In the spirit of sharing, here are the workshops that we are holding tomorrow.

Thirty five students from entrepreneurship and experiential learning programs will learn about the changing nature of social venture capital, or how individual social entrepreneurs or enterprise ecosystems raise capital. We have invited Candance Klein, founder of Bad Girl Ventures/SoMoLend and David Egner of the New Economy Initiative, as well experts from the region that will talk about using social media to fundraise, grant writing. We also welcome a Wooster alum Sally Feree ’83 who will work closely with students to enhance their venture funding plans.

Since our launch in 2010, we have garnered substantial support from international and domestic constituencies. First we have to thank our social enterprise and alumni supporters in India. Their generosity to our students has opened doors to an unparalleled learning environment.

In addition, we thank our financial supporters that make this possible. From President Cornwell who offers financial aid support to students that demonstrate need, to the parents, families, churches, and the international social enterprises that allow each student to participate. As Laura Valencia’12 wrote for the vision statement:  ”Leaders of the future need to see borders not as barriers but as opportunities; to count similarities, not differences; to think not only of individual profit, but of the greater social return. Leaders need to enter into transnational partnerships evaluating not only how much they can teach, but also how much they can learn.”

Recently Global SE was featured in the Huffington Post. One word: “Nice!”. This is a moment when the students, staff, administrators, alumni that co-founded this program as well as supporters need to be really proud of the fact that their efforts and actions have been recognized. The challenge now is to sustain and be better.

2011 Global SE Team with Sattva Consulting Team

We believe you can solve social problems like poverty, environmental degradation, minority access to education and others by learning from and working alongside agents of change. To find out more come to the informational meeting in Lowry 118 Thursday October 20, at 11am. An additional walk-in session hosted by Global SE alums will be on Tuesday October 25th, 6-9pm in Old Main.

Social Entrepreneurship is the process of creative thinking, innovation, risk-taking, and analysis that creates opportunities with sustainable social and economic value. Our award winning program offers you the unique opportunity to learn about social entrepreneurship by doing. You will work and learn in intergenerational groups both in the US and in India.

1. What is Global SE, really? A transformative seminar and field experience, where you learn, explore and teach each other about the issue of poverty from a multidisciplinary perspective. More…
2. Not convinced? Here is what Gitika (GSE ’10) had to say . And here are Erika’s (GSE’11) thoughts.
3. Deadline to apply is Friday October 28th, 2011. You must submit an online application here. Enter your College of Wooster username and password.

Watch “The Difference Between Change Management and Change Leadership”

“Change management … refers to a set of basic tools or structures intended to keep any change effort under control. The goal is often to minimize the distractions and impacts of the change. Change leadership, on the other hand, concerns the driving forces, visions and processes that fuel large-scale transformation.”

Change leaders have to go beyond vision. They need to spend a lot of financial and human capital as well as time harnessing coalitions for change. How one harnesses coalitions is also important. Amongst other things, a leader must possess large amounts of emotional intelligence and an inclination to act inclusively. I agree with Mr. Kotter, we have few change leaders in the world. We need more.

Corruption is not a new force in the Indian political landscape, but the current public outcries are very strong. During the two months, it was rare to not catch glimpse of an anti-corruption themed headline. The detrimental economic and political effects of corruption are well documented and certainly don’t need to be rehashed here. The situation for India is made all the more precarious by the fact that foreign businesses are a key component of the country’s economic growth strategy. A March 10th article in The Economist cited bureaucratic and political corruption as a barrier to foreign investment second only to India’s struggling infrastructure. The current public fervor isn’t new, but still reveals key lessons about the role the social sector can play in the fight against corruption.

The current Indian anti-corruption movement is among the largest ever organized in India’s history and encompasses a series of protests centered on a proposed bull known as the Jan Lokpal Bill. The bill, which many of the protesters believe could effectively tackle the problem of corruption so long as it is properly worded and enforced, calls for the creation of an ombudsman known as the Lokpal that would serve as an independent body with the authority to investigate political leaders without prior government support. A compromised version of the bill that merges the Government and civil sectors’ versions is currently being drafted. Although this is not the first Lokpal bill to be proposed – indeed versions on this proposal have been introduced without success in 1971, 1977, 1985, 1989, 1996, 1998, 2001, 2005 and 2008 – the current movement has gained significant momentum when social activist Anna Hazare went on a hunger strike in April.

Hazare boasts quite an impressive activist portfolio. Shortly after retiring from the army at the age of 39, Hazare retired from military service to his home of Ralegaon Siddhi, a village in Maharashtra, where he began a decades-long process of activism that transformed the village from a struggling rural region prone to droughts to a model village of development. It was there that Hazare first began his fight against corruption, using non-violent protests, usually in the form of hunger protests. Today he has become in many ways the face of India’s anticorruption movement, leveraging his immense base of support to challenge even the highest levels of India’s political apparatus. In one sense, he has achieved something many social ventures struggle with: achieving scale without losing sight of the mission.

