- Social entrepreneurs to speak at North Central College forum
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Kim McCullough, Public Relations Director, 630/637-5307
Feb. 13, 2008––North Central College will host “Social Entrepreneurship and New Visions of Community Building,” a forum on applying business principles to effect social change, on Thursday, Feb. 21.
Open to the public, the free forum will feature:
• Gerald Thalmann, associate professor of accounting at North Central College, speaking on “Coffee, Chocolate, Students and Free Enterprise.” A certified public accountant, Thalmann co-advises North Central’s Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE) organization. Among its activities, SIFE works with coffee and artisan cooperatives in Latin America and Africa to provide a profitable, socially conscious product line of jewelry, textiles, tote bags, T-shirts, coffee and other goods that has generated more than $10,000 in revenue for the overseas producers.
• Cliff Parish, CEO and founder of RemoteLink and RemoteLink Philippines, Inc., speaking on “Frontline: Computers, the Church and Education in the Philippines.” Parish is also director of The NewThing Network-Asia, which works to multiply Christian missions in Asia. An active member of the BBL Forum for Christian chief executives, he has been a catalyst for new church plants, Christian schooling and adult education in the United States and the Philippines.
• Kristin Dean, president of the Homan Square Community Center Foundation, speaking on “Homan Square: From Sears & Roebuck to Complete Community.” The Homan Square project, a $200 million redevelopment of the 55-acre former Sears, Roebuck and Co. headquarters on Chicago’s West Side, has won numerous local and national awards including the Urban Land Institute Award for Excellence and two Chicago Neighborhood Development Awards.
• Keynote speaker Esther Benjamin, director of resource development for the International Partnership for Microbicides that works to provide retroviral drugs and training to women in the developing world, speaking on “Education for Social Change.” Benjamin, a 1990 North Central College alumna who serves on the College’s Board of Trustees, is a fellow with the U.S.-Japan Foundation and the U.S.-Southern Africa Center for Leadership and Public Values. She also is a member of the Echoing Green Foundation, which provides grants to social entrepreneurs and encourages careers of social service.
Thalmann, Parish and Dean will speak beginning at 4:30 p.m. in Koten Chapel at Kiekhofer Hall, 329 E. School St. Benjamin’s keynote remarks will begin at 7 p.m. in Heininger Auditorium at Larrance Academic Center, 309 E. School St.
For more information, contact Richard Guzman, North Central College professor of English and director of the master of arts in liberal studies program, at 630-637-5280.
Founded in 1861, North Central College is an independent, comprehensive college of the liberal arts and sciences that offers more than 50 undergraduate majors and graduate programming in six areas. Located in the historic district of Naperville, Illinois, which was rated by Money magazine as the nation’s second “best place to live,” North Central College is just 30 minutes from Chicago’s Loop. With more than 2,000 full-time undergraduates and nearly 550 part-time undergraduate and graduate students, North Central College is committed to academic excellence, a climate that emphasizes leadership, ethics, values and service, a curriculum that balances job-related knowledge with a liberal arts foundation and a caring environment with small classes.
North Central College is affiliated with the United Methodist Church. It is recognized as one of “America’s Best Colleges” by U.S. News & World Report; ranked as “a college for high-achieving students” by Peterson’s Competitive Colleges; and among a select number of schools profiled in Kaplan’s Unofficial Insider’s Guide to the 320 Most Interesting Colleges.
