Jay Friedlander, the Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business at College of the Atlantic, is an invited guest at the 2017 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.Jay Friedlander, the Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business at College of the Atlantic, is an invited guest at the 2017 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.You may have heard of Davos? It’s a small town in Switzerland that’s become famous for hosting the World Economic Forum, the primary gathering spot for the elite thinkers of global economics. Skoll is in many ways an analog to Davos, but with a focus on sustainability. The forum seeks “to accelerate entrepreneurial approaches and solutions to the world’s most pressing problems by uniting social entrepreneurs with essential partners in a collaborative pursuit of learning, leverage, and large-scale social change.”

This year, Friedlander is an invited guest at Skoll and his presence at the conference is an excellent opportunity to share COA’s approach to social entrepreneurship with the world, he said.

“I’m very excited to be in attendance at SWF,” Friedlander said. “The world needs to know about College of the Atlantic, our approach to education in general, and how we do social entrepreneurship at the college. There are few – if any – gatherings that can do that better than Skoll.”

This year’s theme at the Skoll World Forum is, “Fault Lines: Creating Common Ground.” A primary objective for the participants is to come up with a collaborative response to the general sense that the world is unraveling due to our ideological, cultural, and political differences.

“There’s certainly a sense of tension in today’s world – unlike any time in the recent past,” said Friedlander. “Human ecology is a perfect lens for helping us see a path toward unwinding from the knots we find ourselves in and I’m happy to bring that human ecological perspective to the gathering in Oxford.”

Find out more about the Skoll World Forum here.

College of the Atlantic is the first college in the U.S. to focus on the relationship between humans and the environment. In 2016, both The Princeton Review and the Sierra Club named College of the Atlantic the #1 Green College in the United States. The intentionally small school of 350 students and 35 faculty members offers a Bachelor of Arts degree in human ecology – the study of how humans interact with their natural, social and technological environments. Each student develops their own course of study in human ecology, collaborating and innovating across multiple disciplines.