Social IS environmental; the environment IS social

I constantly find myself pulling out social and environmental bottom lines when I'm creating promotional materials, writings and deliverables. Each time I write something like "developing a business that manages to profit and a social/environmental bottom line" I feel frustrated that many of us in the social enterprise field and many in the environmental sustainability field don't necessarily behave as if social and environmental issues are intertwined. I believe they are. How can a social service organization claiming to be addressing issues of poverty not also take under consideration that poverty and the environment are linked? For example, a worldwide reduction in farmland combined with farmers planting corn to be used as alternative fuel instead of food has caused an astronomical 60% increase in the price of tortillas in Mexico. The poor who can barely afford to eat cannot afford even the most minimal of food staples. How can an environmental organization who is interested in helping people reduce their carbon footprints not also take under consideration the reality of a working class American family that may buy conventional foods and petroleum-based plastic products because they are by far cheaper than organics and items made from natural materials? When you're living paycheck to paycheck, you are thinking about surviving today, so solutions need to be put forth that are achievable for everyone. For example, teaching people to buy used - shop thrift stores instead of running to Wal-Mart is a place to start. I get that we are all doing the best we can and that we can't all attend to every issue out there. However, I think we all need to think about the interconnectedness of everything - bring social and environmental issues closer together - without a society, there wouldn't be a need to attend to the environment. Without an environment, there is no society. I look forward to the day when we can stop separating the two and know that they are two parts of a whole.

"We have spent 99% of our history in the wild. Sky, water, and trees are embedded in us. Sever that and we've severed what it is to be human." -John Todd

The Genius of Youth and the Dreams of Entrepreneurs

Last night, I attended an amazing event here on Vashon Island. It was a youth-adult discussion forum, moderated by the very talented storyteller, Michael Meade, a Vashonite. The theme was "a crisis of culture and the genius of youth". In my discussions with a couple of high schoolers, I was particularly struck by what they felt the genius of youth meant. We discussed how important the wide-eyed dreamer aspect of youth is, but also how important it is to balance that with the pragmatism and experience of elders. It struck me that that balance is exactly what make social enterprise tick. It's vitally important to balance the enthusiasm, passion and wide-eyed dreaming so necessary in allowing social ventures ideas to hatch with the structure, information and experience of those that have been there before.

I guess that's one of the reasons I'm so passionate and wide-eyed about scaling Sustayne. I deeply believe that it blends both of these aspects - it creates a space for dreaming, but provides structure and pragmatic information to help dreamers get their dreams into a tangible and sustainable format. It's the passion for that dream that keeps me going, but I've also had to be careful about tempering that dream with reality and pragmatism. I guess that's the balance for us all - a constant work in progress.

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.