Hand-i-Work ( i work with my hands)

World of Change Makers

Business Name: Hand-I-Work

Mission
Hand-I-Works mission is to provide teenagers (those whose families are financially challenged) with a knowledge and hands on experience of how to earn money, the cheapest and easiest way possible without having to ask their parents for daily expenses and needs. The use of their own ability to think of designs and make it into actual pieces would be the challenge that only they can fulfil and be proud of.

Vision
The company aims to make one area in a depressed community be self-sufficient and give them hope that they can work hard together to achieve a better life. After a few months, the company would choose another location and hopefully in a year would be able to reach out to more areas reaching as far as Luzon. The company aspires that the training business would have a domino effect on the trainees that they too would eventually give their knowledge to others who are willing to learn and earn.

Business Description
Hand-I-Work is a seminar-based business where in the company trains ladies ages 16- 25 years old on ways to design, make, promote, price and sell jewelries/ accessories and home decorations. Seminars are inclusive of actual hands on craft making, materials ( possible suppliers), brochures, ideas on kinds of marketing strategies, how to compute (costing and pricing), packaging, giving capital loans, and list of prospective clients.

The World is Changing and Needs Social Entrepreneurs to "Bring it into Balance"

Social entrepreneurs are change agents that improve society by developing effective and equitable new models often less hierarchical yet more cooperative and complex than existing ones. Researchers and practitioners have defined social entrepreneurship in various ways but a common denominator is a venture that adds value to a community mission through innovative, risk-taking, business-like practices. Social entrepreneurs combine innovation with fulfillment of community needs and their work overlaps with social justice and environmental preservation movements.

To give a bit more clarity, there may be two kinds of social entrepreneurs. "Social innovators" come up with new and more effective ways (systemically, organizationally, etc.) of dealing with and hopefully mitigating social problems. "Social enterprisers" use the tools and forms of business to provide needed goods and services that help the community at large as well as their clients. They also help themselves by generating earned income. "Social enterprises" may be non-profit or for-profit entities (Some prefer the use the alternative nomenclature "for-benefit" organizations.) The World is Changing and Needs Social Entrepreneurs to "Bring it into Balance"

The way I understood the article, social entrepreneurs are the link to a better tomorrow not only for a single person but for the whole world. They are the keys to unlock the trap door that the world is in right now. Same people, same forms of government, same programs that aren’t truly beneficial, same ways and means to tackle a problem with a disguised solution. The rich helping the rich to enrich themselves, the government offers the same viand with a different name and businesses that are backed up by a strong group stays afloat and promises that are truly meant to be broken. The social innovators comprise the youth because they are more open to changes and are risk takers. They can be innovative in making an old fashioned product or service into a new, exciting and more effective one. Coupled with the social innovator is the social enterpriser who is a fast learner and thinker and finds the best solution to a problem in the most resourceful and appropriate way possible.

With the social entrepreneurship being recognized as a rising force and change maker the world with all its flaws if given the chance to be equal in standing would definitely give a balance to everything and everyone.

Banking for the unbanked

What is Grameen America?

Grameen America is a microfinance organization with a mission to alleviate poverty through entrepreneurship. Grameen America provides loans, savings programs, credit establishment and other financial services to the working poor, especially women, in the United States.

How do they work?

Grameen America provides small loans, known as “microloans”, and other financial services to people with very low incomes, especially women, who are looking to start or grow their small businesses. Grameen America relies on the Grameen lending model developed by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Poverty in New York

The NY State poverty level is 13.8% or approximately 1.7 million people.
In New York City 650,000 people live below the poverty line.
Women are particularly vulnerable to poverty, especially single mothers.
- Single working mothers numbered approximately 312,600 in 2000, making up 10.35% of total households in NYC.
- A family headed by a single mother is 600% more likely to live below the poverty line than a family with a mother and a father.

Grameen America will serve its clients, especially women by:

-Providing them with small loans so that they can start or build small or home businesses, with terms that are an attractive alternative to predatory lenders.
-Creating a culture of savings and individual responsibility in all clients.
-Establishing and improving client credit ratings so that clients can better participate in the mainstream American economy.
-Educating clients about getting loans, building savings and managing credit as well as mainstream financial institutions as a built-in part of the Grameen America lending program.

What is the Grameen Lending Model?

Grameen America uses the Grameen group lending and savings model that has been developed and refined over thirty years by the Grameen Bank. The basis of the system is a peer group model in which borrowers encourage, support and learn from each other.

Grameen America is the U.S. operation of Grameen Bank, the “microlending” institution started in Bangladesh by Muhammad Yunus. Microlending is the lending of small amounts of money to people who are impoverished, unemployed or otherwise don’t meet even the minimal requirements to get traditional credit. Grameen, the world’s largest microlender, has lent money to more than 7.6 million people around the world, 97 percent of them women. It employs more than 24,000 people.

The company’s U.S. operations started last year in the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens, says Tanya Palit, a project manager with Grameen. Grameen has lent $1.2 million to 440 self-employed, low-income women – 99.5 percent of which has been repaid on time.

Palit says, Grameen is looking to raise $2 million from the community to put a branch in the Triangle, probably in Wake County. Early efforts already are under way, she says.
It would likely take around a year from the time the money was raised to the time that Grameen could open a branch. The lender plans to apply for North Carolina approval to begin operation as a credit union.

“Bankers help us because we help mainstream these people, people who are so low-income that they wouldn’t be able to qualify for a loan. The goal is eventually to get people into the financial mainstream. And regulators really like Grameen because we’re extremely accountable, and we’re working really hard with a group of people who often fall through the cracks of social support.”

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

The Girl Effect on Development

What is The Girl Effect?

The girl effect is the powerful social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate in their society.

World Economic Forum Gives Adolescent Girls a Voice on the Global Stage

(Corporate, foundation, government and NGO leaders )
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND, 30 January, 2009

The agenda focused almost exclusively on the global financial crisis, the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting program featured its first-ever plenary session focused on adolescent girls.

A safe, healthy, educated, economically empowered girl has the power to solve poverty and ignite progress as an economic actor and future mother. With the right opportunities, she alone will unleash the girl effect. She will marry later, have fewer children, and invest nearly all of her income back into her family. Yet today, less than half a cent of every international development dollar is spent on her.

