VCU news

By Geoff LoCicero
VCU School of Social Work

A long-held assumption – that entrepreneurship is about discovering opportunity, rather than creating it – has created misconceptions that one needs innate talent or existing wealth to innovate. But a doctoral student at Virginia Commonwealth University is using research grounded in social work to combat those notions and reshape perspectives on addressing wealth, health and equality.

Marianne Lund, a second-year Ph.D. student at VCU’s School of Social Work, believes the effectuation process – a learnable, logical framework – can have profound economic impact to address poverty and help workers who will be displaced by artificial intelligence.

Lund, who earned her Master of Social Work degree from VCU in 2023, is collaborating with like-minded researchers across three continents. In France this past November, she became the first social worker to attend and present research in the nine-year history of the international Effectuation Conference.

“This was an amazing experience, and I was proud to be a Ram in France,” she said. “The call to action was on ending poverty through entrepreneurship – a call social workers can contribute to.”

Lund, an Argentine immigrant to the U.S., is specifically focused on immigrant populations. A participant in VCU’s Child Welfare Stipend Program as a master’s student, she interned with the Virginia Department of Social Services’ Family Partnership Unit, sparking an interest in the role of entrepreneurship in preventative social work practices. Her focus is on Latin American communities suffering from unemployment as well as those in the U.S. that are in precarious economic markets.

“As social workers, we know this has a significant downstream potential for disruptive impact on families, on well-being and health, and in contributing to increased uses of substances,” Lund said. “We need to understand how we can teach folks about the entrepreneurial mechanisms at their disposal that can help them address their economic need, both in the immediate, subsistence level and all the way to establishing their own business, thinking effectually when looking for employment or even building new social networks after a move or change in circumstance.”

In France, Lund presented a proposal on the application of the effectuation model in the field of social work, discussing its potential as a capacity-building tool for teachers and clinical social workers. She also collaborated with a group of doctoral students from the United States, France, Portugal, the Netherlands and Brazil, participating in a short podcast.

The group critiqued each other’s proposals; discussed how to develop a uniform methodology for measuring success; and engaged on topics ranging from microlending and teaching entrepreneurship at the high school and collegiate levels to developing tools to address social emotional learning by following the Effectual Principles.

Lund, who is bilingual as a Spanish speaker, has co-founded Senda Effectual, an organization working to translate effectuation theory into Spanish and Portuguese. Through the website, Lund hopes to connect budding entrepreneurs in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia, and she is working with academic researchers in several of the countries.

“Senda Effectual is important to me as it helps disseminate, almost in real time, significant discussion occurring within the effectual community in the U.S. and Europe, and to liaise with interested folks in Latin America,” Lund said. “The real-time nature of it counters the prevailing ‘last to know’ effect often experienced by folks not living in ‘developed’ countries. So in a way, it’s my small, critical act.”

The researchers in South America are working to raise awareness around necessity entrepreneurs and to create what Lund calls a “less pejorative segregation between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs. My social work perspective challenges the dominant narrative that entrepreneurship is only for the rich or academic or corporate worlds.

“As we look around us and see elevated levels of economic disparity, as we look forward and consider who is going to be displaced by AI, the answers to how to create ‘new’ economic markets, or even economic opportunities where none currently exist for any person, is through entrepreneurship. If we want folks to succeed, evidence shows effectual thinking increases those odds significantly.”

Collaborating with local academic and community health workers, Lund helped organize a workshop last fall at a juvenile detention center in Colombia, mirroring work she is doing at VCU with Project Belong. That project, which is in collaboration with School of Social Work Dean Gary S. Cuddeback, Ph.D., and the VCU College of Health Professions, aims to provide supported employment, trauma counseling, peer support and case management for youth and young adults transitioning out of a Richmond-area juvenile correctional facility.

In Colombia, Lund’s goal was to support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset and skills to mitigate recidivism for youth after incarceration. She found little research on the subject of post-incarceration entrepreneurial training for youth.

“This piqued my interest and led me to conducting a literature review on entrepreneurship in youth detention centers in the U.S.,” said Lund, who is collaborating on the study with fellow VCU doctoral students James Lambert  and Amidu Kalokoh from the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs.

Lund is also working through the Social Workers Innovation Network, an international research, teaching and practice group interested in social enterprise and social innovation, to organize a virtual speaker series about entrepreneurship and social work this spring.

“Academics are pretty siloed, so bringing two fields – social work and entrepreneurship – together is a challenge,” Lund said. “For now, I am enjoying being part of two communities, as I have always been.”