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?

"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

HOW DO WE DEFINE SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP?

Social Entrepreneurship is TO HELP others and TO SOLVE problems.
It is a help in creating an equal opportunity, peace, justice and sustainable world.
It is a solve by searching for change, acting to change and using change as an opportunity.

Edited & Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Inspiring Social Entrepreneurs

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and father of microcredit, provides a classic example of social entrepreneurship. The stable but unfortunate equilibrium he identified consisted of poor Bangladeshis’ limited options for securing even the tiniest amounts of credit. Unable to qualify for loans through the formal banking system, they could borrow only by accepting exorbitant interest rates from local moneylenders. More commonly, they simply succumbed to begging on the streets.

Here was a stable equilibrium of the most unfortunate sort, one that perpetuated and even exacerbated Bangladesh’s endemic poverty and the misery arising from it.Yunus confronted the system, proving that the poor were extremely good credit risks by lending the now famous sum of $27 from his own pocket to 42 women from the village of Jobra.

The women repaid all of the loan. Yunus found that with even tiny amounts of capital, women invested in their own capacity for generating income. With a sewing machine, for example, women could tailor garments, earning enough to pay back the loan, buy food, educate their children, and lift themselves up from poverty. Grameen Bank sustained itself by charging interest on its loans and then recycling the capital to help other women.

Yunus brought inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude to his venture, proved its viability, and over two decades spawned a global network of other organizations that replicated or adapted his model to other countries and cultures, firmly establishing microcredit as a worldwide industry.

The well-known actor, director, and producer Robert Redford offers a less familiar but also illustrative case of social entrepreneurship. In the early 1980s, Redford stepped back from his successful career to reclaim space in the film industry for artists. Redford was struck by a set of opposing forces in play. He identified an inherently oppressive but stable equilibrium in the way Hollywood worked, with its business model increasingly driven by financial interests, its productions gravitating to flashy, frequently violent blockbusters, and its studio-dominated system becoming more and more centralized in controlling the way films were financed, produced, and distributed. At the same time, he noted that new technology was emerging – less cumbersome and less expensive video and digital editing equipment – that gave filmmakers the tools they needed to exert more control over their work.

Seeing opportunity, Redford seized the chance to nurture this new breed of artist. First, he created the Sundance Institute to take “money out of the picture” and provide young filmmakers with space and support for developing their ideas. Next, he created the Sundance Film Festival to showcase independent filmmakers’ work. From the beginning, Redford’s value proposition focused on the emerging independent filmmaker whose talents were neither recognized nor served by the market stranglehold of the Hollywood studio system.

Victoria Hale is an example of a social entrepreneur whose venture is still in its early stages and for whom our criteria apply ex ante. Hale is a pharmaceutical scientist who became increasingly frustrated by the market forces dominating her industry. Although big pharmaceutical companies held patents for drugs capable of curing any number of infectious diseases, the drugs went undeveloped for a simple reason: The populations most in need of the drugs were unable to afford them. Driven by the exigency of generating financial profits for its shareholders, the pharmaceutical industry was focusing on creating and marketing drugs for diseases afflicting the well-off, living mostly in developed world markets, who could pay for them.

Hale became determined to challenge this stable equilibrium, which she saw as unjust and intolerable. She created the Institute for One World Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company whose mission is to ensure that drugs targeting infectious diseases in the developing world get to the people who need them, regardless of their ability to pay for the drugs. Hale’s venture has now moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. It successfully developed, tested, and secured Indian government regulatory approval for its first drug, paromomycin, which provides a cost-effective cure for visceral leishmaniasis, a disease that kills more than 200,000 people each year.

Why not call these people social entrepreneurs? It wouldn’t be a tragedy. But such people have long had a name and an exalted tradition: the tradition of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vaclav Havel. They are social activists. Calling them something entirely new – i.e., social entrepreneurs – and thereby confusing the general public, who already know what a social activist is, would not be helpful to the cause of either social activists or social entrepreneurs.

Source: http://www.ssireview.org/

Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition

According to the article by By Roger L. Martin & Sally Osberg, The nascent field of social entrepreneurship is growing rapidly and attracting increased attention from many sectors. The term itself shows up frequently in the media, is referenced by public officials, has become common on university campuses, and informs the strategy of several prominent social sector organizations, including Ashoka and the Schwab and Skoll Foundation foundations.

Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition

Social entrepreneurship is attracting growing amounts of talent, money, and attention. But along with its increasing popularity has come less certainty about what exactly a social entrepreneur is and does. As a result, all sorts of activities are now being called social entrepreneurship. Some say that a more inclusive term is all for the good, but the authors argue that it’s time for a more rigorous definition.

We define social entrepreneurship as having the following three components:

(1) identifying a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve any transformative benefit on its own;

(2) identifying an opportunity in this unjust equilibrium, developing a social value proposition, and bringing to bear inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude, thereby challenging the stable state’s hegemony; and

(3) forging a new, stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or alleviates the suffering of the targeted group, and through imitation and the creation of a stable ecosystem around the new equilibrium ensuring a better future for the targeted group and even society at large.

Source: http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/social_entrepreneurship_the_case_for_definition/

Fundamentals of social change in our time

Bill Drayton is a changemaker and an ambitious one at that. Through his “citizen sector” organization Ashoka – Drayton does not use the term non-profit – he is playing the instruments of capitalism to orchestrate social change. Basically he provides social entrepreneurs with the necessary start-up capital. Then monitors the social returns.

AT FIRST SIGHT, the founder ofAshoka looks quiet and reserved – and yet you immediately sense the strength of his convictions. Here is a man who fights day and night for what he believes in. His most powerful weapon in this battle is rhetoric. He has no time for superficiality and never tires of explaining what he is out to achieve. All of which makes an interview with Bill Drayton a surprising and remarkable experience – in a positive sense. He talked to THE FOCUS about the fundamentals of change in our time.

The Focus: Let’s kick off with a big question: How have you seen the citizen sector evolve in recent years? How do you think it’s going to evolve, and how would you like to see it evolve over the coming decade?

Bill Drayton: The citizen sector, like the rest of the world, is faced with making the transition in this coming decade from a base-building period to a very rapid and self-multiplying take-off period. That is going to challenge every institution – every individual – very dramatically and the citizen sector in particular. Around 1980, the citizen sector followed business to become entrepreneurial and competitive in structural terms. That we lagged three centuries behind business here explains why we had fallen so far behind. Since then we’ve had thirty years of catch-up – very rapid catch-up of productivity, scale and now globalization. So at one level, business and society now can work together, which was not practical earlier. That represents a huge strategic opportunity for the ultimate clients, for business, and for the citizen sector. It’s going to pretty much demolish the existing boundary lines – including legal boundary lines and financing systems. But at a much deeper level, now that the citizen sector has caught up, it’s about transitioning to a world in which everyone is a changemaker.

“This is the transition to the Everyone a Changemaker world.”

The Focus: You once said “social entrepreneurs don’t want to help, they want to change the world.” Where does social entrepreneurship enter this equation?”

Drayton: Social entrepreneurship gives birth and lends shape to change. But let’s back up a bit: Around 1700, business broke the mold. Up to that point, ever since the agricultural revolution we’d had “a world of a few players”. The model that we still live with in almost every institution in society is this world of a few players. Agriculture produced a small surplus, so it could only support a few players. So when we think about a company or citizen sector organization, we think about a few people having the ideas and “managing” everyone else – and that has been the structure of society for a very long time. The problem is that this structure just won’t work in the context of logarithmically escalating change that also comes from more and more angles.
The Focus: What does the accelerating pace of change mean for present day organizations?
Drayton: An organization that works along conventional hierarchic lines will not be able to function in this fast-changing world. It’s an obsolete model. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the business or social sector; the same pace of change is going to be there. It doesn’t even matter much how big the organization is – whether you have 10 people or 20,000. Now this is a wonderful, magical transition, once we get through it. It’s getting through the transition, this next decade, that’s going to be the challenge.

The Focus: Which means a fast change in mindset for management?

Drayton: Correct. This is the most profound change in the management of people since the agricultural revolution. To put that another way: In the business sector we’ve been through several centuries of very slow change, escalating to modest change. Now the rate at which change is accelerating is literally logarithmic. So what was once a very flat curve is going to get very, very steep faster and faster. And while managing a ten percent slope is one thing, managing an eighty percent slope that is still escalating is a very different thing altogether. Even this explanation is understating the nature of the change, because it is going to be taking place not just for business, not just for the citizens sector, but all across society and of course that multiplies the impact. Why do I think this upcoming decade is going to be the most critical period? Because up to now the change has been happening in a way that has not affected most people. Now people need to understand what’s happening in their strategic environment and so this is a classic awareness-tipping process.