"Including girls in this year's agenda marks a real turning point in the world's understanding of adolescent girls" potential contribution to their own communities and to the global economy," said Mark Parker, President and CEO of NIKE, Inc. "When given an opportunity to participate, girls are a powerful force for social and economic change. That's exactly what we need right now. The session, entitled The Girl Effect on Development, was moderated by Dr. Helene Gayle, President and CEO of CARE USA. Panelists include:

• Melinda French Gates, Co-Chair, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
  
• Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director, World Bank
  
• Mari Pangestu, Minister of Trade of Indonesia
  
• Mark G. Parker, Chief Executive Officer, NIKE, Inc.; Co-Chair of the Governors Meeting for Consumer Industries 2009
  
• Ann M. Veneman, Executive Director, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF); Chair, Global Agenda Council on the Welfare of Children
  
• Muhammad Yunus, Managing Director, Grameen Bank; Board Member of the United Nations Foundation

Panelists explored the dearth of investment in adolescent girls in developing countries, which economists have called "an irrational investment gap." They discussed the potential multi-trillion-dollar impact of girls on national economies, the economic cost of not investing, and the impact of these investments on developed economies.

“We'll never be able to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty if we do not address the issues girls face," said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Managing Director, World Bank. “Directing resources to address gender equity, universal education, child and maternal health is a start, but the success of reaching every goal is dependent on the critical wellbeing, safety and participation of world's girls."

In India, for example, adolescent pregnancy results in nearly $100 billion in lost potential income over a lifetime. That's equal to the world's total humanitarian assistance over the last 17 years combined. However, innovative organizations like Going to School are showing girls in India a world of possibilities beyond early marriage and early child-bearing. Their "Be! an Entrepreneur" Fund inspires girls to create businesses that solve the social, economic and environmental problems they face in their daily lives.

With little more than one half a cent of every international development dollar going to girls, there is a desperate and immediate need to increase funding to programs that unleash the girl effect and enable girls to achieve their potential. Early champions, including the UN Foundation, the NoVo Foundation, the Nike Foundation and many others, have helped drive this issue to the forefront. Saturday's session is a critical step in building global attention and investment. However, much more must be done for families, communities and nations to benefit from the potential of girls.

The session addressed what others can do to invest in girls as well as the importance of reaching girls in early adolescence – before they are faced with the issues that derail a healthy and prosperous trajectory. These include a range of factors that can take a girl away from school including early marriage, early pregnancy, household chores, caregiving for family members and HIV/AIDS.

Click to watch the whole event:

Davos Annual Meeting 2009 - The Girl Effect on Development

Ann M. Veneman (L), Executive Director, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), New York; Chair, Global Agenda Council on the Welfare of Children, talks to Muhammad Yunus, Managing Director, Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, during the session 'The Girl Effect on Development' at the Annual Meeting 2009 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 31, 2009

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Grameen Bank: Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due

After a year in which we saw capitalism do so much bad we forget the power of free markets can do so much good. However, one man didn’t forget. In fact, he embodies that vision. His name, Muhammad Yunus.

As the father of microfinance provides small loans to low-income borrowers with promising business plans through his Grameen Bank. The program began in 1974, when Yunus lent $27 to a group of poor villagers and realized that even small amounts could make transformative differences. He set up the Grameen Bank, which has since disbursed about $6 billion in tiny loans to about 7.4 million Bangladeshi micro-entrepreneurs, mostly women in businesses such as street vending and farming.

In Bangladesh, Grameen also functions as a savings bank, makes college and housing loans, and operates projects in areas such as telecommunications, yogurt production and solar energy.

The problem with capitalism, Yunus tells Fast Money, is its distinction between companies pursuing profit and charities pursuing good. His bank model operates with corporate efficiency, but pumps profits back into social objectives.Despite an explosive growth rate and opportunities to do business with the wealthy, Grameen remains true to its mission; it still only gives loans to the poor, and mostly women.

"We saw that money going to women brought much greater impact (on households), Yunus explains to the traders. "It's not the repayment, it's not the risk, it's the impact."

That might sound odd for most banks but it’s been a very successful formula for this one. Since its inception, Grameen Bank made profits every year, except for 1983, 1991 and 1992. And 99.5% of its loans are repaid.

Today, the Head Office of Grameen Bank is located in Mirpur-2, Dhaka, Bangladesh. However, after so much success in poor nations it's branching out. Grameen America does business in our country -- offering loans between $500 - $3,000 to the poorest Americans who don't have access to credit.

Make no mistake, a bank that specializes in doing business with the very poor is thriving right here, in this nation. Yunus's work is truly an inspiring story, but you may be wondering what’s its relationship to Wall Street and Fast Money?
It's that the guiding principle of banking should be to "open your banking system to the people. There are millions in America who can not open a bank account," concludes Yunus. And perhaps it’s also that Muhammad Yunus is proof positive that greed can in fact be used for good.

Source: Lee Brodie
Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

To know more about GRAMEEN BANK click this:
http://lifeandworksofmuhammadyunus.blogspot.com/

Barack Obama and the American Spirit of Social Entrepreneurship

This American Story is an inspiration for thirld world countries to have a better future. We have to take problems as challenges and seek for solutions and opportunities. This great man is a great change maker. I hope that many people, especially the leaders in our world will be inspired and be influenced by this story.

In the late 19th century, Jane Addams saw Gilded Age America as plainly carved into two halves. On the one hand were “the favored, who express[ed] their sense of the social obligation by gifts of money,” and on the other, “the unfavored who express[ed] it by clamoring for a “share” – both of them actuated by a vague sense of justice.” Yet for the founder of Hull House – a social center providing the Chicago working classes with educational and political opportunity – this division rebelled against her very sense of American democracy. In 1893 she wrote: “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain…until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

As I have become more deeply involved with the social entrepreneurship movement, the ongoing presidential campaign has often given me cause to think of Addams. Perhaps more than any other social innovator of her day, Addams wrestled publicly with the relationship between our individual and collective moral action and its reflection on the state of our democracy. For her, America was not an ideal of equality to believe in, but a process of working towards social justice, in which everyone must take part.

A legacy of restorative social innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit in the pursuit of a more perfect union are at the core of Barack Obama’s appeal to the new class of change agents we’re calling “social entrepreneurs.” Indeed, while there are a bevy of policy reasons that social entrepreneurs should be committed to the campaign – a new focus on national service, a social investment fund for social enterprise, a major investment in the clean technology solutions so many entrepreneurs now pursue, even a nonprofit capacity building center with the words “Social Entrepreneurship” in the title – our community’s passion for the candidate comes far more from a sense that he understands the tradition of which we are a part: the American spirit of social entrepreneurship.

