Jim Schorr is CEO of Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA), an organization representing 1000 members and 17 regional chapters that has been at the forefront of the social enterprise movement in the United States since 1998. With its origins as the first national conference for social enterprise, SEA is now in its 17th year of convening the field and advancing the cause of social enterprise in the US.
As a student at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in 1993, Schorr was inspired by emerging triple bottom line businesses and helped launch Net Impact, an organization that has since inspired a generation of MBA students at 200+ business schools to leverage the power of business and their careers to make a difference in the world. Schorr subsequently served for 10 years as a Director and Board Chair during Net Impact’s growth and global expansion in the 2000s.
From 2000-07, Schorr was Executive Director of Juma Ventures, an organization that is widely admired as one of the leading social enterprises in the US. Juma develops businesses to create jobs for disadvantaged youth, and provides financial literacy and other programs that facilitate successful transitions to adulthood. Today, Juma’s enterprises have scaled to six US cities and more than 95% of youth participants advance to college each year.
In 2007, Schorr accepted a teaching appointment at the UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to develop a new course on social enterprise. His enthusiasm for teaching led to a full-time academic appointment at Vanderbilt University in 2009. Schorr continues to maintain his faculty appointment at Vanderbilt, where he teaches MBA and undergraduate coursework on social enterprise. He has served on the steering committee of the Social Enterprise World Forum since the event’s inception in 2008.