Business Fundamentals, Team Entrepreneurship, Leadership and Innovation: Changemaker Lab

“The world has not been given to us to contemplate but to transform and we do it as team-entrepreneurs, learning by creating in teams”

This program can be taken as a 10 week or 6 month program.

This Changemaker Lab Program is a hands-on opportunity for students interested in environmentally and socially sustainable enterprises to learn about biologically-based agriculture and management strategies for running farming or food-based operations.

Most of our time will be spent working in teams and teams of teams to create a learning organization that will facilitate the development of strategic business plans around actual sustainable enterprises and projects. We will utilize some amazing business planning tools used for startups, learn about innovation, strategic visioning and planning, business leadership, creating value, marketing, accounting, tax and web development. We will learn how to use and utilize business software applications as well as scientific instruments and applications.

Team Entrepreneurship, Cooperative Decision Making and Creating Learning Organizations

Hone your skills as a team-entrepreneur and experience the Evergreen Inter Disciplinary way of study and the LEINN and Mondragon Team Academy’s (MTA World) “team learning by creating” over the course of an optional one to three consecutive quarters and become a Changemaker.

Hone your skills as a team-entrepreneur and experience the Evergreen Inter Disciplinary way of study and the LEINN and Mondragon Team Academy’s (MTA World) “team learning by creating” over the course of an optional one to three consecutive quarters and become a Changemaker.

This program is designed around a set of unique ingredients that seeks to promote and empower the entrepreneurial spirit of its participants. It offers a time and space for people from all around the world to work on real projects together at Evergreen.

Last year the Changemaker Lab at Evergreen State College joined 65 other higher education innovators in 14 countries who are working together to spark and accelerate more than 200,000 changemakers.

The program is a combined group of Evergreen Teampreneurs with a exchange group consisting of two team companies from MTA’s LEINN International. The program features a faculty team that combines Evergreen’s pedagogy and local environment with Mondragon’s pedagogy and team-entrepreneurs experience. It further introduces neat tools and resources to support the start up development of entrepreneurial foundations.

 

See our very unique classroom A MTA Evergreen Change Maker Lab

Winter “Incubator” Innovation Specialization – Evergreen Agriculture and Food

We will explore topics such as lean management strategies for farm operations and food establishments,  business opportunities within all aspects of the greater food system,  how organic certification, Food Safety Moderation Act (FSMA) and other Government regulatory requirement affect your business model;  infrastructure needs; finding land; the regulatory aspects of County Extension, conservation districts, and USDA Natural Resources Conservation Services (NRCS).

We will design a business plan, competitive business model and a solid strategic plan. We will investigate social purpose corporations and other forms of business ownership. Our business plan will incorporate marketing, accounting, human resources, and strategic planning. We will use accounting software to record and analyze data in a lab setting. We will learn how to estimate taxes, do break-even analyses, calculate payroll costs and prepare pro forma financial statements.

Building a business can require outlays of cash and financing. Most farm and food businesses are comprised of various smaller, self contained enterprises. We’ll learn how to measure whether anyone enterprise is going to make money and, if so, how much money. We will explore debt and equity financing while planning for business investing needs and also gain an understanding of how financiers make investment decisions.

Credit equivalencies can be expected in managerial accounting and strategic planning.

This offering will prepare you for careers and advanced study in:

Entrepreneurship, farming, agriculture extension and other food- and agriculture-focused government agencies, (i.e., USDA, FDA. WSDA, WA Dept. of Health, WA Dept. of Ecology), NGO, restaurant industry, and food processing and distribution.

Second 10 Weeks (6 Months) – Spring

Spring “Incubator” Innovation Specialization – Cooperatives, Direct Democracy, and Sustainable Business Enterprises

The unsustainability of advanced capitalism is no longer in doubt, with environmental degradation accelerating at unprecedented rates along with massively widening wealth inequality on a global scale. Worker-owned cooperatives offer an alternative model of entrepreneurship that bring direct democracy and genuine accountability to business. In what ways can worker-owned cooperatives be more sustainable, even regenerative, for the environment and for the various communities (at all points of the food chain) that they work with and affect? What potential do cooperatives have in creating a more socially and ecologically just world? What roles can cooperatives play in facilitating equity among historically marginalized groups?

In this program, we will examine the history of worker-owned cooperatives in the U.S. and internationally, along with contemporary case studies, with an emphasis on collective enterprises in the area of food and agriculture.  Indeed, given the rising prices of prime farmland, prohibitive startup costs, unpredictability, and labor-intensive nature of agriculture, worker-owned cooperatives offer a more sustainable path towards starting and maintaining successful farm-based enterprises, with recent research indicating that worker-owned cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses.

Cooperatives must be effectively managed using sustainable and sound business management principles. In this program we will examine the legal structures of entities and their tax implications, operationalizing of business plans and the general management of cooperative enterprises including accounting, human resources, marketing, payroll and income tax planning.

