Q&A with Erin Lewis, executive director of UE’s Center for Innovation & Change
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The University of Evansville’s Center for Innovation and Change is nominated for a 2024 Mira Award this month in downtown Indianapolis. The 25th annual gala, honoring the best in tech in Indiana, will be held on April 26 at Old National Centre by TechPoint, an Indianapolis-based digital innovation economy organization.
The Center for Innovation and Change is one of 10 nominees across the state for the Community Impact Award. Executive director Erin Lewis spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the recognition and how the center has contributed to innovation and progress in the Hoosier state.
Tell me about the history of the CIC.
It goes back about 20 years. It was founded by a large grant from the Lilly Endowment in 2003. It was then called the Institute for Global Enterprise, and it was a transformative investment to allow UE students to solve problems for businesses in the community that may have been considering going global at the time. Helping them identify new markets and potential countries to explore products that made sense for those countries.
Our students did consulting projects: business projects for business clients by business students. It was very focused and siloed, and a lot of that changed around 2015. We started to explore what it could look like outside of one discipline, and that was through a physics professor who was passionate about alternative energy.
She said she had a lot of students—from philosophy to physics and Spanish majors—acknowledge that climate change is something they’re going to have to wrestle with for their whole life. They’re very passionate about tackling it across all disciplines. She said, “We don’t have a major in that. What can I do?” So she did a ChangeLab, which is what it’s now called, and that skyrocketed everything.
If you look at our growth chart, it’s grown about 800% since then. Serving the community is really inside UE’s DNA. It’s not that ChangeLab is just for business students. It’s for anyone who wants to make an impact on the world. And it’s been a wild ride since then.
What is a ChangeLab?
ChangeLab is a unique vehicle for anybody in this region, not just limited to Indiana, but anybody who’s wanting to figure something out that could be a business. trying to decide if it’s worth their time to go into a new market. That could be a city trying to decide if it needs to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. It could be a student wanting to make a new product.
We’re Indiana’s only Ashoka Changemaker campus, and now the only college in the world that is both a Changemaker campus in a Promise Neighborhood and has this ChangeLab program. So it’s this unique engine where you include all of those big, strategic, systems-level operations, things that can make a deep impact.
The secret sauce of ChangeLab is it’s repeatable. You might go through some other pitch competitions, and that’s the last you hear from them, or they touch base once in a while during your journey as you get high-profile touch points, but that’s about it. When you come to UE as a freshman, you can take a ChangeLab every semester and work on the same project. We recognize that project needs change over time. They change every semester, sometimes daily.
We operate at scale. We have 20 ChangeLabs a semester, and over 100 students doing them. Now we’re starting to get high schools asking for them. You can just imagine these entrepreneurial skill sets building over time. And that’s having a big impact on the ecosystem here.
Talk about the Changemaker Challenge and the Changemaker Incubator.
The Changemaker Challenge is something we started in 2016 as a way to connect ChangeLab to students who weren’t here yet. To give high school students a chance to make their world a better place and support them on that journey.
We’ve had over 80 students come through the program and end up depositing at UE because they recognize, “Oh, I want to keep going on this.” You don’t have to stop. You don’t even have to major in it. You can major in business, accounting, engineering or art and keep working on your project through ChangeLab.
The Changemaker Incubator came through a grant from the Ball Venture Fund, another great Indiana resource for colleges. We wanted to have a space where high school and college students or anybody who had an idea could come and build it with our support.
Incubators are all over the state and frequently receive funding, but often they’re underutilized. We were intentional about working with an architect about the purpose of this space. We didn’t want to make something where you’re going to come in and manufacture a prototype. This was more about designing a space that inspires creativity. The local architecture firm we worked with, Hafer, was just incredible about that. It’s up on the fourth floor of our library.
Tell me about the Evansville Promise Neighborhood, an initiative focusing on children and youth in specific census tracts having access to quality schools and support systems.
It’s an honor of a career to work on that. It’s a $30 million grant from the United States Department of Education, but it requires a one-to-one match. So it’s about harnessing about $62 million of resources into our community.
