About the Center

Igniting Liberal Arts Education With Entrepreneurial Spirit

We foster innovative leaders. Utilizing academic and programming engagement, our Center invites students, faculty, alumni, and professionals into meaningful and creative collaborations to define problems, create opportunities, and invent solutions. 

At Lewis & Clark, entrepreneurship is about guiding students to take the essential liberal arts base of writing, analysis, problem solving and collaboration, add the dimension they learn in our program, and apply it to their career — at a start up, nonprofit, or large organization. We combine academic rigor with active exploration into trending topics in technology, health care, marketing, education, environment and philanthropy. The workplace and marketplace has utterly changed since Lewis & Clak students were born and will look different again in four years when they graduate. We help our students anticipate and participate in this change. 

Our mission is to help our students recognize and build both their strengths and opportunities in order to achieve their goals. This includes students taking risks and starting ventures, large and small, global and local. We facilitate formation, financing and networking. If they fail, they have learned many lessons in a supportive environment.

They say that if attending a liberal arts college does not change you, you did it wrong. We aim to help empower that change.

Leadership: 

Chrys Hutchings, Associate Director, Programming & Partnerships, Center for Entrepreneurship

Chrys is a recovering attorney who now uses her advocacy skills to connect employers and entrepreneurs to talented and passionate Lewis & Clark students. As part of her mission to connect the liberal arts to problem solving in the workplace, Chrys engages professionals to speak directly with students about career path, industry trends and entrepreneurship via Lunch with a Leader, Winterim, workshops and evening events. Based on their interests, she connects students to resources on and off-campus including venture competitions, networking and informational interviews. Chrys is helping spearhead Lewis & Clark’s Work Study Pilot and is the Campus Partner to the Entrepreneurship Living Learning Community (LLC). Prior to coming to the Center for Entrepreneurship, she worked in the Career Center as the Employer Relations Coordinator, where she executed much of the programming for the Center for Entrepreneurship and resurrected the on-campus Career Fair. She graduated from Smith College and Boston University School of Law, after which she practiced medical malpractice and insurance defense litigation in California. She moved with her family to Portland 12 years ago and is an unapologetic snob about Massachusetts pizza.