Start anywhere.
Go as far as you want.
A course gives you the ideas. These programs are where you put them to work — with a community around you and people who have done it before in the room.
Our co-curricular programs form a single path that widens at the base and narrows as the commitment deepens. You can walk in curious, spend an evening at a workshop and leave it there — or follow it all the way to running a real venture and presenting your work internationally. Both are legitimate ways to be here.
One path, deepening
Each stage prepares you for the next, and you can join at any point in it.
Find your footing
Take the introductory course, join DartUp, come to a Purpose Lab session or a convening. Low commitment, open to everyone, and the fastest way to find out whether this work is for you.
Go deeper
Map the System, and the Social Blueprint Challenge. This is where you stop reading about a problem and start researching one properly.
Build it
The Social Venture Incubator, and the Hult Prize. For students with an idea they are ready to have tested hard.
Take it further
Fieldwork, immersion programs and, for the team that earns it, representing Dartmouth on a global stage.
Map the System
An Oxford-run global challenge that inverts the usual competition — understand a problem properly before you pitch a solution.
Explore the programWhat is on offer
DartUp
The student-run heart of social entrepreneurship at Dartmouth — where mission-driven students find each other, build community, and start.
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The Social Blueprint Challenge
DartUp's flagship competition — a first serious attempt at the whole arc: identify a problem, design a response, make the case.
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The Social Venture Incubator
A dedicated term to pressure-test a venture against the real conditions it would have to survive — with a mentor, a stipend, and honest feedback.
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Purpose Lab
A guided, low-pressure session to work out what you actually care about — and what that means for what you do next.
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Hult Prize
One of the largest student competitions in the world — develop a venture for a major global challenge and compete through campus, regional, and global rounds.
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Experiential and global programs
Place students where the work is actually happening — immersion courses, field placements, and partnerships with mission-driven organizations internationally.
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Learn from people doing the work
Throughout the year we bring practitioners to campus: founders, investors and leaders of mission-driven organizations from around the world. These sessions are open to students, and they are among the most direct ways to understand what this work looks like in practice rather than in theory.
See upcoming eventsFour ways in, starting today
Take a class.
PBPL 43 / ECON 5.1 has no prerequisite and welcomes every major.
Join DartUp.
No application. Turn up to a meeting and you are in.
Come to a session.
A Purpose Lab workshop or a practitioner convening, and see what resonates.
Apply to a program.
When applications open for Map the System or the Incubator, put your name in.
You do not need a finished idea or a business plan. Curiosity is genuinely enough to start.
Purpose defines the mission. Market-based models as a force for good.
Whatever you go on to do, in policy, in a nonprofit, in government, in business or in a venture of your own, this is where you learn to make change that lasts.