The Focus: How can you tell that we’ve reached a tipping point right now?

Drayton: Over the last couple of months, we at Ashoka have been studying the awareness-tipping process. When you look at the Gandhian movement in India, the civil rights movement in the US, the women’s movement at a more international level… they all followed a remarkably similar and very understandable pattern. Right now I think we are, for the shift from the “few players” to Everyone a Changemaker, in the low foothills of the process that has a multi-stage built-in dynamic of self-multiplication. Typically there is a long time when one or two organizations are working away on change. When you think about organizations like the Indian National Congress or the NAACP in the US, most of them took a long time to build up. Gradually you begin to get small clusters where you have a critical mass – where the change is actually taking place. Then you start reaching the point where we are now. With Everyone a Changemaker. You get to the point where a few people who run professional organizations, who organize meetings, who edit magazines, say “oh this is important. Our members or readers might be interested in this.” So they stage a panel session at their annual meeting; they publish an article, and of course these activities make the change more credible. They help people articulate what they are experiencing, which leads to more articles and meetings, and you begin to get a positive dynamic. The next thing that starts happening is that the process of change becomes clearer to a lot of people who are affected by change but didn’t understand it. As it becomes clearer they begin to change their behavior and that, of course, accelerates the actual change process.

The Focus: Then comes the tipping point…

Drayton: Then comes the third stage of this awareness-tipping, when everybody starts realizing: “Hey, women want to be treated differently!” and asking “How are we women supposed to behave now?” or “How do I treat my wife now she’s starting to act differently?” For the next ten to fifteen years, you can’t pick up a newspaper without having some story on this topic. Why? Because the whole population is trying to figure out how on earth they are going to deal with this change.

The Focus: Building networks is one of Ashoka’s core strengths. Does it hold the key to mastering change?

Drayton: If you can get the best entrepreneurs in the world working on a common goal or a problem – get them to think and then to act together – you have something that is a quantum step beyond the sum of the individual social or business entrepreneurs. This is much easier to do with social entrepreneurs, because they are not individually trying to capture a market. That makes it easier to have open-architecture collaboration. If you get 500 leading Ashoka Fellows to think and work together, about what’s really important for children and young people, for full economic citizenship or the environment, you have something that’s never happened before – let alone at a global level. Individual Fellows, as you know, are very powerful. Over half of them have changed national policy within their first five years, and ninety percent have had independent institutions copy their idea within five years. So imagine the power of 500 people and ideas of that caliber collaborating to tip the world in their field. Each of them has a powerful and proven but partial idea, but when one brings them together, the group can see these most critical principles and go on to develop a joint marketing plan and collaboration.

“Social entrepreneurship is very contagious because people deeply and centrally want to express love and respect in action.”

The Focus: You propagate social change in the business sector. How can this idea win through in a corporate world that often stands for very different values?

Drayton: Being a changemaker for the good is very contagious because people deeply and centrally want to express love and respect in action. They want to be a player, a contributor. Moreover, people who don’t master the underlying social skills and who don’t give themselves permission to be a changemaker are marginalized, which is the most awful experience they can have. So this transformation from the old world of a few players to one of Everyone a Changemaker is a liberation movement in the broad sense of the word. We’re liberating people to be able to express love and respect in action in big ways. The level of social skills that is required today is much higher than was required to be a successful person twenty years ago, and in ten years it’s going to be much higher still. And so every manager is going to have to figure out how to help all the human beings they work with – clients, suppliers, customers, employees, colleagues – to master these skills and hone them. This must be central in the definition of what makes a good manager and a good organization.

The Focus: There’s a clear logic behind that. In our everyday practice we see this same process being driven from below: Young graduates are very picky about which organizations they are going to join.

