Spring Boarding the Social Entrepreneur Ecosystem

Photo: CC BY-SA 2.0 Some rights reserved by f/orme

I have been thinking on ways to redefine the way Civil Society Organizations with strong social entrepreneurship origins can get organized to promote innovation, collaboration and social change empowering less entrepreneurial individuals to leap forward in creating solutions and risk put into action their concerns and ideas.

I call this new organizational structure a Social Entrepreneurial Collaborative.

As a social entrepreneurs, we grow uncomfortably accustomed to believe that we are the "Social Changers"; non-the-less I have seen that actually leaping into the challenge and pain of trying to generate change and put ideas into action in order to create better world for the collective is the biggest difference between social entrepreneurs and other individuals who would like to see change, who dream of a better world.

Why is this? What is stopping others from participating?

There are many ways of answering this question, and one that has come to me in the last years is that there is a level of social non-acceptance and discrimination to those who chose this path, it is a path of resistance, and a path where motivations differ from the mainstream of accumulating wealth or power. It is a path of high risk and one of loneliness.

I believe, these characteristics deter many people from becoming change makers as social entrepreneurs. I recently embarked on the mission to transform a working organizational structure and attempt to reconstruct the organization into a Social Entrepreneurial Collaborative in order to recognize social entrepreneur potential in individuals by forming change making task forces and a collaborative structure that can serve the collective, serve themselves and promote creativity in a more social environment (eliminate so much solace in the process). In our case the focus is OpEPA's mission to reconnect children and youth with the Earth so that they act in an environmentally sustainable manner.

The structure we are developing uses many tried and proven ideas as well as new ones, organizing them in new ways. We established an "umbrella organization" which can provide basic project and idea development support such as legal framework, organizational history, administrative support and capacity, quality assurance structures and office infrastructure. This umbrella, or hub, serves as the refuge for entrepreneurs that want to start to develop their ideas and provides a solution to many of the cumbersome challenges of social startups and pitfalls of lack of experience.

Additionally, by gathering individuals and groups under the umbrella it allows them to interact with other entrepreneurs and individuals working in different ways of addressing OpEPA's mission be it through educational strategies, communication for conservation or public policy initiatives. The collaborative component involves all of the entrepreneurs under the umbrella as active developers and collaborators in the different initiatives each is leading. And idea can then be molded, improved, developed by several individuals giving the leader a team to work with and to find support through the startup and implementation process.

There is one aspect that has been a challenge, this approach requires changing a current paradigm in business and individual development. Individual gain and benefit vs collective gain and benefit, asking first What is our take? vs asking first What is my take? (CVY to CVN: Como Voy Yo to Como Vamos Nosotros).

When speaking of "our" we need to include the collective, all living beings and systems not only humans or human groups. This is and essential part of our proposal since we believe these are values necessary for the future. Values that focus on developing empathy (to humans and other living beings) and attitudes for sustainability and environmental peace. The premise is based on the idea that what is good for the greater "us" ultimately will be good for me (the individual), win-win outcome.

If we fail, we will have learned from the process which is OK (been there, done that), if the idea succeeds and others join and replicate we might be able to increase social changers exponentially. I am looking within the Civil Society Organization Community for people to join this thinking and molding process so we can shift the paradigm of social entrepreneurship. As with OpEPA, any organization or initiative with a collective focus mission can implement and start working towards developing this model.

- LAC

#SocEnt #EnvironmentalPeace #StartEmpathy