As humbling as this experience has been for some of India’s political elite, it also raises some serious questions about the role the social sector can play in political reform. Social entrepreneurs are usually concerned with the long term and will often run their organization in such a way as to promote system change. Hazare, as revered a social activist as he is, is a political outsider. This status no doubt makes him more favorable in the eyes of ordinary Indians, but it also means that Hazare may necessarily be the best man for the job of weeding out corruption. Most social entrepreneurs are accustomed to thinking about their role within a given ecosystem. Some of the most successful social ventures in the world are ones that are able to both serve their constituents and conduct advocacy and policy work at the same time. Indeed, one way in which the Ashoka Foundation measures the success of its entrepreneurs is by assessing their impact on the system as a whole. In the case of corruption, I think the question needs to be asked of whether or not Hazare is the man for the job.

An article in Youth Ki Awaaz, a web-based youth media and news organization, touches on a couple of these concerns including whether or not the idea of a single, autonomous anti-corruption organization isn’t undemocratic itself and whether or not Hazare is making the right demands. The author posits two arguments, the first of which is the idea of Lokpal is undemocratic and if such an organization were created, it would likely fall into the hands of corrupt politicians once the anti-graft fervor had quieted down. If the problem is systemic, how will the Lokpal ameliorate the problem? The second argument is that Hazare isn’t making the right demands. From the writer’s perspective, Hazare’s demands have been two-fold: that the government not turn a blind eye to the anti-corruption movement and that the government not implement its own version of the Lokpal. The writer concludes that a “mellowed” version of the Lokpal be implemented as well as policies to increase transparency at all levels though they remain unclear on the specifics of how this could be achieved.

As I understand it, Hazare’s movement, like any social venture, has been about empowering ordinary citizens to challenge political authority and to hold leaders to high standards. In that sense, he has been a powerful force for good. I’m less certain that that’s all that’s needed for real reform and I’m unconvinced that Hazare has the political sway and experience to negotiate the taciturn world of Indian politics. Corruption is an incredibly complex issue that no country on Earth is completely free from. This is only one of interpreting the situation. Hazare has opened the door for a lot of previously marginalized Indians to get involved in the political process. I’ve been harder pressed to find evidence of wide-scale institutional reform that will formalize and protect those kinds of transparency-enforcing mechanisms in the long term. It’s not difficult for the government to listen now with the threat of hunger strikes and protest in the air, but it will be much easier once the climate has returned to some semblance of normalcy.

For a recent article in the NYTimes click here

It can be difficult for social ventures to maintain as sense of integrity when it comes to compensation. As is the case with American non profits, there is a general perception of social ventures and non-profits in particular as being feel-good-and-no-one-ever-gets-fired places. In that kind of a setting, I imagine a lot of people might be uncomfortable with the idea of an employee going home with anything more than a modest income.

This debate has a lot to do with how social entrepreneurship is taught. I had the pleasure of meeting some students of SE at the CSIM session we attended during our time in Bangalore. SE is a booming field and one that has gotten increasingly popular among Indians. Social entrepreneurship means different things to different people, so it’s no surprise that it can be taught differently by different groups. As we move from person-to-person, country to country, we have different notions of what a social entrepreneur is and how they should act. This is the case with most other areas of study like economics programs where some programs might be conservative or liberal or can favor either Institutionalist approaches or Marshallian approaches.

In general, the idea of teaching entrepreneurship strikes me as being somewhat counterintuitive. Entrepreneurship has been broken down into a lot of different concepts and a lot of different processes, but one thing all these conceptualizations have in common is the belief that entrepreneurship involves the pursuit of a venture, project or goal that doesn’t fit with current financial and nonfinancial resources. No matter the definition, I think most people in the field would agree that in order to be a successful entrepreneur means being able to identify resources, including knowledge and training, needed for a project and finding ways to meet those needs. An entrepreneur is therefore someone who has to be comfortable with the idea that they’re not always going to have all the knowledge needed to do something. That can also mean that an entrepreneur has to be ready to bring in people into the organization who aren’t necessarily there because they want to save the world.

On the issue of paying the people who work in nonprofits, here is what I’ve concluded: there is no magic percentage and there’s definitely no magic number that will ensure that the social entrepreneurs or employees working in the social sector are compensated enough. Every venture is different and in the long term, it’s more advantageous to look at impact if you really want a good sense of an organization’s integrity. Ultimately, all social ventures must cope with the reality that different people join nonprofits for different reasons and it’s not difficult for me, having now gone through the SE consulting experience twice now, to imagine that some people might be drawn to an organization because of a particular professional interest.

For instance, someone from a finance background may start working at a nonprofit involved in complex new forms of microfinance because they want to be on the cutting edge of this finance innovation. In the end, the motives and interests don’t add or subtract value from the work being done, so it doesn’t seem helpful to me anyway for social ventures to straitjacket themselves by believing that anyone working in the social sector must accept wages that are below what they can receive in the market.