The spirit of social entrepreneurship is woven deep into the American story. Decades before the Declaration of Independence, American Quakers began the first sustained abolitionist movement against slavery in history, developing the techniques that future leaders would build upon to create an unstoppable global paradigm shift. Later, at the dawn of the Industrial Age of American commerce created wealth never before seen in the world, a new breed of “Progressive” social reformers including Jane Addams and photographer Jacob Riis changed the way we saw the urban poor and helped return their stories to the center of the American story.
In the period of turbulent upheaval in the 1950s and 1960s, social innovators helped the disenfranchised and dispossessed find new ways to speak truth to power. Despite Sarah Barracuda’s snarky cynicism, the traditions of community organizing were the testing grounds in which Obama came to believe that real change comes from the bottom up. And while movement politics and community organizing may seem far away from many of the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” market-based solutions so many social entrepreneurs pursue today, both strategies share the desire for those who were once treated as passive to become the lead actors in their own destiny.

The job of the entrepreneur is to move resources from an area of lower yield to an area of higher yield. For a social entrepreneur, this means disavowing the orthodoxy of social change in order to find the solution best suited to the problem. It means acting in the space between the world as it should be and the world as it is. The title of Obama’s landmark speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” reflected just how deeply routed in the American story this process can be.

Throughout this campaign, Obama has reminded us that the great task of American civic life is to build a country and a world that reflect the high ideals set forth in our founding documents but not yet achieved. He has painted a picture of the American people as imperfect vessels for a perfect dream, and has asserted America’s greatest asset is a vision of a better future in the hands of its citizens. This is the energy and spirit that cascades through the social entrepreneurship movement, from students working for a more equitable education system with Teach for America to Paul Farmer and his Partners in Health, who refuse to believe that the poor should be denied access to medicine because a global system has priced them out.

And it’s that energy the next president will have to harness as they face a set of challenges unlike anything in recent history. To solve the problems of the 21st century, they will have to enlist the help of social entrepreneurs already on the ground. But they will have to remind us that our work is not solely in the service of any individual’s particular mission, but part and parcel of building a more just society in which the “good” has been secured for all. That is the true “scale” we seek to achieve.

A new generation of change-makers is ready to inherit American spirit of social entrepreneurship, and Barack Obama is the man to lead us.

Barack Obama and the American Spirit of Social Entrepreneurship by Nathaniel Whittemore

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Microfinance organizations

Check out the list of Microfinance organizations in the world and be inspired by their wonderful visions and achievements:

Grameen Foundation
We're a dynamic, nonprofit organization that uses microfinance and innovative technology to fight global poverty and bring opportunities to the world's poorest people. With tiny loans, financial services and technology, we help the poor, mostly women, start self-sustaining businesses to escape poverty.

Grameen Bank (Bangladesh)
Grameen Bank was started in 1976 by Professor Muhammad Yunus with the money in his pocket. Today it serves over five million poor clients in Bangladesh, helping thousands rise out of poverty each week.

Opportunity International
"Giving the poor a working chance - that's what Opportunity International is all about. Small loans, sometimes as little as $50, in the hands of a poor entrepreneur can transform the lives of individuals, families, and entire communities."




Microcredit Summit Campaign
"The Microcredit Summit Campaign brings together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and others involved with microcredit."

FINCA
Provides financial services to the world's poorest families so they can create their own jobs, raise household incomes, and improve their standard of living.


Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

The Four Components of Social Entrepreneurship by Paul Light

assumptions about social entrepreneurship fall into four broad components:

• Entrepreneurs


• Ideas


• Opportunities


• Organizations.

These four components not only help organization the rapidly growing literatures on business entrepreneurship, they clarify the search for strategies that might help entrepreneurs develop and launch better ideas, discover opportunities, and create more creative organizations.
There is plenty of evidence that social entrepreneurship involves more than an entrepreneur and a pattern-breaking idea. The only problem, if it is a problem at all is that the field as a whole has yet to decide which components matter most, or how individual dispositions vary with organizational context.

Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurs are the first component of social entrepreneurship, and can be found in every definition I have read. However, some definitions give entrepreneurs greater prominence than others. Although Drayton argues that there is no entrepreneur without a powerful, system-changing idea that seeks widespread impact, there is no chance of success without the talent, creativity, and entrepreneurial intent of the individual. As he wrote in 2005, “these people are compelled to change the whole society. From childhood, an entrepreneur intuitively seeks out an area of interest, for example, health, and then begins the long search for an idea that will be his or her vehicle for leaving a scratch on history.”

This focus on entrepreneurs inevitably leads the search for traits and characteristics that might these gifted individuals from the rest of society. According to Drayton, “entrepreneurs are easy to spot long before they have made their mark. They are married to their vision—and will stick with it for decades if needed. They are equally focused on the ‘how to’ questions. They ask themselves: How do I get from here to my goal fifteen years from now? How do the pieces fit together? How do I solve this and the next problem?” Thus does the “democratic revolution” occur.

Drayton’s entrepreneurs also show deeper qualities:

What qualities define an effective social entrepreneur? First, the person must be creative in both goal setting and problem solving. Second—and this is the toughest screen—is entrepreneurial quality. This is not leadership, or the ability to administer, or the ability to get things done. The driving force here is the fact that such a person is emotionally, deeply committed to making change throughout the whole of society. Once one understands that this commitment itself is the driving force, then everything else follows. The final quality essential to success as a social entrepreneur is ethical fiber. People will not make significant changes in their lives if they do not trust the person asking them to do so.

Ideas are the second component of social entrepreneurship, and are also found in all of the definitions I have collected. Comparing business and social entrepreneurship in 2007, Martin and Osberg argued that the critical difference between the two is the “value proposition.” Unlike business entrepreneurs who focus on serving markets that can afford a new product or serve, social entrepreneurs seek no profit for their investors or themselves:

Instead, the social entrepreneur aims for value in the form of large-scale, transformational benefit that accrues either to a significant segment of society or to society at large. Unlike the entrepreneurial value proposition that assumes a market that can pay for innovation, and may even provide substantial upside for investors, the social entrepreneur’s value proposition targets an under,, neglected, or highly disadvantaged population that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve the transformational benefits on their own.

