This collection was curated by the Solutions Journalism Network for you, the students in the Entrepreneurship Capstone: Small Business Management course at Borough of Manhattan Community College.  We invite you to read the stories in this collection to expand and deepen your understanding of the challenges and opportunities small businesses face; to learn how important local businesses are to their communities; and to gain inspiration from the stories of small business entrepreneurs who are living their dream of running a business with a purpose (beyond simply making a living). 

The stories included here (see below) will get you started exploring these topics, but you can come back to the Solutions Story Tracker (SST for short) to find more stories like these, and on issues you care about. 

Here's how:

1. With this collection open, click on the LOGIN/REGISTER button in the upper right corner of the website and select Register Here.
2. In the "Join Today" box, select that you are "Not a journalist, but I want to learn about solutions." 
3. Fill in the rest of the information -- that you are a student, your name and email, create a password (anything will do, we're not picky), and in the referred by box, please add your professor's name.
4. Now, open the collection again and this time, click on the "Copy and Customize" button to the right. That's it; now the collection is yours to add to as you'd like. When you want to come back to it, you'll find it saved to "My Collections" under your name in the upper right corner of the page.
5. When you find a story you'd like to add to the collection, simply click on the bullet icon in the story detail page and select this collection to add the story.  You can also create new collections from scratch if you'd like. Just click the bullet icon in the story detail page and instead of adding a story to an existing collection, select "create a new collection." 
6. Here's a custom search link in the SST of stories that feature businesses.  

There are nearly 10,000 solutions journalism stories in the SST about how businesses, nonprofit organizations, governments and even colleges and universities are working to solve society's most pressing social and environmental challenges. This resource is available to you as a college student for free.  Please use it to learn about solutions to issues you care about, and come back whenever the "regular news' is getting you down ... which we know happens a lot.  The Solutions Journalism Network is working hard to get us to a new reality, where everyday, news tells the whole story: not just uncovering and reporting on problems, but also about solutions. Until that day arrives, the SST is here so you can find these stories.