Historical and contemporary case studies include: 19th-century labor utopian cooperatives, African-American cooperatives from early to late 20th century, The Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland, Green Worker Cooperatives in New York, Cooperation Jackson, Mondragon in Spain, the Zapatistas in Southern Mexico, the horizontal cooperative movement in Argentina, urban agriculture collectives in Cuba, and small farmer cooperatives in India.  Other topics of study include comparisons between family and monopoly capitalism, solidarity economics, and social entrepreneurship. A community-based learning component will include site and work visits to cooperative businesses in the Olympia area.

This offering will prepare you for careers and advanced study in:

Agriculture, Entrepreneurship, Sustainable Development, Urban and Rural Planning, Coooperative Enterprises

Team-entrepreneurs will attend seminars, lunch time speaking events, field trips, guest lectures and team activities. As a participant, one may supplement knowledge by attending certain supplemental workshops and lectures. There will also be some opportunities for optional international and local travel. Some travel to Seattle may be required.

The program has been designed by a shared team of faculty members from MTA Traveling University & The Evergreen State College. Thanks to this strategic collaboration, it is the first time that students from the United States will learn and experiment with Mondragon Team Academy’s methods.

 

Team Entrepreneurship Learning by Doing Competencies

There are 21 competencies in three categories that students will get exposure to namely;

Learning as a team

1. Information technologies and computer skills
2. Team-learning techniques
3. Personal learning methods and attitudes (mental models)
4. Creativity
5. International vision
6. Communication skills
7. Self-guidance

Leading a team

8. Self-management skills
9. Project management
10. Team leadership capacity
11. Planning techniques
12. Coaching skills
13. Strategic skills
14. Decision making and determination

Team entrepreneurship

15. Consumer services and negotiation and sales techniques
16. Comprehension of financial elements
17. Marketing
18. Innovation
19. Theoretical and modeling skills of an entrepreneur
20. Networking
21. Bravery and will to overcome obstacles

Mondragon Team Academy (MTA World) is a global community of social innovation ecosystem labs using the Mondragon’s Worker Cooperative Experience roots & TiimiAkatemia’s Finnish Educational methods. MTA was created in 2008 to rebirth and transfer the team-entrepreneurial spirit and creating capacity of Mondragon by developing an open and international community of team-entrepreneurs co-operating on a multi-generational, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary level worldwide. As of January 2019, MTA is an international community of 1,547 team-entrepreneurs “team learning by creating” in 11 MTA Labs where MTA programs run: Irun-San Sebastian, Onati (Mondragon Valley), Madrid, Bilbao, Barcelona, Valencia, Maastrich (Netherlands), Shanghai (China), Pune (India), Queretaro & Puebla (Mexico), Seoul (South Korea).

*This program that begins in Winter has a suggested continuing component in Spring quarter. See the catalog listing for registration information. This program offers advanced study for students continuing from a prior changemaker program and is also open to new students who meet the prerequisites.

Contact: gouwsd@evergreen.edu

FACULTY MEMBERS, FACILITATORS & ROLES:

FACULTY MEMBERS, FACILITATORS & ROLES:
MTA Evergreen – LEINN Spring and or Summer 2019
Faculty	Institution	Faculty Role
Dion Gouws	Evergreen Faculty	MTA Evergreen Team Coach
David Muelheissen	Evergreen Faculty	MTA Evergreen Team Coach
Jose Maria Luzarraga	MTA World visiting faculty at Evergreen	Program Coordinator
Maria Valle	MTA  Visiting Faculty at Evergreen	MTA International Team Coach
Egoitz Tellitu	MTA  Visiting Faculty at Evergreen	MTA International Team Coach

Dr. Dion Gouws, CPA, MTA Evergreen Team Coach

Dion is a member of the business management and entrepreneurship faculty at Evergreen. Highlights of his life from activities over the world include “chaperone” of the President of  the National Health and Allied Workers Union during apartheid South Africa; starting and operating a management consulting firm for many years; wildlife restoration and conservation and being appointed by the South African government for several years to address the representation of all members of society in the aviation sector by developing an employment equity training plan for the defense and civil sector.

In Angola he was appointed to coordinate and manage a project involving the capture of family groups of elephant and other wildlife families in South Africa and relocated these, for the first time ever by airlift, to Angola. As Director of a 1.2-million-hectare park in Angola he established its wildlife management and tourism infrastructure and drafted enabling national parks legislation.

In 2001 he immigrated to the United States, obtained a CPA license and started and operates a public accounting firm in California. He worked in the US Virgin Islands for seven years as an Associate Professor of Accounting and held the positions of Chair of the Department Accounting and Finance and Assistant Dean of the School of Business. In 2016 he received the SBA- SBDC Small Business Champion of the year Award.  He was awarded a Certificate of Special US Congressional Recognition for his contribution to society.