Entrepreneurs clearly play a significant role in transformational change, but only when they are absolutely committed to the idea. Indeed, writing in 2003, Martin warned the social benefit sector to avoid “heroic leadership trap.” “Take-charge leadership misapplied not only fails to inspire and engage, it produces passivity and alienation.

And this is true not only in the for-profit and government sectors. When nonprofit leaders assume ‘heroic’ responsibility for making critical choices, when their reaction to problems is to go it alone, work harder, and do more—with no collaboration or sharing of leadership—their ‘heroism’ is often their undoing.”

Opportunities are the third component of social entrepreneurship, and were at the center of most, but not all of the definitions I reviewed over the past two years. Viewed as a moment of possibility, opportunities are sometimes taken as a Peter Pan phenomenon—that is, if you believe you can fly, you will fly.

Writing in 1998, Dees offered a very difference view. Like Drayton, Dees reserved a significant role for the entrepreneur as the starting point of change. However, Dees also argued that a powerful vision is not enough to create disequilibrium. Opportunities must be identified and exploited. Indeed, entrepreneurs are defined in part by their ability to recognize and “relentlessly” pursue new opportunities. “Where others see problems, social entrepreneurs see opportunity,” he wrote. “They are not simply driven by the perception of a social need or by their compassion. Rather they have a vision of how to achieve improvement and they are determined to make their vision work. They are persistent.”

Opportunities also provide resources and the potential for collaboration, which leads to Dees’ notion that social entrepreneurs work around the obstacles embedded in an opportunity.

Social entrepreneurs do not let their own limited resources keep them from pursuing their visions. They are skilled at doing more with less and at attracting resources from others. They use scarce resources efficiently, and they leverage their limited resources by drawing in partners and collaborating with others. They explore all resource options, from pure philanthropy to the commercial methods of the business sector. They are not bound by sector norms or traditions. They develop resource strategies that are likely to support and reinforce their social missions. They take calculated risks and manage the downside, so as to reduce the harm that will result from failure. They understand the risk tolerances of their stakeholders and use this to spread the risk to those who are better prepared to accept it.

For Dees, social value is always the ultimate goal. It is why social entrepreneurs pursue opportunities in the first place, learn and adapt as they proceed, and act boldly without regard to resources. And it is why they are called to action in the first place. Nevertheless, they could not act without the ability to recognize opportunity when it arises.

Organizations are the fourth component of social entrepreneurship, but were often an afterthought in the definitions I read. Indeed, many definitions focused on organization and management as adversaries of change.

Jane Wei-Skillern, James E. Austin, and Howard Stevenson took a neutral stance about organizations and social entrepreneurship in 2005. Writing about the opportunity, people, capital, and context involved in creating social value, the three authors noted the importance of organizational alignment in achieving results:

Remaining attuned to how contextual changes can affect the opportunity and the human- and financial-resource environment causing the need for realignment is a critical skill for the social entrepreneur. Furthermore, practitioners should remain cognizant of a unique characteristic of the operating context, namely, that the societal demand for social-value creation is enormous. This creates a plethora of opportunities for social entrepreneurs and a concomitant ever-present temptation to address more and more of them.

Although organizations impose clear operating constraints, they also provide essential capacity. As Wei-Skillern and her colleagues continued, the challenge is to determine how much the organization can achieve with limited resources: “Seeking to address a very broad set of issues with very limited human and financial resources may actually result in low social impact because the organization’s resources are spread too thin.” Simply put, organizations cannot be ignored as a component of successful social entrepreneurship and a potential source of failure.

Wei-Skillern and her coauthors clearly understood the point—their 19 page article in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice used the word “organization” or “organizations” 127 times, and the words “entrepreneur” or “entrepreneurs” 109.

As we shall see, these four components do not drift aimlessly through what Dees accurately described in 2008 as the ecosystem of social entrepreneurship. Rather, they come together on occasion to create a strategy for change.

Some strategies emphasize the entrepreneur’s dispositions and traits, while others focus on the context created by organization, and still others emphasis ideas and opportunities as central ingredients that are shaped and noticed by entrepreneurs and organizations.

As we shall also see, the key to success may be in assembling the four components together to take advantage of a specific opportunity, develop a particular idea, use an entrepreneur’s special skills, or focus energy within an organization.

As such, creating social entrepreneurship may be very much like solving a jigsaw puzzle. Some will start at the corners, others at the center, and still others with a color. But it is unlikely that the puzzle can be solved without some combination of all approaches, especially as the number of pieces increase.

Source: http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/let-there-be-light

by: Micka Santisteban

Top Ten Ways to Get Involved with Social Entrepreneurship

I have recently read this article about “top ten ways to get involved with social entrepreneurship” it is written by Nathaniel Whittemore. He is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation. He is also the Founding Principle for Do Good Well, Inc, a consultancy focused on fusing business and philanthropy to advance social change. Most recently Nathaniel co-founded AssetMap.org, a web-based startup to help individuals and organizations better harness their assets for collaborative social change.

After I read the article, it encouraged me to explore more ways on how I can contribute not only to the economy but also to our countrymen. I didn’t realize that there are several ways to be a social entrepreneur and that it could start just by reading and educating yourself with it. I hope that when you do finish reading this article, you, would also be enlightened and TRY to make a change.

Top Ten Ways to Get Involved with Social Entrepreneurship
by Nathaniel Whittemore
Published October 05, 2008 @ 07:55PM PST

1. Read

Although the field is young, the excitement and passion of those involved has already begun to produce volumes of articles, books, and case studies that give you can help you understand the challenges and opportunities of social entrepreneurship to create change. “The Power of Unreasonable People,” by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan or “How to Change the World,” by David Bornstein are great starting points. For more, see our “Top 10 Social Entrepreneurship Reads”



2. Reach out to a social entrepreneur

Social entrepreneurs are people, just like you and me, who care deeply about an issue and have found a way to do something innovative about it. Most, if not all of them, remember the moments where they realized that they had to do something, and are excited to share their stories with up-and-coming change-makers. The internet has broken down the barriers to communication, so look ‘em up and reach out! Use this channel or www.socialedge.org to figure out who to connect with.













3. Fundraise

No matter how well publicized an organization is, almost all social enterprises (particularly those in startup and growth stages) need more money than they have. Social entrepreneurs rely on networks of friends and supporters to take some of the fundraising burden off their shoulders and allow them to focus on their missions. So get creative; instead of just donating a few dollars once, organize a group of your friends to give collaboratively every month. Change.org is just one of an incredible number of tools you have to help build the networks of support that good organizations rely on.



















