Chapter 1
Social Entrepreneurship: A Calling for You
In This Chapter
Discovering what social entrepreneurship is all about
Seeing where you fit in and how to get started
Being inspired by examples of social entrepreneurs
Preparing to move forward with your passion and ideas
At the most basic level, social entrepreneurs want to fix problems. What kinds of problems? Well, what kinds of problems might you be concerned with? Some problems are nuisances or pet peeves, like overcrowded roads, outrageous dress, rude drivers, barking dogs, and telephone solicitors. Other problems threaten or degrade our way of life: environmental pollution, crime, corruption in business and government, economic crises, and so on. And then there are the problems that threaten life itself: climate change, war, famine, genocide, disease, and natural disasters — a grisly list for sure.
It’s probably true that the world today is plagued with more problems of all three types than at any other time in history. We face challenges like never before. The world’s “to do” list is enormous and growing. For social entrepreneurs, that means take your pick — please! You can start small, focusing on a narrow, local issue, and work your way up to bigger and broader goals, building on your successes. The good news — and the bad news, of course — is that there is no shortage of problems around, waiting to be tackled.
What Is Social Entrepreneurship?
Social entrepreneurship and its methods, borrowed from the world of business, are becoming more and more popular among morally conscious people itching to solve a particular social problem and possibly make money in the process. Social entrepreneurs execute innovative solutions to what they define as social problems — be they local, regional, national, or international.
In social entrepreneurship, people use the principles of enterprise — business principles and even capitalism itself — to create social change by establishing and managing a venture. Some are altruists. They set up small, medium, or large nonprofit groups designed to ameliorate a difficult situation threatening certain people, flora, fauna, or the environment — or sometimes a combination of these. Others are profit seekers with a heart, who manage to establish a money-making enterprise that improves a situation in one of these four areas.
Whether starting and running a nonprofit or for-profit social enterprise, these entrepreneurs are usually practical. Each entrepreneur has a mission, typically one that is powerfully felt with urgency and compassion, and each takes concrete action leading to solution of the problem targeted in that mission.
We’ve just described the scope of social entrepreneurship, or what social entrepreneurs do. But what is the nature, or essence, of social entrepreneurship? One way to answer that question is to look at its three essential elements: motivation, organization, and society.
Social entrepreneurship is motivation
Any discussion of social entrepreneurship and its entrepreneurs must include why people get involved in it in the first place. Sure, they’re trying to solve a pressing problem, one that bothers them and probably other people. But look at the desire to be a social entrepreneur in still broader terms.
Some entrepreneurs hope to develop a for-profit social enterprise — they’re seeking a livelihood of some sort. It may not be much at first, but they hope it brings reasonable success in the long run.
For other entrepreneurs, eventually becoming a for-profit social enterprise may be a side effect, even an unexpected one, of their first efforts. And some are only interested in working toward building a successful nonprofit enterprise.
These possibilities of for-profit and nonprofit organizations raise the question of what the entrepreneur gets out of all this, besides solving a problem and changing the world as a result of the solution. What is that person’s motivation? Motivation has long-term effects. Why you do something often determines how and how well you end up doing it.
We discuss this matter of motivation in several ways throughout this book. It comes up when we consider the feelings or urgency and compassion that inspire social entrepreneurs. It comes up when we explain social entrepreneurship as either a special form of leisure (the nonprofit form) or a special form of work (the for-profit form). And it comes up when we look at commitment and obligation.
Social entrepreneurship is organization
A social enterprise is an organization, often one that is legally incorporated (see Chapter 14 for more on that). As in all successful organizations, leaders of social enterprises must engage in careful planning, organizing, and building their group’s identity. They have to decide on the structure of the enterprise, the nature of its constitution, and the elements of its bureaucracy. Sooner or later, they have to decide whether to be a for-profit or nonprofit entity — a decision that has implications for the organization’s status as a tax-deductible charity. The organization needs a mission statement, which sets out its vision, and a clear set of goals toward which to work. Those are the minimal things that must be done in order to have much of a chance at success.
The nature of organizations requires that there be leaders and followers. The principles of good leadership apply as much to social enterprises as to any other kind of organization. The same may be said for managing the people who participate in them. In for-profits, these people, or staff, are paid; whereas in nonprofits, they’re either paid or serve as volunteers. Some nonprofits rely on both paid staff and volunteers.
Social entrepreneurship is society
Social entrepreneurship doesn’t take place in a vacuum — far from it. Working with others is the whole idea, and not just internally within the organization itself. As with other organizations, social-enterprise leaders must adapt to and take advantage of the organization’s external environment. In practice, this means publicizing the enterprise and establishing networks of communication and influence with like-minded groups and with private and governmental sources of power, all of which can help or hinder the enterprise’s goals.
A multitude of large-scale trends currently bear on social entrepreneurship. They include the international movement of national populations, decline in amount and sources of money, and patterns of communicable disease, among others. Trends can subtly or not so subtly influence how your own enterprise evolves, and even whether it eventually fails or succeeds.
Note that for-profit social enterprises are, at bottom, capitalistic entities. Their leaders must necessarily be familiar with the fundamentals of capitalism, the need for innovation, and the need to remain abreast of relevant information about and knowledge of the world of business. The biggest difference is that whereas normal businesses exist to serve one bottom line — profit — social businesses add two more: social and environmental impact. (We discuss the three bottom lines at length in Chapter 8.)
Social Entrepreneurship: How Do You Get Started?
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not asking you to do the Clark Kent thing and transform yourself into a superhero — or become a saint. Not at all. We are asking you to free yourself enough, to be deviant enough, to find the suffering of others, and the state of our world, objectionable. After you do that, what you plan to do about it is up to you. People all over the world are claiming this responsibility and inalienable right to address social and other problems — a right that comes simply from being a person on this precious planet. If you feel like it’s time for you to step up to the plate, then you’ve...
