Fighting cancer in and out of class: UNT course pushes social entrepreneurship

The nonprofit’s mission is to prioritize care methods for North Texas children fighting cancer. It also works to improve the quality of the children’s live in part by bringing families who are going through treatments together. Families share social events throughout the year through the Children’s Cancer Fund.

Hackett and Pletan had something besides their social entrepreneurship in common: both had dealt with cancer, up close and personal.

“It was actually my partner, Jeremiah,” Hackett said. “He has a brother who went through childhood cancer. It was on his list, because Dr. Short had us go through some possible topics that we’re interested in. Whenever I saw that he was interested in cancer, it was a no brainer for me.”

In late August of 2022, Hackett was diagnosed with rectal cancer for the second time. Her first diagnosis was in the spring of 2021. She took incompletes in her classes to concentrate on treatment.

“I just focused on getting better,” Hackett said. “After that, I had to go every three months for scans, and I went the week before school started. It was the third day of school that I got the news and I was like, ‘Oh, man, this is gonna be a rough turn,’ and it was.”

Hackett, who returned to school after raising four daughters, said she decided to power through the treatment in Dallas and at M.D. Anderson in Houston and attending classes on the Denton campus.

“This semester, when that happened, I was like, ‘I am not doing that again,’ because every semester I’ve had to take classes, plus make up. This semester, I had six classes. Two of them were making up from that semester. I didn’t want to do that again. I just wanted to do everything in my power to finish. I needed it to be over,” Hackett said.

Short’s class requires students to raise at least $500 for their chosen nonprofit, and each class has a goal of raising $10,000. His class attracts students outside of the G. Brint Ryan College of Business, but Hackett was in a class with mostly entrepreneurship students.

The course looks at how traditional and novel business techniques can be harnessed to help solve cultural, social or environmental problems. Short’s students study how entrepreneurs are changing the way nonprofits present their missions and visions, and how they raise money.

Over the last 20 years or so, social entrepreneurs have addressed environmental problems, such as massive plastic pollution in the world’s oceans and waterways, by leading clean-up efforts and then using some of the materials claimed from the ocean to make new products, like jewelry, reusable bottles and the like.

Social entrepreneurship students discuss and debate approaches to solving social problems without hurting the communities they serve.

“We watch a documentary called Poverty, Inc. that really talks about some of those things,” Short said. “An example of that would be Tom’s shoes, where you buy one [pair of shoes], give one away. But in the movie, it explores the depth or the dark side of that.

“Maybe you’re providing shoes to people who need them but you’re also putting a local cobbler out of business … That’s something that always strikes me as that tension of how do you help support these nonprofits while not selling out? The students in class don’t have the time to start a purely social venture. So, this gets us close to that. You’re doing something social on behalf of someone, and doing something entrepreneurial, so that you’re making real money that will really go to these different groups.”

Short said the nonprofits students work with are familiar with some of the best-known crowdfunding platforms. GoFundMe is a popular platform, because campaigns get all the money they raise. Kickstarter, another popular platform often used to fund products or productions, requires campaigns to meet their fundraising goal in the designated timeline to get any funding.

DonorsChoose is a crowdfunding platform that allows donors to give directly to public school classroom projects.

“For a lot of the campaigns, or a lot of the nonprofits, maybe they were aware of GoFundMe, but they were not on the platform,” Short said. “In this class, in some cases, we would have to kind of walk a nonprofit through the process of using the platform.”

Hackett and Pletan marketed their campaign using social media, and they exceeded the $500 goal. Their classmates curated campaigns for disabled military veterans, public school teachers, women’s shelters, ministries fighting hunger, animal welfare and helping women in poverty.

Hackett said nonprofits like the Children’s Cancer Fund support families during their darkest hours.

“I have to say, for me, whenever the cancer returned, I said, ‘What I’m more afraid of than the cancer is going back to that dark place,” she said. “Because whenever I finish treatment, I’m starting to see a pattern.

“I do what I need to do, and then whenever I’m done, or done with a surgery, it’s the depression that comes after. It’s hard to function. And I was on guard this time, and it still came pretty bad. So that’s the real struggle for me.”

She said her team’s success is owed to Short’s leadership and teaching.

“I think Dr. Short set us up for success,” Hackett said. “I just loved the whole course, because it was very interactive, and we were all very engaging. You got to hear what other people were doing and could just kind of bounce off of the ideas from everyone. I think just following his directions was key.”