4. Volunteer or get an internship

While fundraising is great, it can be even more rewarding to see an organization you care about in action. With organizations providing direct services you may be able to work directly with the communities social entrepreneurs seek to support. For some others, your opportunities may be more based in office work and administrative tasks. Either way, being part of a team in an entrepreneurial, mission-driven organization is an incredibly rewarding (and challenging!) experience.

5. Advocate

One of the things that often distinguishes social entrepreneurs is their desire not only to remedy a problem, but to change the social landscape that allowed that problem to happen in the first place. For many organizations, this means pairing their philanthropic endeavors with government advocacy. Like fundraising, advocacy efforts require support from people like you, organizing your friends, peers and social networks.




















6. Go to the source and LISTEN

The most important thing anyone who wishes to create change can do is to spend time with and learn from the communities experiencing the poverty, injustice, and inequality you wish to address. Nonprofits have long known that the most sustainable solutions to any problem are those that come from impacted communities, but it’s only recently that our transportation and communication infrastructures have given average people the opportunity to learn from one another. Intern abroad, do a volunteer vacation, work in a different part of your town. Just listen, listen, listen. No matter what you end up doing, your efforts will be better for it.


7. Enroll

Increased interest in social entrepreneurship has prompted business schools like Haas at Berkeley and Kellogg at Northwestern and undergraduate departments to begin to offer courses, certificates and even degrees in social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. If you’re a currently a student or thinking about going back to school, programs in social entrepreneurship can be indispensable in giving you the analytic and reflective tools to run and support entrepreneurial, mission-driven organizations.


8. Enter a competition

So you care passionately about an issue and think you’ve got a good plan for addressing some social ill, but you’re not sure you’re ready to start an organization? A great way to test an idea is to enter a university business plan competition such as the Global Social Benefit Incubator, or even an online competition like ideablob.com or changemakers.net. These structured environments will force you to think about your idea in new ways and more practical terms, and can help you understand whether you’re ready to take the plunge of starting a new organization.


9. Always challenge yourself

One of the hallmarks of a good educational experience is that it provides you materials that directly challenge what you think you believe. For aspiring social entrepreneurs, or even just those interested the field, it’s as if not MORE important to read criticism like Michael Edwards “Just Another Emperor” and constantly reflect upon your own ambitions. Another great challenge for would-be social entrepreneurs is to ask yourself if you really need to start a new organization, or whether your efforts would be better spent supporting ongoing work. Remember, ideas that challenge your believes don’t undermine your passion and commitment to social justice; they reinforce it and better prepare you for tackling complicated problems.


10. Start your own organization

So you’ve learned from other social entrepreneurs, read about your field, and spent time learning directly from people who experience the problems you want to address. You’ve read and reflected to challenge your own ideas, entered a competition, and you’re convinced you’ve got something. Go for it, and go for it all the way. Building organizations is not easy, but its possible, it’s important, and if you proceed in the right ways, it can be incredibly rewarding. And hey, you know where to come for support and ideas, right?

Social Business Entrepreneurs

by Muhammad Yunus

Capitalism is Interpreted too Narrowly

Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly. In this narrow interpretation we create a one-dimensional human being to play the role of entrepreneur. We insulate him from other dimensions of life, such as, religious, emotional, political dimensions. He is dedicated to one mission in his business life ---- to maximize profit. He is supported by masses of one-dimensional human beings who back him up with their investment money to achieve the same mission. The game of free market works out beautifully with one-dimensional investors and entrepreneurs. We have remained so mesmerised by the success of the free market that we never dared to express any doubt about it. We worked extra hard to transform ourselves, as closely as possible, into the one-dimensional human beings as conceptualised in theory to allow smooth functioning of free market mechanism.

Economic theory postulates that you are contributing to the society and the world in the best possible manner if you just concentrate on squeezing out the maximum for yourself. When you get your maximum, everybody else will get their maximum.

As we devotedly follow this policy sometimes doubts appear in our mind whether we are doing the right thing. Things don't look too good around us. We quickly brush off our doubts by saying all these bad things happen because of "market failures"; well-functioning market cannot produce unpleasant results.

I think things are going wrong not because of "market failure". It is much deeper than that. Let us be brave and admit that it is because of "conceptualisation failure". More specifically, it is the failure to capture the essence of a human being in our theory. Everyday human beings are not one-dimensional entities, they are excitingly multi-dimensional and indeed very colourful. Their emotions, beliefs, priorities, behaviour patterns can be more aptly described by drawing analogy with the basic colours and millions of colours and shades they produce.

Social Business Entrepreneurs Can Play a Big Role in the Market

Suppose we postulate a world with two kinds of people, both one-dimensional, but having different objectives. One type is the existing type, i.e. profit maximizing type. Second type is a new type, who are not interested in profit-maximization. They are totally committed to make a difference to the world. They are social-objective driven. They want to give better chance in life to other people. They want to achieve their objective through creating/supporting sustainable business enterprises. Their businesses may or may not earn profit, but like any other businesses they must not incur losses. They create a new class of business which we may describe as "non-loss" business.

Can we find second type of people in the real world ? Yes, we can. Aren't we familiar with "do-gooders" ? Do-gooders are the same people who are referred to as "social entrepreneurs" in formal parlance.

Social entrepreneurism is an integral part of human history. Most people take pleasure in helping others. All religions encourage this quality in human beings. Governments reward them by giving tax breaks. Special legal facilities are created for them so that they can create legal entities to pursue their objectives. Some social entrepreneurs (SE) use money to achieve their objectives, some just give away their time, labour, talent, skill or such other contributions which are useful to others. Those who use money may or may not try to recover part or all of the money they put into their work by charging fee or price.

We may classify the SEs, who use money, into four types :

i) No cost recovery
ii) Some cost recovery
iii) Full cost recovery
iv) More than full cost-recovery

Once a SE operate at 100% or beyond the cost recovery point he has entered the business world with limitless possibilities. This is a moment worth celebrating. He has overcome the gravitational force of financial dependence and now is ready for space flight ! This is the critical moment of significant institutional transformation. He has moved from the world of philanthropy to the world of business. To distinguish him from the first two types of SEs listed above, we'll call him "social business entrepreneur" (SBE).

With the introduction of SBEs, the market place becomes more interesting and competitive. Interesting because two different kinds of objectives are now at play creating two different sets of frameworks for price determination. Competitive because there are more players now than before. These new players can be equally aggressive and enterprising in achieving their goals as the other entrepreneurs.

SBEs can become very powerful players in the national and international economy. Today if we add up the assets of all the SBEs of the world, it would not add up to even an ultra-thin slice of the global economy. It is not because they basically lack growth potential, but because conceptually we neither recognised their existence, nor made any room for them in the market. They are considered freaks, and kept outside the mainstream economy. We do not pay any attention to them, because our eyes are blinded by the theories taught in our schools.

If SBEs exist in the real world, it makes no sense why we should not make room for them in our conceptual framework. Once we recognise them supportive institutions, policies, regulations, norms, and rules will come into being to help them become mainstream.

Market is always considered to be an utterly incapable institution to address social problems. To the contrary, market is recognised as an institution significantly contributing to creating social problems (environmental hazards, inequality, health, unemployment, ghettoes, crimes, etc.). Since market has no capacity to solve social problem, this responsibility is handed over to the State. This arrangement was considered as the only solution until command economies were created where State took over everything, abolishing market.

But this did not last long. With command economies gone we are back to the artificial division of work between the market and the State. In this arrangement market is turned into an exclusive playground of the personal gain seekers, overwhelmingly ignoring the common interest of communities and the world as a whole.

With the economy expanding at an unforeseen speed, personal wealth reaching unimaginable heights, technological innovations making this speed faster and faster, globalisation threatening to wipe out the weak economies and the poor people from the economic map, it is time to consider the case of SBEs more seriously than we did ever before. Not only is it not necessary to leave the market solely to the personal-gain seekers, it is extremely harmful to mankind as a whole to do that. It is time to move away from the narrow interpretation of capitalism and broaden the concept of market by giving full recognition to SBEs. Once this is done SBEs can flood the market and make the market work for social goals as efficiently as it does for personal goals.

Social Stock Market

How do we encourage creation of SBEs ? What are the steps that we need to take to facilitate the SBEs to take up bigger and bigger chunks of market share ?

First, we must recognise the SBEs in our theory. Students must learn that businesses are of two kinds : a) business to make money, and b) business to do good to others. Young people must learn that they have a choice to make --- which kind of entrepreneur they would like to be ? If we broaden the interpretation of capitalism even more, they'll have wider choice of mixing these two basic types in proportions just right for their own taste.

Second, we must make the SBEs and social business investors visible in the market place. As long as SBEs operate within the cultural environment of present stock markets they'll remain restricted by the existing norms and lingo of trading. SBEs must develop their own norms, standards, measurements, evaluation criteria, and terminology. This can be achieved only if we create a separate stockmarket for social business enterprises and investors. We can call it Social Stock Market. Investors will come here to invest their money for the cause they believe in, and in the company they think is doing the best in achieving a particular mission. There may be some companies listed in this social stock market who are excellent in achieving their mission at the same time making very attractive profit on the side. Obviously these companies will attract both kinds of investors, social-goal oriented as well as personal-gain oriented.


Making profit will not disqualify an enterprise to be a social business enterprise. Basic deciding factor for this will be whether the social goal remains to be enterprise's over-arching goal, and it is clearly reflected in its decision-making. There will be well-defined stringent entry and exit criteria for a company to qualify to be listed in the social stock market and to lose that status. Soon companies will emerge which will succeed in mixing both social goal and personal goal. There will be decision-rules to decide upto what point they still qualify to enter the social stock market, and at what point they must leave it. Investors must remain convinced that companies listed in the social stock market are truly social business enterprises.

Along with the creation of the Social Stock Market we'll need to create rating agencies, appropriate impact assessment tools, indices to understand which social business enterprise is doing more and/or better than others --- so that social investors are correctly guided. This industry will need its Social Wall Street Journal and Social Financial Times to bring out all the exciting, as well as the terrible, news stories and analyses to keep the social entrepreneurs and investors properly informed and forewarned.

Within business schools we can start producing social MBAs to meet the demand of the SBEs as well as preparing young people to become SBEs themselves. I think young people will respond very enthusiastically to the challenge of making serious contributions to the world by becoming SBEs.

We'll need to arrange financing for SBEs. New bank branches specialising in financing social business ventures will have to come up. New "angels" will have to show up on the scene. Social Venture Capitalists will have to join hands with the SBEs.

How to Make a Start

One good way to get started with creating social business enterprises would be to launch a design competition for social business enterprises. There can be local competition, regional competition and global competition. Prizes for the successful designs will come in the shape of financing for the enterprises, or as partnership for implementing the projects.

All submitted social business proposals can be published so that these can become the starting points for the designers in the next cycles, or ideas for someone who wants to start a social business enterprise.

Social Stock Market itself can be started by a SBE as social business enterprise. One business school, or several business schools can join hands to launch this as a project and start serious business transactions.

Let us not expect that a social business enterprise will come up, from its very birth, with all the answers to a social problem. Most likely, it will proceed in steps. Each step may lead to the next level of achievement. Grameen Bank is a good example in this regard. In creating Grameen Bank I never had a blue-print to follow. I moved one step at a time, always thinking this step will be my last step. But it was not. That one step led me to another step, a step which looked so interesting that it was difficult to walk away from. I faced this situation at every turn.

I started my work by giving small amount of money to a few poor people without any collateral. Then I realised how good the people felt about it. I needed more money to expand the programme. To access bank money, I offered myself as a guarantor. To get support from another bank, I converted my project as the bank's project. Later, I turned it into central bank project. Over time I saw that the best strategy would be to create an independent bank to do the work that we do. So we did. We converted the project into a formal bank, borrowing money from the central bank to lend money to the borrowers. Since donors became interested in our work, and wanted to support us, we borrowed and received grants from international donors. At one stage we decided to be self-reliant. This led us to focus on generating money internally by collecting deposits. Now Grameen Bank has more money in deposits than it lends out to borrowers. It lends out half a billion dollars a year, in loans averaging under $ 200, to 4.5 million borrowers, without collateral, and maintains 99 per cent repayment record.

We introduced many programmes in the bank --- housing loans, student loans, pension funds, loans to purchase mobile phones to become the village telephone ladies, loans to beggars to become door-to-door salesman. One came after another.
If we create the right environment, SBEs can take up significant market share and make the market an exciting place for fighting social battles in ever innovative and effective ways.
Lets get serious about social business entrepreneurs. They can brighten up this gloomy world.