This is the first time [a Promise Neighborhood] has been housed by a Changemaker campus. So the national folks at the Department of Education and Ashoka are watching what this looks like closely because we think Indiana can do this differently than any other Promise Neighborhood in the nation. By taking all that passion and impetus to make change and harnessing it on behalf of those in the highest need, it could redefine what college means.
We’ve got data students coming in who are going to have to learn how to go door to door to see if this wraparound care service thing is working. We’ve got marketing students who are designing logos and helping schools build their brand identity within the Promise Neighborhood. This is a neat way to rethink what college means when it comes to serving our community.
It’s also real work we have to do. There are 10 outcomes that we have to deliver on from education all the way to community. Everything from counting the number of fruits and vegetables [children] get to whether they apply to college and find jobs afterwards then all the way back to mothers getting prenatal vitamins. It’s cradle to career, and UE is the housing entity for it. But it’s done with 23 partners.
Each school in these census tracts will have its own ChangeLab team for the first time. The students will get to determine what community improvement looks like to them. So instead of getting it done to them, they’re going to work with our college students. Maybe Bosse High School wants a rooftop garden. Maybe Lincoln Elementary School wants a walk-to-school program. We don’t know yet, but we’ll be responsible for helping them achieve it.
What about Global Scholars, which offers faculty support?
It’s a pot of funds we have for faculty who want to do change-making on epic scales. We give them some funds for travel and research, and then they report on it. We do about four a year, and it’s been going on for years. A lot of global scholarships that have been passed out.
We have Maxwell Omwenga, who is a computer science professor, and he’s looking at using smart technology and AI to help better handle traffic patterns and flooding in some third-world countries. We’ve got Mari Plikuhn, who’s working how to unlock the potential of first-generation students.
We have Diana Rodríguez Quevedo, who is building a portal to other countries around the world where students can come and learn languages and physically see through [virtual reality] what’s going on in that country at that time and communicate with people there.
It’s incredible the range of projects our faculty work on. UE faculty are brilliant. They’re caring and kind. They’re very globally minded, and they’re empathetic, so they’re willing and interested and eager to take their research globally to see what change-making can look like.
How did you feel when you learned the CIC was nominated for the Community Impact Mira Award?
I was so moved and touched because of who the nomination came from, one of our students, Kerry Ao, [whose financial literacy startup won the 2022 UE High School Changemaker Challenge]. He’s amazing. He won the Student Entrepreneur Mira Award last year. He’s one of the most humble, hardest working—but pushing the envelope in this gentle, Hoosier way—guys I’ve ever met.
Kerry thought what’s going on here is unique, and he’s been in just about every entrepreneurial network you can be a part of. He was one of Forbes 30 under 30. He’s connected up in Indianapolis. He’s done every pitch competition you can do in this state. But he started here with the CIC and the Changemaker Challenge.
Kerry thought we provide a unique level of service to students as they go along their journey. It definitely doesn’t stop at the pitch competition. We do everything from when you start. If you need a home to have meetings, if you need fundraising, if you need donors, we’re that muscle that can help you get things done.
The fact that the nomination came from a student who had experienced that journey with us, I was touched and honored that someone we served had thought about giving back a little recognition. I was really surprised. Southern Indiana is not usually thought of when it comes to this kind of space. It’s nice to see that work get talked about throughout the state.
What else is going on at the CIC in 2024?
Indiana has an aging population, as a lot of states do, southern Indiana in particular. And there’s a whole boatload of talent, energy and ideas sitting in our retired population that’s untapped. That lends itself to a loneliness epidemic, which is going around senior populations all over the world. So UE and the CIC have a new program called the Silver Aces, and it’s going to be a senior dance team. They’re going to have tracksuits and tryouts and work with a ballroom coach.
But in addition to that, they’re going to be in a collaborative ChangeLab. They’re going to get health screenings from our physician assistant and physical therapy students. They’ll get their blood pressure checked, cholesterol, do a balance check, but also from our new clinical psychology students, they’ll get checked for loneliness, mental health and connection to people. Then we’re going to start this crazy, fun dance program and check everything again at the end.
We hope to match that up with our UE Dance Camp so it’s multigenerational. There’s a lot of research on how kids and seniors connecting can literally extend their lives. So I couldn’t be more excited about that program.