Entrepreneurship, Community, and Community Development

Michael W-P Fortunato is a founding partner of Creative Insight Community Development (CICD), co-founder of North Bay Music Foundry (California, USA), an instructor in Community and Economic Development at Penn State University (Pennsylvania, USA), and former Assistant Professor of Sociology, Engaged Scholar, and Director of the Center for Rural Studies at Sam Houston State University, USA. His professional interests include finding ways to infuse community development practice with high levels of creativity, enthusiasm, and compassion. His research focuses on how local culture and institutional structure shape local innovation, entrepreneurship, and well-being in communities both domestically and internationally; and how to enable transformation from legacy social systems into newer, flexible, more democratic and entrepreneurial local systems that serve the public good.

Theodore R. Alter is Professor of Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics, and Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Community Development, at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He also serves as an Adjunct Research Fellow in the School of Law at the University of New England in Australia. His research and teaching focus on community and rural development, resource and environmental economics, public sector economics and policy, institutional and behavioral economics, and public scholarship and civic engagement in higher education.