Innovating for Good: SIC Alumni Spotlight

When a person is evicted, loses a job or has another life event that leads to temporary homelessness, they often hold onto an important asset: their vehicle. Teresa Smith, a 2014 USD graduate alumna, recognized that a vehicle allows people to get to or look for work or school and access necessary services, yet many homeless resources in town are not set up to accommodate vehicles. Her proposal: a safe parking program that would allow individuals and families to have a safe, dependable place to park at night while they are in transition. Often, this has made the difference between moving forward and spiraling into chronic homelessness. Teresa’s simple idea, to negotiate an evening-to-dawn secure parking program at locations that do not use their parking lot at night, has now served over 3,000 individuals since inception.

In 2013, Teresa entered her safe parking idea into the San Diego Social Innovation Challenge, a student-venture contest for socially conscious businesses or innovative non profit ideas organized by the University of San Diego’s Center for Peace and Commerce. This wasn’t Teresa’s first social venture — the prior year, she had entered an idea for a mobile catering food truck that would provide healthy food to Calfresh card holders. By the time she came to USD for an MA in Nonprofit Leadership and Management, Teresa had founded Dreams for Change, a nonprofit with the mission to fill the gaps of government and social services through out-of-box collaborative models and innovative, cost-effective programs in order to stabilize the lives of underserved families and individuals. USD helped her find ways to innovate for good.

Teresa is an example of what happens when you put a passionate and capable individual in the mix with other Changemakers, add in some mentoring from those who have gone before, and infuse a little cash. That’s what the San Diego Social Innovation is about — idea labs, mentoring, support and some cash to start.

Teresa comes back each year to judge and mentor for the Social Innovation Challenge. Since she first participated in 2012, she has been part of a panel of judges that has awarded cash and in-kind prizes to student ventures that provide low cost, portable toilet seats, water purification systems, low cost education solutions and to a veteran-owned sustainable solutions company.

The 2017 Social Innovation Challenge is open to full time undergraduate and graduate students in San Diego County and in our neighbor to the south, Mexico. Are you a community member with experience in enterprise development or non profit management interested in being a coach or a mentor for a student venture group? Email: cpc@sandiego.edu.