Dear Neil,

 

I have had the pleasure of working closely with your colleague Marcy O'Neil for the past several months as she established herself as a leader in the SolutionsU community of educators.  She told me about the undergraduate entrepreneurship program that you run, and I am reaching out to you today because I believe that our resources would also be of interest to you and your colleagues.  Let me explain.

 

SolutionsU is a project of the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN), a nonprofit organization that works to rebalance the news so that what we read, hear and listen to each day isn't just problems, but also solutions. SJN works with newsrooms and universities to train journalists and future journalists in how to do this type of reporting on society’s toughest challenges, and SolutionsU works to disseminate these stories across society, beginning with higher education.  

 

As part of this mission, we provide our resources to educators at no cost. 

 

SolutionsU just launched in August 2017, and already we are nearly 200 faculty (and administrators) strong, teaching in a range of disciplines at more than 100 college campuses across the country. Solutions journalism stories add value and creativity to courses in disciplines ranging from economics and environmental studies to business, social entrepreneurship and, as Marcy has demonstrated, anthropology. These resources complement or enhance texts or journal articles with nuanced, diverse, and continuously updated stories about people around the world working to create change. 

 

If other MSU faculty are half as ambitious and motivated as Marcy, then MSU is at the top of our list of institutions that we would like to partner with in getting these stories into the classroom! 

 

I am sending along our first SolutionsU Educator Newsletter, as well as an invitation to you to join our growing community.  Please take a look, and if you wouldn't mind letting me know what you think, I would appreciate it. I also have colleagues nearby at U of Michigan Flint and U of Michigan Ann Arbor, and if we have sufficient interest between the three institutions, I could come out in January and do a faculty workshop.

 

Thank you, and best wishes for a successful wrap up to the fall semester!

 

Katherine

 

PS – In the Featured Resources section of the Newsletter below, you’ll find an assignment you could send home with your students (or do yourself) over the upcoming holiday break.  It will get them (and you) started using SolutionsU!