Category Archives: Social Entrepreneurship

Jul 06 2012
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Career, Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Jaspal Shakya (OpportuneJobs.com)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am the Co-Founder and CEO of OpportuneJobs.com, a for-profit initiative of SkillsKarma Services Private Limited. OpportuneJobs.com is a one stop portal for jobs, fellowships, internships, volunteering, consulting services, RFP/EOI/Tender, events and news. It is a creative enterprise managed by a group of young, passionate, innovative and skill driven entrepreneurs, whose constant endeavor has been addressing the needs of development professionals and corporate/NGOs/social enterprises across India. As a CEO my responsibilities include developing and implementing strategies, making major decisions, and managing the overall operations and resources of OpportuneJobs.com.

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Jun 21 2012
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Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Aubrie Campbell Canfield (Actuality Media)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am Co-Founder (along with my husband) and Production Manager of Actuality Media, a service learning documentary production company. We coordinate study-abroad experiences for individuals interested in media and we teach them how to create short documentary films about nonprofit organizations, social entrepreneurs and other change makers around the world. Within the organization I am responsible for overseeing all aspects of our production process (research, prep, shooting and editing), instructing the students while on location, and developing current and new programs. I am also about to undertake a speaking and screening tour, traveling to University campuses in the US and Europe and talking to media students about the importance of telling stories that matter. Actuality Media is a for-profit LLC based in the USA, that was recently certified as a Benefit Corporation. All our media is available here.

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Jun 11 2012
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Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Tom Rippin (On Purpose)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am the CEO and Founder of On Purpose, a social enterprise that is a leadership programme for professionals seeking to transition into the social enterprise space at a relatively early point in their career. We believe that the way capitalism works is changing and that equipping as many as possible of the very best talent to work on new models of how society works is a critical mission.

What that means in practice is that I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to develop people, helping them get used to working in new ways and/or organizations, modeling behaviours and exposing them to others who model useful behaviours and a lot of networking and network sharing. Beyond that, I also have to run the nuts and bolts of the organization and the actual programme (now together with my colleague Kate Richardson).

The programme runs for one year, full time and we recruit high-calibre professionals (from any sector) who have at least several years’ work experience. During the programme these “Associates” do four things:

  • Work for six months each in two organizations that are combining social (or environmental) and commercial ways of working (for which the Associates are paid a living allowance)
  • Attend half a day a week of training covering the most important topics from both the social enterprise and commercial worlds
  • Meet once a fortnight with a mentor who helps them add as much value to the organization they are working for as possible
  • Talk to a coach once a quarter about their personal goals, their career and how they are transitioning into social enterprise

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May 28 2012
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Good Profiles, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Roy Lachica (Koios Project)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What are you up to nowadays?

For a living I work as a software developer in the private sector. On my spare time I use my expertise as a programmer to develop koios.org, a free online problem solving platform for complex social issues.

Koios is a long term nonprofit R&D project that aims to create a web based service for systemic innovation.

At the moment the project is in a proof of concept feasibility study phase and we are testing the conceptual underpinnings of the system. At this early stage it is mainly me working on the project although there are a few contributors from around the world.

Our website koios.org is gradually making more sense as we continuously do prototyping, comprehensive literature studies and state of the art reviews. We are also gradually establishing contact with relevant people around the world who contribute with valuable ideas and feedback.

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Apr 26 2012
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Career, Development, Good Profiles, Impact Investing, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability

Good Profile – Chelsea Katz (Kellogg Net Impact / Fresh Takes Kitchen)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What are you up to these days?

I am wrapping up my final quarter at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and will complete my MBA in less than two months!  While at Kellogg, I’ve focused on Social Enterprise (SEEK) and Entrepreneurship academic concentrations and have taken several great experiential or project-based courses including Sustainability Lab, Innovate for Impact, and Impact Investing (taught by David Chen of Equilibrium Capital Partners). I’ve also been heavily involved in the Net Impact Community.  This year I served as the VP of Careers for the Net Impact Club and chaired the Innovating Social Change Conference.  In my first year I led the Social Impact Career Trek to the Bay Area and the Global Health Initiative HIV/AIDS diagnostics market research trip to Kenya. 

What did you do prior to school?

I spent three years in Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance practice where I provided consulting services to a variety of cross-industry clients with a focus on change management, organization design, and talent strategy. While at Accenture, I also provided extensive pro-bono consulting services to a number of nonprofit organizations including Accenture Development Partnerships, i.c.stars, and Junior Achievement.  I was also very involved in Corporate Citizenship efforts and developed a collaborative internal network of social impact enthusiasts dubbed the “Accenture Network for Social Impact” and managed Accenture’s sponsorship of the national Net Impact conference.  After a year as a pro-bono consultant, I transitioned to a full-time strategic project manager role with i.c.stars – an innovative Chicago nonprofit organization that uses project-based learning and full immersion teaching to provide opportunities for change-driven, inner-city community leaders to develop skills in business and technology. At i.c.stars I managed a portfolio of social enterprise consulting projects, fundraising events, and strategic initiatives, and led a cycle of interns through the first project in the training program.

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Apr 09 2012
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Reflection, Social Entrepreneurship

Envy = Unhappiness or: The Importance of Generosity of Spirit among Social Innovators

We intuitively understand that we live in a society today where, more than ever before, everyone has the opportunity to be an innovator and a changemaker thanks to the marvels of technology and the interconnectedness it has brought us. That’s beautiful indeed. But this has come at a price, I would argue. Not all is well that seems well on the surface.

