Editorial

Dear Community Development Readers,

We are pleased to bring you our first thematic issue under our editorship. A big thanks to Drs. Thomas Lyon and Philip Roundy on their extraordinary collection of articles on social entrepreneurship ecosystems for community development. This thematic issue is one of multiple still to come, and we welcome more thematic issues and ideas for them from you!

As point of personal privilege, I will share that two of the most impactful courses in my Ph.D. program in Community Resources and Development were on social innovation and social entrepreneurship. For many today, these concepts are new or not core components of community development education programs. In a previous special collection in the International Journal of Community Well-Being (https://www.springer.com/journal/42413), I argued that social entrepreneurship education is a necessary tool to be included in community development education (Talmage, 2021). For those interested in exploring social entrepreneurship and enterprise further, I highly recommend (Martin & Osberg, 2015): Getting Beyond Better.

Drs. Lyon and Roundy have assembled a collection of four articles that enhance understandings of social entrepreneurship ecosystems, a topic touched upon but not widely explored in community development. Our thematic guest editors have also provided a stellar commentary that grounds the articles in the larger realms of social entrepreneurship and community, while providing a solid framework for future inquiry and practice. They have been stellar scholars and guest editors during the editorial process, and I look forward to working with them more in the future.

In addition to the thematic pieces, this issue includes four articles from around the globe that tie directly to entrepreneurship as well. Mamo and colleagues provide an excellent article on women entrepreneurs in Southern Ethiopia, specifically speaking to the power of gender and entrepreneurship in capacity building. From the UK, Chivers and colleagues discuss contexts, impacts, and implementations of microgrants, which are often essential tools in funding entrepreneurship and community development work. In Cairo, Egypt, Mohamed and Kronenberg offer unique insights into how to use two tools of entrepreneurship for community development: (1) design thinking and (2) story mapping. Finally, Biney provides an exceptional piece on fostering an entrepreneurial mind-set among Ghanian young people, directly speaking to the importance of community development education.

Further thanks to our editorial board members and editorial team: Managing editor, Dr. Sofia Kotsiri; associate editors Drs. Brien Ashdown, Bryan Hains, Kristina Hains, and Matthew Mars; and, book reviews editor, Dr. Anne Silvis. We also hope you will stay up-to-date with articles published even more rapidly online before they hit print publication. Please stay-up-to-date by subscribing to our alerts and/or RSS feed on our website (See Figure 1 and website: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rcod20).

Figure 1. How to subscribe to journal alerts.

I continue to be excited about the upcoming CDS Portland Conference, where we are hosting two sessions on publishing (visit https://cdsociety.org/. A final thanks go out to our authors, editors, readers, reviewers, and all others who support our journal.