Social Entrepreneurship at Council on Foundations

I attended a fascinating session this morning on Social Entrepreneurship. I wrote up a bit of a (lengthy, but informative) play-by-play for Tactical Philanthropy. I’ll put a piece of it below, but you can check out the whole thing here.

How do we create a culture of social entrepreneurship in our community/funding area?

Bill Drayton spoke of the need to reach individuals at an early age in order to build successful adult social entrepreneurs. He emphasized what he termed “applied empathy” as a crucial component for change-makers.

Gregory Dees stressed that entrepreneurship—in the business OR social benefit world—is not easy to create. He argued that building the capacity of social entrepreneurs will depend on inspiring creativity, celebrating successes in a public way, and not stigmatizing failure. Failure is a natural part of the for-profit entrepreneurial world, and yet social entrepreneurs often face unrealistic expectations of success all the time.

I would add that one thing I didn’t cover too much in the guest post was the limitations of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. Those themes weren’t covered very much in the session (to be fair, we were just touching on those topics when time ran out). BUT it should be stated that there certainly seems to be an environment (and perhaps a subset of problems) that are best-suited for social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, or social ventures.  What exactly those conditions and problems are is still unclear to me, but it certainly seems that health issues and youth development in the developing world is one area where social entrepreneurship has had an enormous impact.  More blogging to follow–it’s great to be blogging quasi-professionally!