Social Entrepreneur

The Office of the Third Sector in the United Kingdom has just co-published with NESTA and Social Enterprise Magazine Good Deals 2009: A Social Investment Almanack (PDF).  Per the Third Sector Minister, Angela Smith, “This is an unprecedented collection of think pieces and case studies that aims to build knowledge and inspiration among those operating [...]

Talking with Elmira Bayrasil from Endeavor today, we got into the question of resilience. Right now, resilience is the most important thing the rich world can learn from the poor.

In an interview, I asked Elmira what Endeavor had seen change with the last six months of economic downturn. Her response was to share the story of a group of the entrepreneurs they work with who were touring the US just as Lehman Brothers collapsed. Upon hearing the news, their response was basically “what the hell are you so worried about? These sort of collapses happen all the time in our countries.”

The point was not to understate the severity of what’s happening. This crisis is crushing families around the world, putting quality health care, housing, and education further and further away from many people’s reality. And there isn’t yet, I don’t think, any clear sense of the way out. We need more global economic cooperation, for sure, before this gets far, far worse.

That said, the way individuals and institutions view the economy, and particularly their faith in recovery, has huge ramifications for the flow of goods and capital. When banks aren’t confident, they don’t lend. When consumers aren’t confident, they don’t spend.

By and large, the world’s poor are used to doing more with less. People who are living at the so-called bottom of the pyramid have to find ways to survive and thrive every day. It is not romantic but it is reality to suggest that local innovation is the mother of necessity, and that that process has lessons for those with more.

The question becomes why? Why struggle every day? Why work so hard for so little? Why continue to push when things seem so thankless? Whatever the reason they push on – faith, children, hope, the promise of a better life – that is their personal story of resilience.

Those stories are affirming, and they push many of us to reconsider our own plight and put it in context. They help us rediscover our own resilience by making us ask the all important questions of why. And while there is a danger in romanticizing poverty, I think this is one of those moments where many of us should be looking beyond ourselves and into very different types of communities as we struggle to stay confident and hopeful for the future.

The Economist this week is running a special report on entrepreneurship.  One of the stories in the special report, focused on entrepreneurs “doing good,” argues that entrepreneurship is reshaping the voluntary world as much as the commercial world.  Among leading “social entrepreneurs,” the Economist lists Riders for Health, run by 2006 Skoll social entrepreneurs Andrea [...]