Academy for Creating Enterprise

The Academy for Creating Enterprise (ACE) is a private business college. It was founded in 1999 in Cebu, the Philippines with the intent of providing basic business training to young Filipinos who want to start their own businesses. The Academy's philosophy can be summarized by the following quote offered by Joseph F. Smith that appears on the website: "Our idea of charity, therefore, is to relieve present wants and then to put the poor in a way to help themselves so, in turn, they may help others." [ [http://www.the-academy.org/philosophy.php Academy for Creating Enterprise website] , accessed Jun. 9, 2007]

The Academy was founded by Steve Gibson, a professor at Brigham Young University. One unique aspect of the Academy is that it only accepts return missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as students, though there are no official ties with the Church. Unlike other micro-enterprise programs (which tend to focus on empowering females in the marketplace, if not by design by default) two-thirds of the spots at the Academy are reserved for men, it being a belief of the founders that it is the man's responsibility to provide for the family.

The Academy runs an eight-week intense program focusing primarily on case studies, after which students are expected to go out into the market and begins their own businesses as well as teach others what they learned. The materials developed by Steve Gibson and his wife have been adopted by several other organizations around the world including Ascend Alliance in their Bolivia micro-enterprise program. [As mentioned in the preface to the manual "Where There Are No Jobs," it has also been used in Ghana, but it fails to mention the organization that used it.] While the Academy does not claim to higher aspirations, Brigham Young University - Hawaii has agreed to offer graduates of the Academy a certificate of completion, [ [http://www.the-academy.org/misc_info.php Academy for Creating Enterprise website] , accessed Jun. 9, 2007] making the Academy one of a small group of LDS institutions of higher education.

In addition to the colleges officially sponsored by the LDS Church (BYU, BYU-Idaho, BYU-Hawaii, and the LDS Business College), the only other LDS Institutions of higher learning (albeit not officially sponsored by the Church) are Southern Virginia University and the Academy for Creating Enterprise. There is however, a new initiative by the Acorn to Oak Foundation to build a privately funded LDS university in Argentina. If successful that would bring the number of LDS institutions of higher learning (both officially sponsored and independent) to seven.

References

External links

* [http://www.the-academy.org/ Academy for Creating Enterpise] - Official website of the Academy for Creating Enterprise
* [http://www.lds.org/ LDS.org] - Official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints