After meeting Dr. Wallace and learning about the good that he does for his community through the Oasis Project, my mind has been working non-stop. Wallace has employed a systematic strategy to improving his community through social entrepreneurship, and seeing the degree to which he was passionate about his community was refreshing to me. Furthermore, while I had considered the concept of having a profitable business help fund social entrepreneurship, I had never conceived that said profitable business could contribute to the social entrepreneurship in and of itself.

All of this led to me to begin thinking about my own home in Tennessee; for much of my life I have lived in rural, Appalachian Tennessee. Appalachia is an exceptionally poor and disparaged area for a lot of reasons: lack of infrastructure, political inequality, lack of industry, and so on. Therefore, I began to wonder about the logistics of social entrepreneurship in a non-urban area such as Appalachia. Whereas Project Oasis has several facilities within a mile of each other, an Appalachian version of the same project simply could not act in the same way because of the rural nature of said communities. Perhaps there is a lack of social entrepreneurship in rural mountain communities because it simply is not financially feasible, or perhaps the region is isolated enough that social entrepreneurs never really enter. Regardless, there certainly is a severe lack of economic development in Appalachia, and trying to solve this problem interests me greatly.

This then begs the question: is there a specific way to quantify the barriers to social entrepreneurship for any given community? To what degree can social entrepreneurship be data-driven and cookie-cutter, and to what degree does social entrepreneurship have to be driven by qualitative analysis of community trends, attitudes, culture, and other variables? Initially, I would have to argue that the sort of economic development that Dr. Wallace participates in requires a greater level of the latter sort of analysis; there simply is not a way to quantify the difficulties of such wildly stratified communities. Logically, it follows that social entrepreneurship would be one of the most difficult forms of business, not only because it necessitates risk in the sense of making profit a less emphasized goal, but also because the environment in which one operates becomes far more complex than the typical business environment.

In short, today may have been my best experience in this program so far; it has made me look at a problem close to my heart through a new lens, and has made me think non-stop for ten hours and counting.