One Health is a concept of interconnectivity between human, animal, and environmental health, and also an approach to creating stronger health systems and outcomes for all. Teaching One Health as an approach is pedagogically challenging, as it requires both acquisition of new knowledge and the application of the acquired knowledge (the One Health approach) to be effective. Several core competencies have defined essential skills and behaviors to support One Health education, but more research is needed to fully operationalize the field. Social entrepreneurship is a systems-thinking approach that uses business methodologies to solve social challenges by blending financial revenue with social impacts. This approach may help provide an application-based paradigm to increase systems thinking in One Health education. This study aimed to evaluate how careful integration of social entrepreneurship into the One Health and Global Food Security course has supported students’ learning. An exploratory retrospective analysis was performed on participant-matched pre- and post-course surveys from undergraduate, graduate, and professional students enrolled in the course in 2024 ( n = 11) and 2025 ( n = 9). Students’ self-assessed knowledge of six key topics (such as food systems, sustainability, social entrepreneurship, One Health, global food security, and impact assessment) increased significantly ( p 0.001) through participation in the course. Students’ understanding of social entrepreneurship was evaluated by significant improvements ( p 0.001) in rubric-graded definitions of the term pre- and post-course, and students rated several aspects of applied social entrepreneurship (such as pitch presentation and case study project) as highly impactful to their learning. Additionally, students indicated they were likely to use social entrepreneurship in their future and to recommend social entrepreneurship as a tool for climate action. Taken together, these results suggest social entrepreneurship as a curricular approach may help support One Health operationalization and education.
Parsons et al. (Wed,) studied this question.