor practices, environmentalism and anti-corruption. DePaul is taking a leadership role among the 120 academic institutions that have joined Global Compact to develop education materials that will be used for teaching principles for responsible business worldwide.

DePaul’s initiatives are part of a larger management education movement to foster socially and ethically responsible business practices. Two years ago, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the international business school accrediting body, launched Peace Through Commerce, led by Carolyn Woo, dean of the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. The initiative encourages the study and teaching of business practices that promote peace via financial stability, cross-border cooperation, trust and tolerance internationally.

Several business schools also have founded centers and degree programs devoted to advancing for-profit solutions to social and environmental challenges. They include the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the University of North Carolina and the Corporate Environmental Management Program at the University of Michigan – both founded by Hart – as well as the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case Western Reserve University and the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University.

The view that for-profit initiatives can be successful in reducing poverty received a major boost this fall, Werhane noted, when Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize for lifting six million people from poverty in his native Bangladesh through his bank’s program of small loans to poor entrepreneurs.

“In an increasingly global economy where an estimated two-thirds of the population lives in poverty, for-profit initiatives can be instrumental in developing new markets in these sectors while providing jobs and services for the needy,” she said. “If Muhammad Yunus can be successful in a country as poor as Bangladesh, surely we in the United States can reduce poverty both globally and locally by providing jobs and entrepreneurial opportunities. We only need the will to do so.”

For information about the public lectures, contact the IBPE at 312/362-8786.