Social entrepreneurism
On March 31st, I joined a webcast from Inc.500 when former President Clinton spoke on issues he felt pertinent to small businesses. We are a small, small business. Sometimes I feel that we use the “Mighty Mouse” paradigm…being small and making big noise!
What President Clinton spoke about, however, had little to do with size as much as intention. He spoke about the needs of a culture and society to balance itself in opportunity, prosperity, and responsiblity. He also spoke ot the power of leveraging one companies capacity with the needs of a culture. Specifically, approaching Starbucks about purchasing coffee from one of the Indonesian islands whose sole crop and economy was reduced to coffee following the psunami. Starbucks carries a great deal of power in the this great, far from charity, put together need, opportunity, and potential.
I am reminded of a time in my life when I did not know the word “exploitation.” When businesses were not suspected of taken advantage of weakness, but were credited for matching hard work with opportunities rather than assumptions of self-serving profitability.
The first time that I heard the tem “social entrepreneurship” was in India in 2002, attending the first awards ceremony of t he Unniti Founation, a private foundation that provides mini-grants to women-owned buisnesses in undeveloped counries. Founded by Ravi and Kaval Gulhati, Unitti works with interns, women owned businesses, and other social entrepreneurs to fund works directed towards the alleviation of poverty through enhancement of skills and opportunities given for productive endeavours (http://www.propoor.org/ngos/?id=11473).
It felt that I had finally found the right words.
Willaim Jeffereson Clinton pointed out that profitability and social entrepreneurship was hardly incompatible. It was good business..sustainable business.
Pulling from the words of J Dees of Stanford, “Identifying and solving large-scale social problems requires a social entrepreneur because only the entrepreneur has the committed vision and inexhaustible determination to persist until they have transformed an entire system. The scholar comes to rest when he expresses an idea. The professional succeeds when she solves a client’s problem. The manager calls it quits when he has enabled his organization to succeed. Social entrepreneurs go beyond the immediate problem to fundamentally change communities, societies, the world.”
I am so grateful that in this life at this time, any of us can do anything we can dream up. While change is inevitable, it brings with it unlimited possibilities. Not only can we “be the change we want to see in the world,” but at this time…with increasing technoogies to speed it all up…we can design the change before it designs us.