On his academic path he prepared himself as a professional accountant, obtained an MBA from Edinburgh Business School, a Doctoral Degree in Strategic Management from the University of Johannesburg and a Master’s Degree in Accounting and Finance from Keller Graduate School. In his other profession he is an avid Scuba Diving Instructor.

He is keen to share his experiences through mentoring with learning communities that are discovering how to deliver their value in the GIG economy through community building and creating enterprises that have a larger sense of purpose.  Combining Team Entrepreneurship as developed by MTA and Tiimiakatamia, with Evergreen’s learning model, Six Expectations of the Evergreen Graduate and the 5 Foci of Learning and model shaped network structure may provide us with an excellent model to develop our future entrepreneurs that will create enterprises with the necessary sustainable social perspective, equally both, for profit and not for profit entities.

Yujiao Xia, MTA Team Coach

Master of Intrapreneurship and Open Innovation, Mondragon University; Bachelor of Business in Marketing, University of Tasmania; Bachelor of Management in International Business, Shanghai Ocean University.

MTA Team Coach since September 2017 providing team coaching for LEINN (European bachelor’s degree on Entrepreneurial Leadership & Innovation) program of Mondragon University after graduating from TEAMINN Mastery program.

Translator since October 2016 with books translated (from English to Chinese): Organization Development by Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge, The Team Coach’s Best Tools by Johannes Partanen, Covert Processes at Work by Robert J. Marshak.

Initiator of Impact Hub Shanghai, member of the co-founding team supporting on-boarding process of Impact Hub Shanghai, focusing on the educational area.

Co-founder of Innovative OD Center (China) from 2011 to 2016, responsible for the introduction and localization of the leadership and organizational development related training programs from United Kingdom (Nowhere Group) and United States (Power Lab, NTL, Gestalt OSD Center, etc.), to China; involvement in the OD’s consulting work for domestic and multinational corporations focusing on catalyzing innovation and organization transformation, clients include Alibaba Group, Bertelsmann China Corporate Center.

Dr. Jose Maria Luzarraga – Program Coordinator – MTA visiting faculty in Evergreen

Co-founder of Mondragon Team Academy (MTA World) & LEINN, ASHOKA Fellow, TiimiAkatemia Master Team Coach

Professor & International researcher at Mondragon University since 2004 lecturing in MBA and masters specialized in Global Business, Working Co-operatives, Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainable Development & CSR Strategies.

Author of his PhD thesis “Mondragon Multilocalisation Strategy: Innovating a Human Centered Globalisation” back in 2008.

Speaker at several international conferences in India, Norway, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, USA, Saudi Arabia, China & Brazil, collaborating with different universities as CEIBS (Shanghai), Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico) or Harvard Business School (Boston, MA).

Serial social entrepreneur having cofounded several social business start-ups such as: “Viaje Solidario” a responsible tourism platform (2004), Empathya Consulting: CSR & leadership consulting (2005), “EusKalAsia” Basque Country & Asia platform (2006), MTA World (2008), TZBZ Innovation (2012), MTA China (2014), MTA Korea (2016) & MTA Africa (2018).

Awarded as ASHOKA Fellow in 2015 and advisory Board member of TZBZ S.Coop & DOT S.Coop..

Ane Beitia Salaberria, MTA Assistant Team Coach

Co-Founder & CCO of ABORA World, and Team-entrepreneur at Mondragon Team Academy

Co-founder and Chief Communications Officer of ABORA World, and part of LEINN International’s first generation, pioneers of a nomad and multicultural revolution. Passionate team-entrepreneur focused on the fields of education innovation, intergenerationality, and applied technologies.

Organizer of several events and initiatives, such as AKTION, a platform to generate opportunities and interaction spaces for entrepreneurial people from different generations, and United Nations Global Goals Jam Seattle, first ever West Coast location to host the event to give answers to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Leading and organization of exchanges and training courses for the European Union’s Erasmus+ program on topics such as global ethical values, democratization, entrepreneurship, immigration and sustainability.

Completed various academic stays in the United States; 2011-2012 in Chico, CA, 2015-2016 in Berkeley, CA, and 2018 in Olympia, WA.

Martin Fernández de Labastida García, MTA Assistant Team Coach

Co-Founder & CEO of ABORA World, and Team-entrepreneur at Mondragon Team Academy

Co-founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer of ABORA World, and part of LEINN International’s first generation, pioneers of a nomad and multicultural revolution. Passionate leader and entrepreneur focused on the fields of education, innovation, social impact and 4.0 technologies.

Experience working on the organization of several events such as the United Nations Global Goals Jam Seattle 2018, a one-day hackathon to solve local challenges through innovative and creative methodologies in teams; and Team Talks, a conference showcasing individuals’ team entrepreneurial experiences through short, powerful talks.

Co-founded World ID, an identity card to recognize world citizenship, and part of the development of BeMonkeys, an international brand of technological phone gadgets.

Lived in China, Belgium, Switzerland, Spain and United States, working and completing academic stays.

Evergreen is located in beautiful Olympia, State of Washington.