Drayton: Let me use a real-life example, without naming the company. Over recent months I have been talking to several hotel and travel companies. One of these companies is family run. They have just under a hundred thousand employees. They have employed the Henry Ford model, so they train people “you tuck the bed in this way” – that’s how they manage all these people. They do all the thinking. I think this is a hopeless model. The moment one competitor figures out how to run an Everyone a Changemaker hotel chain, this company will be dead as a dinosaur. Imagine by contrast what an Everyone a Changemaker hotel company will be like. The message to everyone in the company is: “Look, all those people out there are travelers. What needs do they have that we could serve?” This is a very different definition of the role of chambermaid or receptionist.

The Focus: So what does all of this mean for organizational leadership? And how do you try to promote change within organizations in practical terms?

Drayton: It’s really all about something every business should do: Figure out what the clients need. But don’t leave it to a few smart people at your company to do that. You need to say to everyone in the organization: “You are a changemaker. You can figure out what customers need. And if you also figure out how to make it work, you are a hero. You are going to do really well. You are going to be a role model for other people in the firm.” Everybody, including the doorman, is empowered. We should be doing the same thing in education organizations, in human rights organizations, in hotels chains and electronics firms – this is the transition to the Everyone a Changemaker world.

Source: - http://www.ezifocus.com/content/thefocus/issue/article.php/article/54300800

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Who is Bill Drayton?

Bill Drayton was born in New York in 1943. His father was an explorer, his mother a cellist. He gained a BA from Harvard in 1965 before going on to Oxford where he read Economics, won a First, and received his MA in 1967. He then attended Yale Law School and obtained his JD in 1970. Drayton began his career with McKinsey as a consultant. Later he worked as Assistant Administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1980 he founded Ashoka, an internationally-oriented citizen organization that tackles the woes of this world with the means of the marketplace. Drayton has played a major part in defining social entrepreneurship: entrepreneuring changes whose success is measured not in terms of profits but of social transformation and whose business models are designed to be copied by other social enterprises to accelerate the pace of change. When it was founded in 1980 as a venture capitalist supporting change in the world, Ashoka had a global operating budget of US$50,000. Last year that had risen to around US$40 million. Today, Ashoka is active in more than 70 countries and supports the work of over 2,000 Fellows – social entrepreneurs it helps from the start-up phase onward. The Ashoka community also includes those who are now thoroughly proven social entrepreneurs, such as the Nobel Prize laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus.

Source: http://www.ezifocus.com/content/thefocus/issue/article.php/article/54300800

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Can Social Entrepreneurship Ever Be Cool

Alliance Extra Article - Can Social Entrepreneurship Ever Be Cool

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Culture online free

Source:Alliance Extra Article - Can Social Entrepreneurship Ever Be Cool - http://www.scribd.com/doc/8519619/Alliance-Extra-Article-Can-Social-Entrepreneurship-Ever-Be-Cool

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Spotlight on Young Social Entrepreneurs

Who are they? What they do? What they need? How can you support them?

Here's a very nice video.

ENJOY & LEARN!

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Want To Be A Social Entrepreneur?

Watch This: Environmental Leader: Green Business, Sustainable Business, and Green Strategy News for Corporate Sustainability Executives

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

The innovation style of social entrepreneurs

Two great social entrepreneurs, Nobel Peace Price winner Mohammad Yunus of Bangladesh and British activist Michael Young, were outstanding experimental innovators.

As typical seekers, they achieved their successes by trial and error and often were unsure of themselves.

“The late Michael Young, who has been spoken of several times today, was perhaps the world’s most prolific social entrepreneur and was an archetypal experimental innovator. He had the basic uncertainty of the experimentalist, as he once declared that ‘I have never had an idea that I was sure about.’ As a result, in all his activities he proceeded cautiously. In the introduction to his doctoral thesis, he compared his scholarly method to the experience of finding his way through the dense London fog that had enveloped him on his first visit to the East End community that became the subject of that thesis: He wrote, ‘I felt my way along, tapping my foot against the kerbstones as I went. I am still tapping.’

“Yet his uncertainty never prevented him from making an effort to achieve what he understood to be the best option, no matter how much opposition he encountered. He attributed his accomplishments to a combination ‘of perseverance and bloody-mindedness.’ Above all, however, he reserved the right to change his mind as he went, for his tapping in the dark was not aimed merely at moving, but at making progress. In 1998, at the opening of his School for Social Entrepreneurs, in his inaugural speech the 83-year-old Lord Young offered a remarkable definition that captured the essential humility and open-mindedness of the experimental innovator, as he explained that ‘Introducing an innovation is an exercise of entrepreneurship, and for me entrepreneurship is best thought of as a concentrated and targeted kind of learning… . The idea has to be subject to continuous examination, a continuous trial and error.’ Appropriately, Young made that speech in Bethnal Green, where decades earlier he had learned about the problems facing the English working class by talking to the people who lived there.