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod
Source: Grameen-info

"instead of giving them fish, teach them instead how to fish."

In our book, Contemporary Entrepreneurship by N.A. ORCULLO, JR., Ph. D, the word social entrepreneurship is defined as..

..the idea is not only promoting the purely business (profit motive) side of the venture but it also focused on providing a venue for employment generation at the resource location mostly in the countryside... "instead of giving them fish, teach them instead how to fish."

Posted by: Jasmin Bautista

Social entrepreneurship - Its promises and its challenges

Last March 2005's Alliance magazine includes this article. The article is all about the promises and challenges of Social Entrepreneurship.

First, the magazine liked to jump headlong into the discussion on social entrepreneurship by asking five questions:

1. Do you regularly take at least three weeks’ holiday a year?
2. Do you give any thought to what you will do when you retire, looking longingly at the time when you will no longer have to be in the office from nine to five – or often much later?
3. Does the thought of not having a regular monthly pay cheque drive you to the medicine cabinet in search of a tranquillizer?
4. Do you need to feel that your friends and co-workers approve of what you are doing?
5. Do you spend any less than 24 hours a day obsessing over new ways to transform society?

The article stated:

When you have answered ‘yes’ to at least two of those questions, chances are that you are not a social entrepreneur.

But before you put down this issue of Alliance because you have decided it obviously has nothing to do with you, we want to assure you that very few people are social entrepreneurs. Indeed, a world populated by social entrepreneurs alone would be as unbalanced as one filled only with public servants or corporate sector representatives. What is important is to be able to recognize social entrepreneurs, and the vital innovative and transformative role that they play, and ensure that they are fully supported by other sectors.

This issue of Alliance will explore what it means to be a social entrepreneur from the point of view of its leading proponents and practitioners. Persistent challenges for social entrepreneurship will be examined, including how best to scale up innovations and assess impact without losing the vision, as well as how to work effectively with other major stakeholders and potential supporters, including governments, business, multilateral and bilateral organizations, foundations and high net worth individuals. What is the role of education and the media in social entrepreneurship? What systems and services must be created to provide the kind of financial and other supports social entrepreneurs need?

Prior to delving into these issues, we need to define what we are talking about, for as social entrepreneurship has become a generalized ‘buzzword’, it is suffering from the ‘five blind men and the elephant’ syndrome. Because it is a relatively new field, people tend to base their definitions of social entrepreneurship on subjective and relatively limited experience rather than on a broad base of empirically derived knowledge and, to a certain extent, that’s what we’re doing. In that sense, we, too, suffer from the ‘elephant syndrome’. Nevertheless, and in all humility, we would suggest the following description of a social entrepreneur – and conversely, offer our ideas on where confusion over its definition might partly lie.

What a social entrepreneur is …

A social entrepreneur identifies practical solutions to social problems by combining innovation, resourcefulness and opportunity. Committed to producing social value, these entrepreneurs identify new processes, services and products, or unique ways of combining proven practice with innovation to address complex social problems. Whether the focus of their work is on enterprise development, health, education, environment, labour conditions or human rights, social entrepreneurs are people who seize on the problems created by change as opportunities to transform societies.

The organizations set up by social entrepreneurs defy pigeonholing. They cannot be lumped easily into the non-profit or for-profit worlds that we cling to. Increasingly, social entrepreneurs are setting up their organizations as for-profit entities, though most are still constituted as not-for-profits. The point is that the legal form chosen for the entity is simply a strategic decision based on how best to achieve the mission. They don’t shun existing economic models, but most social entrepreneurs are pragmatic about the limitations of market economics and persistent about finding ways to use markets to empower the poor. Most experiment with and perfect business models that allow the poor to have access to the wide variety of technologies that the more fortunate among us take for granted – from information communications technology and health care to ways of ensuring good housing, clean water, access to energy, decent wages, relevant education and so on.

Social entrepreneurs undertake both public and private sector functions simultaneously. On the one hand, they work with people that governments have been unable to reach effectively with basic public goods and services. On the other, they address market failures by providing access to private goods and services to markets where business does not operate because the risks are too great and the financial rewards too few. With little market reward or assistance, social entrepreneurs are reshaping the architecture for building sustainable and peaceful societies.

Social entrepreneurs are the ultimate scenario planners of our time. They see desirable futures in present conditions, and act to bring them about, generally in spite of efforts to persuade them to the contrary. They are disrupters and activists who challenge the notion of incremental, continuous improvement. Social entrepreneurs don’t believe in more of the same, and they appear to relish what keeps the rest of us awake at night – uncertainty and risk.

… and what a social entrepreneur is not

Social entrepreneurs aren’t just founders of social enterprises. While some social enterprises are created by social entrepreneurs, not all of them are. The term social enterprise emerged recently with reference to non-profit organizations seeking new and different ways to generate the funds they need to operate. Now social enterprises are being created by governments to catalyse community renewal and provide excluded groups with income-generating opportunities. The vast majority of social enterprises focus on the delivery of goods and services. Social transformation and system change are not their primary drivers, as with social entrepreneurs.

This may seem like a superfluous distinction but it isn’t. There is a marked difference between a social entrepreneur and a manager of a social enterprise. While the latter is essential for the smooth running of the operation, the former is a mover and a shaker, the motor of social transformation.

Nor are they business entrepreneurs. However, the two are sometimes confused, so it’s useful to draw some distinctions. For a start, social entrepreneurs are committed to social value creation, so finance is a means to an end for them, never the end in itself. Personal reward, risk and cost become secondary concerns; and they typically take little for themselves. They display innovation, resourcefulness and practicality just like business entrepreneurs, but their products, services, clients and business methods are dictated by the needs of underserved markets and stakeholders. They are often more comfortable with the unconventional than with the conventional in reaching beyond the limits of the marketplace to serve the needy.

By virtue of their social mission, social entrepreneurs are often thrown into the same pot with other organizations in the citizen sector, those referred to by the misnomer ‘NGO’. But here again a distinction needs to be made. Social entrepreneurs are practical and focused on outcomes rather than process, while many in the citizen sector are wedded to the latter. Moreover, social entrepreneurs tend to shun ideological positions as they prevent one from spotting the opportunities for transformational social change. Nor do they embrace charitable models that aim to alleviate suffering and address social issues without changing the conditions that gave rise to that suffering. Social entrepreneurs seek transformation of the status quo.

