Learning Something about Social Entrepreneurship

What do I like about social entrepreneurship? A great line from the book Mission Inc.: "you won't be good at social enterprise unless you're passionately in love with the very idea of it." Well I was never in love with business. To put it mildly, words like cash flow, generated revenue, return on social capital, or my favorite word so far is one universities use to describe their students: “revenue generating units”, ranged from incomprehensible to repugnant. But the social part, that was my true passion. See I never really got why money was so interesting to people, when they are much more interesting than money. And like most people that didn’t understand money, I spent many a university night in my apartment with friends talking about The Man/Architect (in the clouds and counting the world’s till of money) and the end of days over macaroni and cheese. We talked about more, well normal things like: Do we have a purpose? Why Nietzsche got it right or horribly wrong? Where are we going tonight, and who’s this new hottie?

Being around people is great, but being an activist was where it was at, the passion, the conversations, the heat and fury, sometimes the self-righteousness, but always the purpose. I strongly believed that I had a purpose, that everyone on this planet was born to contribute to something much larger than themselves. It was easy to believe in purpose when you believed in greatness, and I believed in greatness because I saw greatness from a very young age. I was lucky enough to experience both fulfillment and pleasure and got hooked on fulfillment. I found fulfillment in being a human rights activist. They spoke of the conscience in humanity. I learned much later, during my student union year, that a social enterprise does the work of humanity, with humanity.

In our student union, we wanted more accessible student-directed public space, from classrooms, to hallways, to our campus pubs. To organize in any space, students had to go through volumes of paperwork, application deadlines, dos and don'ts. Space was expensive; it took long to book; it was too small, too big, too inconvenient, and with too many rules like: "you ought to have half the attendees be university students"; “you have to have university catering" .... etc.

Those challenges made the difficult job of mobilizing students on campus, off campus, and across clubs, faculties, and campuses much more difficult. Our major campus pub was a nightmare to book. It cost around 3,000 a night and had to be booked 3 months in advance. I sincerely believed that if the university heard the concerns of enough students, things would be different, and with that belief, I believed they were the problem. As much as I would have liked for it to be the case, the problem was much deeper than this. The problem was not only space; it was in our operations. We were amateurs fumbling with a half a million dollars worth of student levy.

I then stumbled across the gold mine of opportunities. I was introduced to a guy who had connections to a huge bar owner who was willing to give us his space for free, with the shuttle busses going to and from campus on a regular basis. The bar was close enough to our campus to be appealing, much larger than our campus pub, had a lounge with pool tables, cheaper drinks, better and more affordable food. It dawned on me. You create competition; you provide a better service more equitably... you stop whining about it and get to work! The space itself held possibilities: what if we could bring our campus artists and musicians and have graffiti jamming nights? What if we could host events across clubs? With minimal overhead expenses, lesser restrictions and a place with potential, a lot of good things can happen.

They didn’t happen, partly because the student union did not have time, and in part because they were suspicious of businesses. I rethought my ideas about the evils of business, because for once I saw the potential of using an enterprise model to create the space for students to connect, mobilize and create more effective change. With the enterprise model, the enterprise itself is the vehicle and you, with your community, are the drivers of the design, content, and purpose of this vehicle. The enterprise model gives you this imaginary plot of land and forces you to rethink and recreate the way in which you use it for the public good. I started to fall in love with the enterprise model because it promised more successful social engagement and change. I wouldn’t want to be a business without a mission, and wouldn’t want to compromise my mission and miss out on a golden opportunity simply because I do not trust anything business.

Hence I learned social enterprise without ever hearing about the phrase itself. "Enterprising" something or other would have been a word I associated with a socially awkward telemarketer. I was told about it much later and figured: maybe it is not so lame a word; it holds the promise of making you an effective dreamer. I think the world of social entrepreneurship is the world of human opportunity and potential.

What’s on your mind? What’s your story? I hope you talk about it, blog about it and share it with us.