About

Increasingly, communities are recognizing the value of and receiving the benefits from social entrepreneurial efforts initiated by community based service leaders. Social entrepreneurial leadership "combines the passion of a social mission with … business like discipline, innovation, and determination," and often fills gaps where governmental or market based solutions have fallen short (J. Gregory Dees, "The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship").

Existing programs that help prepare social entrepreneurial community leaders can be found in education (Teach for America ), housing (Habitat for Humanity), and architecture (The Rural Studio), among other areas. However, in medicine and healthcare, areas acknowledged by most to be in crisis and in need of innovative thinking and grassroots solutions, there is a striking scarcity, if not total absence of community based leadership development programs which focus on preparing individuals to use their own strengths and to work with the strengths and resources of local communities to effectively meet needs and build on strengths in those communities.

Launched in the Summer of 2009, the Horseshoe Farm Fellowship is a pioneering attempt to rethink and provide a new model for how to prepare our most promising future community based service leaders in medicine and healthcare to lead effective grassroots community based efforts in their own communities once they have completed their education and training.

Students preparing for careers in medicine or healthcare as well as other students with strong leadership potential are invited to commit one year (13 months) to the Greensboro community and to the Horseshoe Farm Fellowship. Fellows are challenged to learn about and become engaged in the community as they are immersed in almost all phases and aspects of the development, management, and leadership of, and service in the programs of Project Horseshoe Farm. To further help prepare Fellows for leadership roles amid the complex systems they will likely face, Fellows are introduced through readings and discussions to topics including community involvement and engagement, an introduction to health care systems, management and leadership of non-profit organizations, health care law and ethics, health care economics, the structure and financing of the health care system, the history of American medicine, and health policy.

Taken as a whole, the Fellowship is intended to provide a rich and textured experience that will help prepare some of our most promising future leaders of healthcare and medicine to provide leadership in service to their communities and potentially to develop innovative community based solutions to the problems facing the broader healthcare system.