Writing about Social Enterprise

I recently submitted a chapter for the book The Great Enterprise: Creating a New Civilization through Social Entrepreneurship and Responsible Business Practices, which discusses how social entrepreneurs and innovative social business practices and models can help make our world more sustainable. Edited by the Goi Foundation of Japan and scheduled to be published by Oekom Publishing (Munich) later this year, the book features articles from authors all over the world. This summer I also signed a contract with Jossey-Bass to develop a book based on my Sustayne curriculum. I felt honored to be asked to participate in both of these projects.

As I sat down to write the chapter "Social Enterprise and Social Entrepreneurship: Tools to Achieve a More Balanced World" for Goi, the reality of starting with a blank page and trying to create something meaningful hit me hard. After all, it's easy enough to engage in lively conversation, even to deliver workshops about the topic I care so much about. But writing 8-10 pages for an unknown audience about how I think social enterprise creates change in the world ended up being a daunting task. After some serious procrastinating , including asking for an extension or two, it finally all came together. In writing, I was forced to get really clear about why social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are important. Sure, it makes me feel good to do work that aligns with my personal values, creates financial sustainability and positively impacts society. But how does it change the world and how does my work help contribute to that?

The answer I came up with is that we need to get back to a more holistic view of our actions, of our relationship with the earth and how we live. I got inspiration from a Native American fable about a time when we were in more harmony with the earth, a time when innovations and ideas were valued by how they benefitted society. I realized that social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are tools that can be instrumental in helping us get to a place of knowing and acting on the belief that our social, environmental and economic activities are inextricably linked. An organization that embodies this and which is featured in the chapter is MA'O, an organic farm in Hawaii that has one of the most holistic models I've seen. They teach native Hawaiian youth how to be entrepreneurs and farmers by running a successful organic farm. The ripple effect of this is that it helps the youth connect back to the earth and their native culture, gets healthy, locally grown food into the community, provides youth with job skills, training and hope for their futures and provides revenue to do additional education and awareness in the broader community.

As for how Social Enterprise Group's work helps change the world, I've discovered that as we help to scale technical assistance through our clients like MA'O , we’re also creating a ripple effect. We help by making tangible, effective tools broadly available and by providing a "bird's eye view" of the field. In the past eight years, we've worked with hundreds of organizations in workshops and trainings and with many more each year through in-depth consulting projects. This fall more of our Sustayne curriculum will be available via our workshop series. We'll be offering a free teleworkshop on September 9th for those of you who want an overview of what social enterprise is. And, for the first time, in our "Horror Stories from the Field" workshop, we'll have a session that highlights three projects that didn't go so well, the lessons learned and ways you can learn from these mistakes. All of our workshops are delivered via a one hour phone call, so you can participate from wherever you live and work. Check out www.sustayne.com for information on our workshops, speaking and consulting services.

So, for all you social entrepreneurs out there, keep on changing the world and let us know how we can help.

Download A More Balanced World here

Global social enterprise - the same old conversations?

Last week, I was one of 3 panelists at the Canadian Conference on Social Enterprise in Vancouver, BC. The topic of the panel was Lessons From Abroad and focused on what we can learn from social enterprise initiatives in other parts of the world as well as what's the same and different about working in North America versus other parts of the world. The main things I learned from this conversation are:

1) The barriers to social enterprise are virtually the same the world over: lack of appropriate & sustainable types of financing, public policy that doesn't support or understand social enterprise and lack of effective and accessible management support/technical assistance - which happens to be my big passion and the push behind getting Sustayne, our sustainable business planning methodology scaled as broadly as possible.

2) Many large global philanthropies are the major funders in developing countries and there is a dependency on these dollars. However, most of these organizations are bureaucratic and not very entrepreneurial themselves, so they often don't understand how to support social enterprise and the innovative solutions stemming from social entrepreneurs.

3) Meeting communities where they are at continues to be an issue. Developing countries are often facing very core issues such as hunger, basic education, water sanitation and rampant theft. So, some solutions we might seek in North America are often not appropriate for where a specific community is at in terms of the very real constraints they have to work in. One example that was given is a funder who gave computers to a nonprofit in South Africa. The community had a major theft problem and computers were often stolen quickly. Additionally, having a computer put a person into a different social "status" than those without computers. So, there were many issues behind the receipt of computer equipment than just being a solution to a specific problem.

A question that was raised that really made me think was "these sound like the same conversations I had in graduate school 20 years ago in terms of community development and micro enterprise - has anything changed?" Hmmm. I had to admit, these are many of the central issues I learned as a Peace Corps Small Enterprise Development volunteer in Mali, West Africa many years ago. He's right. The conversation does sound the same. I guess for me what's changed is my understanding of what these issues mean and how an entrepreneurial approach to solving tough social and environmental issues can actually be applied for effectiveness. And, the world has changed. We are living in a very different place with much more communication than 20 years ago. Thanks to technology, women in small villages can sell their art around the world. We can see, hear and practically feel what's going on in the farthest reaches of the world. So, yes, much of the conversation around global social issues is the same....I just hope we are all getting to a deeper level of understanding what these issues mean and how to approach them.