To get some idea of what these distinctions mean in practice, if you were to combine a Mother Teresa with a Richard Branson, you’d be getting close to a social entrepreneur – a Fazle Abed, for example, or one of the other accomplished social entrepreneurs featured in this issue.

The benefits of working with social entrepreneurs

The greatest challenge for social entrepreneurs lies in persuading all other actors to reinforce and support them. Neither governments, businesses, multilateral and bilateral institutions, foundations, philanthropists, and academia nor the civil sector have yet caught up with this emerging field, and they too often stand in its way.

Yet all these groups stand to gain tremendously from stimulating and supporting social entrepreneurship. And social entrepreneurs need them. In fact, social entrepreneurs will be the first to say that alone they cannot undertake their critical work of social and economic change. They need the support of imaginative, compassionate and talented people from all sectors who can help social entrepreneurship live up to its promise.

The public sector
Government has a critical role to play in supporting social entrepreneurs, as we will see in the article by Sheela Patel of SPARC in India (see p24). However, with few exceptions, governments and government bodies have yet to recognize social entrepreneurship as a legitimate field of endeavour. This recognition is crucial if governments are to provide a better fiscal and legislative environment for social entrepreneurs, including the review of tax laws and the elimination of burdensome regulations, arbitrary decision-making and other requirements and practices that hamper them. More often than not, social entrepreneurs find themselves shunning collaboration with governments for reasons ranging from corruption to inefficiency and indifference on the part of government bureaucrats. Where government-social entrepreneur collaboration has been effective, the benefits have been manifold for both, but such examples are rare.

Companies
Increasingly, companies are beginning to appreciate the merits of working with social entrepreneurs, mainly for three reasons, all related to competitiveness.

• From a financial perspective, reaching untapped markets can be greatly facilitated by working with social entrepreneurs who have spent decades designing, implementing and refining innovative ways of bringing previously excluded groups into the marketplace.
• Increasingly, companies are discovering that consumers expect them to pay some heed to the social effects of their operation. Companies are discovering that they can ‘outsource’ the social innovation element to social entrepreneurs in the same way they have done with product innovation and business entrepreneurs.
• From a human resources perspective, the ability to attract top talent is a major challenge for companies. But the best and brightest today are looking for more than impressive salaries and stock options. They want something that gives meaning to their work and their lives. Supporting social entrepreneurs in different ways shows that companies care about more than the bottom line.

Foundations and philanthropists
These are best placed to support social innovators, as they are free of the voting booth and the financial bottom line, the forces that dominate the decisions of government and business respectively. But too many foundations and philanthropists seem content to fund demonstration projects that they hope will produce dramatic results in a very limited time. This is unrealistic, misplaced and costly. As so many successful social entrepreneurs can vouch, it often takes years before their idea takes shape into a viable and scalable solution. Even then, the approach must be constantly modified to respond to unforeseen obstacles or dynamics along the way. This issue’s article on ‘Learning from mistakes’ (see p35) highlights how every obstacle encountered by the social entrepreneur means modifying the idea or the way it is implemented.

A social entrepreneur continuously adapts. As Ela BhattMirai Chatterjee, founder member of the ground-breaking Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, put it, ‘The biggest thing we have learned after 30 years of existence is that there are no definite victories or defeats. The most important thing is to keep on going.’ Foundations need to rethink their focus on supporting demonstration projects. They can have much greater impact by scaling up demonstrably successful social innovations initiated and implemented by social entrepreneurs. The wheel does not need to be reinvented, just adapted to travel in new terrain.

Multilateral and bilateral development organizations
It is evident that multilateral and bilateral development organizations, to a greater or lesser degree, have all increased their collaboration with non-state actors, including social entrepreneurs. Much of this change has occurred in the last decade in response to general calls for reform to make these organizations better equipped to respond to the challenges of the 21st century. In particular, strong criticism has been made of those multilateral institutions responsible for finance, development and trade for their failure to consult civil society and interest groups on their policies. Some institutions have responded by devoting time and energy to dialogue with non-state actors. But more needs to be done.

We are in an interesting phase of new thinking and experimentation, and these institutions have a vital and catalytic role. They should make it a priority to spot and legitimize social entrepreneurs who have the capacity to imagine and the ability to implement what they imagine through disciplined innovation. In this issue, Andrea Coleman of Riders for Health (see p25) and Victoria Hale of OneWorld Health (see p27) describe their ups and downs working with UN organizations to illustrate the benefits and difficulties inherent in such partnerships.

Academia
Finally, the academic sector has a key role to play in fostering social entrepreneurship and advancing knowledge about it (see Rowena Young’s article on p30). Important strides have been made, particularly at university level, but we have barely begun to instill entrepreneurial thinking in younger students. And while we all know that entrepreneurship is not something to be learned out of a book, it must be cultivated. The entrepreneurial mindset has been described in terms of the following characteristics: commitment and determination; leadership; obsession with opportunity; tolerance of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty; creativity; self-reliance; ability to adapt; and motivation to excel. Primary and secondary schools across the globe should be supported in their efforts to develop a curriculum that instills these characteristics in future global citizens, whether they become social entrepreneurs or not.

Summing up
Perhaps the most important qualities of social entrepreneurs are courage and resilience. Their courage allows them to champion a cause and to take risks others wouldn’t dare to take. Their resilience enables them to endure the obstacles and setbacks along the way to achieving transformational social change for as many as possible, as soon as possible.

We cannot expect the systems and structures that created the problems we face to come up with solutions to those problems. Too many of us have lived within those systems for too long, blinding us to other possibilities. As historian Barbara Tuckman noted, men and woman ‘…will not believe what does not fit in with their plans or suit their prearrangements’. Social entrepreneurs, with their hybrid approaches derived from inspired pragmatism, can work with any and all sectors, offering new and very different approaches to what many of us say we want to do – change the world.

Guest editors for the special Alliance feature on ‘Social entrepreneurship – its promise and challenges’

Pamela Hartigan is the Managing Director and a Board Member of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a Geneva-based organization dedicated to improving the state of the world though social entrepreneurship. She can be contacted at Pamela.Hartigan@schwabfound.org Jeroo Billimoria is a social entrepreneur, and founder of numerous transformational initiatives including Childline India and Child Helpline International. She can be contacted at jeroo@childhelplineinternational.org

Source:http://www.alliancemagazine.org/node/1061