The Catholic Entrepreneurship & Design Experience (CEDE) is a high school entrepreneurship curriculum grounded in the wisdom of the Catholic tradition. The course is an exploration of each student’s personal vocation—his or her unique way of creating value in the world—using design thinking and experiential learning to help each of them thrive as CEO’s of their own lives who freely choose to live and create in service to others.
CEDE is a high school entrepreneurship program driven by experiential and project-based learning. We believe that a spirit of freedom and play are critical to the entrepreneurial journey. Combining academic rigor with fun and engaging action, CEDE is organized into 3 phases of Discern, Create, and Grow. As such, it is not strictly for those who want to found companies, launch ventures, or go into business. CEDE’s broad and widely-applicable call to an entrepreneurial spirit will serve all students, whether they become priests, parents, teachers, business people, or chefs!
The course has 12 Foundational Modules built on essential and supplemental blocks. In each module, students are challenged to complete projects that create real human value. Each module uses a student prompt that sets the context for learning through direct delivery to each individual student. Then, modules use excerpts from the Catechism of the Catholic Church to reinforce Catholic Social Teaching, with entrepreneurial profiles and case studies to reinforce discussions, driving project work. Throughout, engaging activities provide the experiential element necessary for internalizing and applying the concepts.
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Students are given foundational skills to know self and others, to see opportunities for creating value by serving others, and to know which opportunities to pursue.
Applying their foundational skills as entrepreneurs, students learn what it means to be co-creators with an incarnational spirit.
Entrepreneurs play a key role in the development of culture. Students learn how to scale their creations to create more value for more people.