“Over time, Young had become more and more deeply engaged with these problems, for as his friend and biographer Asa Briggs remarked of Young, he was ‘a traveler who becomes increasingly involved the longer he continues his journey.’

“Nor should Young’s experimental orientation be considered in any way surprising, for the complex problems faced by social entrepreneurs can often be expected to require perseverance and bloody-mindedness in the face of both external opposition and internal uncertainty. And perhaps the key is Michael Young’s emphasis on entrepreneurship as learning, not with a fixed goal but as an open-ended process, with continuous examination and constant trial and error. Michael Young was a successful scholar, but Asa Briggs noted that he was never completely comfortable in a university setting, for he needed to be in the field learning about the problems he wanted to solve. Michael Young would certainly have agreed with the metaphor of another important social entrepreneur, Muhammad Yunus, that the university classroom was like a beautiful movie theater, ‘where professors have all the answers and the tale works out so neatly at the end of the day. But it’s make-believe. When you turn on the lights and go outside, it’s a completely different world.’

“Frustrated by the failure of economic theory to help solve the problems of the rural poor during a famine in Bangladesh in 1974, Yunus decided to learn about the poor at first hand by going into their villages, and in his book ‘Banker to the Poor’ he tells us that it was there that ‘the poor taught me an entirely new economics.’ In classic experimental terms, Yunus tells us that when he first began lending money to the poor, ‘I did not know if I was right. I had no idea what I was getting into. I was walking blind and learning as I went.’

“Yunus founded the Grameen Bank on the basic principle that experience is the best guide. All the bank’s employees are encouraged to suggest changes in even the most basic rules. If they perceive better procedures for dealing with the problems they encounter in the course of their daily work.

“Social entrepreneurs do not all have to be experimental; most disciplines, both artistic and scholarly, thrive on the combination of the two approaches, and the creative tension between theoretical and empirical innovation. But as in other disciplines, it is the experimentalists who are likely to have the harder time finding their way.”

by Colin Stewart

Source: http://artsofinnovation.wordpress.com/
Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Social Entrepreneurship: Creating Change

Sometimes the world's social problems can not or should not be addressed by government. Enter the Social Entrepreneur. These innovative people have found solutions to many problems by combining their social expertise with business acumen to create new organizations that are, as London School of Business Dean Laura Tyson describes them, 'a new kind of business hero.' The 2004 Burkenroad Symposium addresses the issue with three scholars who, having written extensively on the subject, share examples of how social entrepreneurs have changed the world.

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Muhammad Yunus: Building Social Business Ventures

Building Social Business Ventures (preview)

Dr. Yunus, recently awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, shares his strategies for building businesses dedicated to the social good. He describes the founding and structure of Grameen Bank, Grameen Phone and other companies he has created on behalf of the poor.

What is a Social Entrepreneur?

A social entrepreneur, in our view, is a person or entity that takes a business approach to effectively solving a social problem. We call this approach an "enterprising idea." Borrowing from the collaborative approach that often distinguishes social entrepreneurs, we also offer the following definitions from a variety of reputable sources.

Here are some definitions of social entrepreneurs...

Are individuals with innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems.
Ashoka

Act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss in order to improve systems, invent and disseminate new approaches and advance sustainable solutions that create social value.
PBS "New Heroes" Program

Are driven by a social mission and a desire to find innovative ways to solve social problems that have been neglected by either the market or the public sector.
Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership Are pioneers of innovation that benefit humanity. [Note: Enterprising Ideas is partially funded by the Skoll Foundation.]
The Skoll Foundation

Use the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems.
Fast Company

Recognize a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.
Wikipedia

Social entrepreneurship is... The art of "simultaneously pursuing both a financial and a social return on investment (the double bottom line)."
Institute for Social Entrepreneurs


Souce: http://www.pbs.org/
Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

SOCIAL BUSINESS ENTREPRENEUR

Social Business Entrepreneurs Are the Solution Dr. 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. Source: Grameen-info Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod