*Note: I'm not currently accepting freelance gigs--building Purpose Portfolio has me pretty much at capacity :) Thanks for your interest, and feel free to drop me a line if I can help find the right designer for your project. `sj
All in Social Change
Poverty is like an exponent for suffering. The poor experience drought-squared, disease-squared, disaster-squared. It's time we figured out how to "square" our efforts as well.
One of the greatest strengths any social entrepreneur can build is an ability and commitment to "associate closely" with ALL the sectors; to get beyond the semantics and the status quo and focus on solutions.
Many of the most disruptive social innovations of all time have been playpuses--unexpected, even illogical ideas that reasonably shouldn't exist.
From Geoff Wolley (of HuntsmanGay Capital Impact) keynote at the BYU Economic Self-Reliance Conference
I don't think I have ever heard someone say they want to "do" social entrepreneurship...or "work in" it...or "try" it. The language of social entrepreneurship is fundamentally different. They want to BE.
I didn't catch anything else as they walked away, but it made me smile, and I wondered if perhaps I'd just witnessed what Cheryl Dorsey of Echoing Green calls a "moment of obligation."
Like junkies, successful change agents fixate on their cause. They crave it, sacrifice for it, and are willing to expend ever greater effort, against ever greater odds, to move it forward.
SJ: "So, what's the biggest challenge you're facing right now?" Matt: (with not a moment's pause) Funding. SJ: (after a moment of disbelief) Funding? But...you're Kiva...Funding!?
The problems we’re working to solve are enormous, intense and insistent. They demand speed, stamina, and collaboration. They demand we ride as a peloton.
Saw a tweet a few days ago describing social entrepreneurship as a double-edge sword; one edge entrepreneurship and the other the “social” element. I had to laugh—the idiom most commonly meaning risky, unsafe, something that “cuts both ways.” But there must have been a reason someone centuries ago decided to sharpen both edges of their sword.
Development is about releasing potential energy. Like a drawn bow or a loaded spring, developing communities are FULL of potential energy—they vibrate with it. But there are things about living there that prevent this force, this generative energy, from being released.
Perhaps the problem is not so much that we fail, that our efforts fall short of our goals (and the needs of the people we work with). Perhaps the problem is with how we fail.
