Doan Winkel, Ph.D., director of the Edward Muldoon Center for Entrepreneurship at John Carroll University, is being honored by the Cleveland Leadership Center and FreshWater Cleveland as one of six Fresh Innovators “using their grit to make Cleveland great.”
Winkel’s creativity, as well as his continued commitment to service, were points of emphasis that attracted FreshWater to his work. He will be honored virtually during Spark 2020: Grit to Great, the CLC’s annual leadership symposium, on Thursday, Sept. 3, from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
“Winkel paired his entrepreneurial knowledge with JCU’s dedication to service to head the school’s Cleveland Neighborhoods Project—leveraging the resources of the JCU community to address poverty, inequality, and civic disengagement in specific Cleveland neighborhoods,” said Karin Connelly Rice of FreshWater. “The initiatives engage youth to collaboratively develop solutions so they can experience ownership of the results.”
In an interview with FreshWater, Winkel expanded on his leadership role in serving the community through his work at John Carroll.
“Students at John Carroll do a ton of service work,” said Winkel. “They have 140,000 hours of service work throughout the community each year.”
He went on to explain, “It’s an opportunity to say, ‘Okay, you’re learning these things in the classroom. Now we have a lot of boots on the ground, let's get these ideas into action. We want to bring in more community partners and put the process together [to develop] a playbook on ‘Here’s how to do XYZ.’”
For more information on the Entrepreneurship Minor at John Carroll, visit the Edward M. Muldoon Center for Entrepreneurship webpage.