There are many reasons you should volunteer, but some people need a little more persuasion than others. If you are one of these people, consider volunteering in order to gain valuable work experience. Yes it takes time away from something you could otherwise be doing, but typically the experience is rewarding and fun. Also, volunteering is a great way to meet like-minded people who are movers and shakers in the community. Volunteering increases your work experience by increasing your leadership, problem solving, and communication abilities. Find something you’re passionate about and donate some time to it.
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Activism
The following is a list I pulled straight from the appendix of Global Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs To Know, by David Bornstein and Susan Davis. The list is a great starting point for anybody who wants to be involved in social entrepreneurship or social causes. Please feel free to review, share, and become involved. If there are any broken links, let me know and I’ll update the URL. Also, as always, feel free to add any sources you may be aware of that aren’t here.
- Alltop’s Social Entrepreneurship coverage
- Catalyst Fund’s Social Business Blog
- Change.org’s Social Entrepreneurship Blog
- CSR Wire
- Dowser
- E-180
- Echoing Green
- Evan Carmichael
- Fast Company’s “Ethonomics”
- Global Voices Online
- Good Magazine
- Greenbiz
- Grist
- MIT Innovations
- Net Impact
- NextBillion.net
- Ode Magazine
- Social Edge
- Social Enterprise Alliance
- Stanford Social Innovation Review
- Starting Bloc
- Treehugger green news
- University Network of Social Entrepreneurship
- World Changing
- Youth Social Entrepreneurs of Canada
Social entrepreneurship is free enterprise’s answer to social issues and injustices, which, ironically, are largely a result of the failures of that very system. According to economists, a true free enterprise system is the efficient allocation of goods and services from producers to consumers. The problem is that many of these goods and services are allocated very efficiently to only a privileged few, rather than the masses. I’m not pushing a socialist agenda. I’m all for capitalism and free enterprise. I don’t have a problem with one person owning three homes while another owns one. But why should a child have to starve while I’m enjoying steak and shrimp on an expense account 800 miles from home?
Just yesterday a teacher friend of mine told me she saw a young couple across the street pushing two cats in a specially designed cat stroller. What does it mean when our educators are struggling to eat while others can cart around their feline friends in a stroller? Now, I have no problem with how you choose to spend your money, but what does it say about our value system when it’s okay, even expected, to put in sixty hours a week to make enough money only to make it back to work?
Social entrepreneurship brings business intelligence and socially conscious ingenuity together to effectively bring solutions to human and environmental issues that have thus far been largely ignored or have been ineffectively addressed, such as education gaps, health care, poverty, economic disparity, prejudice, and access to clean water and safety.
It hurts my heart to see just how much devastation is caused by the destruction of earthquakes, tsunamis, civil wars, terrorist activities, or other economic, environmental, or political unrests. As we see time and time again, it hurts the hearts of many others as well, as we often donate large amounts of money, time, and volunteers to provide medical attention, counseling, foodstuffs, and other resources. Regardless of whether the issues are across the street or across the globe, something inside us puts our differences to the side so we focus on the human suffering at stake.
In our attempts to provide foreign aid, we often fail to deliver long-term, sustainable impacts that can lead to true change. I think one of the primary reasons this happens is because we look to provide said change, rather than work with the people to develop culturally relevant solutions. We throw money at a problem, but because of the siphoning of it at different levels, very little actually reaches its intended use, making aid money a tremendous source of wealth for the already wealthy. This also perpetuates political unrest and corruption. We tend to judge success by how much money we raise rather than the how much change occurs. It feels good to say we raised x amount of dollars. We can go about our days feeling like we contributed to the solution, and we have. But at the end of the day, we need to make sure that a sustainable solution is reached.
As outsiders we tend to preach the importance of infrastructure. “If only we can irrigate the land to bring fresh water, we can eliminate many of the diseases that claim the lives of so many,” we say. “We’ve got to educate the people about cause and effect so they can change their behavior,” we explain. These sound great, but due to limited funding, one to two year project periods, and volunteers who often either can’t or don’t want to stay long enough to see the changes through, we often leave a problem with little more than a failed experiment. The solutions that work for one group or in one place may not work for another. I’m a big proponent of education, infrastructure, healthcare, and economic development, but how can we work to create sustainable solutions? Grameen Bank and the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) are doing it by brining microfinance to Bangladesh, enabling the people to build their own economy by hiring locals and refusing bribery. How else can we attack problems so build solutions that last?