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NACCE has compiled vignettes of community college Presidents who have embraced entrepreneurship as part of the solution to the challenging times we are facing-both for the leadership team and the communities they serve. Below is the second in our series, a brief story of Felix Haynes, President, Hillsborough College, FL. Enjoy!

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A NACCE Entrepreneurial President Profile:

Felix Haynes, Ed.D.
Hillsborough Community College, Plant City Campus

 

 

 

Hillsborough Community College, which has four primary campuses and two satellite locations in the Tampa, FL, region, is deep in the process of developing its first entrepreneurship program, a college credit certificate in Small Business Entrepreneurship. Development of the program turned out to be a case of "great minds think alike." While Felix Haynes, Ed.D., president of the Hillsborough's Plant City campus, was assembling an advisory panel of 10 successful business people to talk about the need for entrepreneurship education in the Plant City area, the district office of Hillsborough Community College was putting together a small group of business faculty to work on developing an approach to entrepreneurship education. The two efforts soon merged, and the result will be a 25-credit program that will be available to the school's 23,000 students in January 2010.

What was Haynes' impetus for starting to think about how to bring entrepreneurship education to his campus? "My impetus was NACCE!" he says. "I have been to the last two conferences in Texas and Los Angeles. I'm going to the one in Chicago in October, and I'm looking forward to it. I love NACCE; it is really exciting. When our college joined NACCE five years ago I was not among the original representatives who were selected, but I immediately began politicking to become one of them!"

In addition to providing educational resources for would-be and existing small business owners, Haynes believes community college campuses need to be models of entrepreneurship. "I like to spell entrepreneurship as p-a-r-t-n-e-r-s-h-i-p," he says. "No community college campus or organization has enough resources to support entrepreneurship. So for the 10 years I've been here, we've focused on building community partnerships to support our core mission of education. We have a private industry center that helps people get jobs and job training. We have a branch campus of the University of Florida on our campus, which gives our students a chance to transfer and get a bachelor's degree without having to go 120 miles down the road to Gainesville. We rent a portion of our facilities and the revenue stays on campus; that brings in $230,000 in rent revenue that we turn back to the campus and the community."

Haynes is also proud that his campus, which has about 3,300 students, has done a fundraising campaign that brought in $1.6 million from a town of 33,000 people. "That generated another $900,000 from a state matching grant. We're using that money to build more partnerships," he says. "Some of those dollars are being used to start the Small Business Entrepreneurship program. When we went through an accreditation review a few years ago, they asked me what was the one word that defines our campus and I said "entrepreneurial." 

Corner Office Advice
When working on establishing an entrepreneurship education program, Haynes says it's important to always keep in mind what is at stake. "Start by realizing the importance of entrepreneurship in terms of building a strong national and regional economy, which ties in exactly to our current national situation," he says. "When you start with that realization, you see how important the tie between what you're doing and the state of the economy is. You realize the high percentage of jobs each year that are created by small businesses. For those areas that are looking at double-digit unemployment rates, the need is great, and community colleges can be part of the movement to remake and strengthen the American economy."