Consider that in the same world, in a given community, for every single person that takes the initiative to write a book, start a company, or build anything else of meaning and value, there are hundreds if not thousands of others who stand by, observe, nod in public approval… and then, upon returning home, lay privately tormented and desperate.

Tormented by what?

Before we get there, consider this scenario: one day, any day, you read the news and blogs of whatever domain you happen to be a passionate follower of and you find the headlines about someone’s amazing invention, discovery, accomplishment or celebrated success. On top of this, imagine that this person is just around your age, even from the same country, had the same major in college and worked in the same industry.

What is your very first reaction? Are you:

A) Excited about the invention?

B) Happy that things are going well with the world, after all?

C) Hoping you could meet this person one day?

Likely, my guess is you would circle D) None of the Above. What else then? No matter how accomplished, rich, successful and pedigreed you are, it is likely possible that you experience to some degree a feeling that we commonly refer to as “envy”. This, if not admitted honestly, can then lead to further feelings of frustration, inadequacy, and even anger. The complete package, in the worst case, results in torment and despair.

Today, I would like to think about why this is, what’s at stake for changing this, and why the key to this may be the little discussed but essential notion of “generosity of spirit”.

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Apr 05 2012
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Good Profiles, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Zack Matere (Leo pamoja)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I would describe myself as an evangelist for my innovation of village noticeboards as an alternative/addition to the internet (*Editor’s Note: Official website still under construction) for rural communities in the developing world. I have run a mini supermarket and am currently a small scale farmer.

Is “doing good” a key reason why you chose this job? 

I developed the leo pamoja (“together today”) communicating villages because of the frustration of knowing that there was valuable knowledge in the air that the community in my village could not access. Doing good to me is providing a place for people who have been unable to access knowledge and connect with each to finally be able to do that. Access to information is life-transforming in a rural village. Hence, with my innovation I hope to bring change in the community and that’s exciting.

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Mar 29 2012
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Reflection, Social Entrepreneurship

The Quest for Originality or: “Help! Everything Has Already Been Done!”

As easy to find as a needle in a haystack!As someone who did not grow up with a habit of inventing things, I wonder sometimes what it must be like to have that type of mind. It is less creativity that I’m referring to as much as the notion of originality. More precisely: how to cope and avoid going nuts when you cannot really come up with anything truly original!

Remember the time I was thinking about why we don’t consider more seriously the idea of social “replicaneurship” instead of the traditional “entrepreneurship”, in order to take some of that “wheel reinvention” habit out that we tend to see nowadays? At the time I wondered if sometimes we would be doing good enough if we could simply take well-conceived social change models that some brilliant person elsewhere had already come up with, say, microcredit, and simply replicate this idea in our own neighborhoods. Instead, what we tend to see is many people starting up their own social enterprise without much research about what has already been done, i.e., with little regard to existing best practices. Sometimes this wastes time, money, or both, or worse: it can create widespread confusion among the landscape of funders, beneficiaries and practitioners.

In that sense, the problem was that people sometimes overestimate the importance of originality to create breakthroughs and/or attain fame.

Today, I am pondering what we should do when we actually DO seek originality… but can’t find it because thanks to the Internet, you can find your awesome idea already done just about fourteen times over – five years ago, that is – maybe even by a guy or girl living in the town next to you!

Oh, the angst, the frustration!

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Mar 21 2012
12 Comments
Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship

Competition vs. Collaboration in Social Entrepreneurship – Can’t We All Be Friends?

In a recent article I read, the author, Yotam Ariel, tries to offer a social entrepreneur working in solar lamp distribution an opportunity to cut his costs by half by arranging for bulk-buying with other solar entrepreneurs to reduce the unit cost for each manufacturer. The entrepreneur refuses, citing that he would rather not help his competitors to “free-ride” off of his (bigger) purchasing power.

Hence, the author wonders why it is that people with similar social missions are still hesitating or outright refusing to share resources. What fears or concerns motivates them to do so? What speaks in favor or against collaborating with other social entrepreneurs? How much competition do we need among social businesses?

Good questions in my book! I wonder what you think after indulging my thoughts for a moment…

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Mar 17 2012
6 Comments
Forum, Reflection, Social Entrepreneurship, Weekly Ponder

Weekly Ponder #7 – The Nature of Ambition: How Serious Should We Take Ourselves?

Weekly Ponder #7

The Nature of Ambition: How Serious Should We Take Ourselves?

Last week, we concluded some thoughts on the nature of ego and the way it affects different individuals’ approach to social entrepreneurship. While we tend to speak of ego usually negatively, I pointed out that at best, it serves as a basic motivating force for us to spring to action – even if some may not like the inherent “selfish” motivation.

Today, my thoughts have been circling around this idea of motivation and its big brother – ambition. Specifically, I have been wondering about how we can reconcile the notion of ambition, which deals by definition with the future, with the notion of being at peace and content with the present. Think about all the Buddhist teachings that encourage us to reject attachment, desire and expectations, in order to diminish or avoid suffering.

I suspect that there is a good number of people in the do-good and social entrepreneurship space today that would identify with Buddhist teachings (or perhaps, not?). If so, would it be ignorant of me to think that if you are a social entrepreneur or consider yourself active in this “social” sector, you probably have a considerable amount of ambition?

And if that is the case, do you have some advice for the Good Generation on how to balance forward-looking “ambition” with present-focused Buddhism? Can you have both? Answering this question may be a non-trivial component of the quest for happiness for many folks out there in the field, fighting the good battle.

What’s further at stake seems to be this: at a time when we keep saying that we need more and more people to engage, to strive, to change the world, we are implicitly saying that we need more people to follow the call of their ambition to make their dreams a reality. Where, then, does this leave us?

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