Stanford University announced a new "ecopreneurship" program focused on supporting students working on climate-related initiatives, and it's doing so with a "sizeable" gift from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne Benioff.
The new Stanford program will be a joint project of the Doerr School of Sustainability and the Graduate School of Business. It will support students working on climate-related efforts in public, private or non-profit sectors.
The university did not disclose the exact size of the donation from the Benioffs, but the program's new co-director Yi Cui told me it was "sizeable."
"We are looking for ideas right here that can be scaled and have a global impact with speed" from young entrepreneurs with high energy and lots of excitement for working on climate change, Cui said. "We need to see that they're catching fire type of people."
The new programs will benefit both undergraduate and graduate students enrolled at Stanford University. And while the ecopreneurship program could evolve in the future, Cui said, at launch it has three main areas of focus, all with a climate-focused lens.
One is a year-long fellowship for early-stage "high-impact" concepts that need help with scaling into the real world. These "Impact Founder in Ecopreneurship" fellowships will be awarded to graduating students who will also be paired with a faculty-led lab.
Two different summer-long programs will provide financial support for graduate-level internships at early-stage companies as well as an immersion program for students who are leading their own projects or working in a faculty-led project.
The new funding will also allow Stanford to double the capacity and programming of the its Climate Ventures courses.
"Addressing sustainability issues will require us to mobilize all talents, not only at the faculty level but at in the student level. Not only inside Stanford, but also globally," Cui said. "We think it's so important to develop as many ecopreneurs as possible."
The summer immersion program will support 16 graduate students this year, and 10 graduates will be placed in internships at startups, the university said.
In 2021, the Benioffs announced a new $300 million fund that would be dedicated to making grants and investments in climate change mitigation projects.
One-third of that fund was committed to investments through Time Ventures, another third would go to non-profits via Salesforce and the remaining third would go towards forest management in indigenous communities and emerging and developing countries.