How do social ventures maintain integrity? During the roughly two months I’ve been in India, I’ve had a lot of time to consider this question and my encounters with social ventures and various people from the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) sector of commercial sectors have helped me refine many of my own ideas about entrepreneurship. Now that my experience in India has come to an end and I can step back, I’m able to see the situation with a little perspective and two challenges stand out in particular as threats to social ventures trying to maintain integrity: compensating employees and consultants who work for the organization and getting regular consumers to care. Both challenges have their roots in maze of social, cultural and historical forces so I will express my views in two separate posts. In this post, I’ll share my experiences on the second challenge since it has been on my mind rather frequently since I arrived back in Boston last Saturday.

The challenge of getting regular consumers to care has a lot to do with consumer culture. Now that I’m back in the States, I’m starting to appreciate the contrast between consumer cultures in India and the United States. During the roughly two months I spent in India, I was able to visit and meet the founders or managers of several social ventures, many not-for-profits and some for-profits as well. In the US, it has become commonplace for firms to improve their branding by tying their products or services with a social cause. This winds up in what philosopher Slavoj Zizek describes as a guilt-ridden consumer culture wherein with every purchase we simultaneously commit the crime of capitalist consumption and buy our forgiveness for doing so. Examples abound and Zizek isn’t hesitant to point some of them out: Ethos water at starbucks, Tom’s Shoes, etc. In the US, compassion and charity have almost become commodities you can purchase readily.

The same culture of ethical consumerism does not seem to apply in India. In Bangalore at least, it has not yet become fashionable to shop in places where portions of the firm’s proceeds are donated to help alleviate social injustices in the same way that it’s become fashionable here. There is undoubtedly a multitude of socio-cultural, historical and economic forces at play that contribute to this and I’m certainly in no position to explore all of them beyond offering my own observations. The average middle income Indian (in whatever sense it’s possible to speak of a middle income given the large income inequalities) can’t walk down a street without homeless or impoverished men, women and children begging for money. It can be just as difficult to take an auto without being bombarded whenever the driver has to stop for traffic or wait for a green light. It’s such a common experience for Indians that almost none of the ones I met batted an eyelash. This was not the case for either me or my classmates and pretty much every foreigner we encountered and it was more than a little difficult to ignore a dirty, shabbily-dressed child or mother begging for money on the streets. The same situation is true in many parts of Tanzania, but my time in the States has seemingly dulled my ability to ignore such encounters.

This is of course only one example, but I can’t help think that it says a lot about the prospects for a successful for-profit social venture in India. During our time in Bangalore, we had the pleasure or meeting with the founder of a retail store whose mission included creating economic opportunities for rural artisans and crafts people. The store we visited, Mother Earth, was an expansive, well furnished and upscale furniture and home goods store. Indeed it was the closest thing I have yet to see of an Indian Crate & Barrel. The founder we met with and who showed us around the store told us about how well the store was doing, how profitable it had become and how quickly it had grown in just the last few years. It was quite impressive, but the founder was quite clear about the fact that this success was built in large part on marketing Mother Earth as a retail brand, not as a social venture. Many of us were surprised to hear this and pushed her to explain the marketing choice, believing then that the organization could market itself as a social venture and still achieve financial success. In fact, if Mother Earth were to emphasize this dimension, it might be able to appeal to a set of consumers who were more likely to return specifically because of the social dimension. After all, consumers care about helping the broader social environment, right?

By the time a month had passed, this perspective had already started to look overly-optimistic and overly-simplistic, at least in my mind. I don’t know nearly enough about Indian culture and history to offer any explanation for the difference in consumer culture, but after the exposure I’ve had to India’s social sector, I have some sense for the difficulties a for-profit social venture faces in maintaining integrity. How does one manage the different responsibilities associated with the bottom-line and the double-bottom-line? If it’s potentially dangerous (revenue-losing) to market the social dimensions of the firm now, when will it be “safe” to do so? How does one manage the expectations of owners and shareholders who might only be there for the for-profit side? How can one ensure that the complex financial benefits (pensions, stock options, etc) earned from the for-profit activity actually reach and improve the lives of the people behind the social mission? How does one manage the risk of mission drift as the venture scales? None of these questions come with easy answers and some are as valid for non-profits as well.

I don’t mean to imply that Indians do not care about being socially responsible or ethical. In some sectors, it’s quite the opposite. For instance, India has a large percentage of firms who practice CSR. In fact, CSR is a fast growing specialty in the Indian business sector and firms all over the country are developing their own tools for making a positive social impact on the world around them.

There are likely some deeper conclusions to draw here. Perhaps one could take it as a sobering reminder of the many ways in which we shelter and protect ourselves from the grisly face of poverty; we don’t even need to interact with it anymore to help combat it. Rather it’s simple enough to buy Starbucks coffee or Tom’s shoes and know that we’ve contributed in our own way. More likely, I think it’s too early to really make sense of this contrasts as India is a country in the midst of serious and far reaching social change. The social and economic changes heralded by the country’s rapid growth have presented Indian’s across almost all classes and castes hitherto unknown economic opportunities, aspirations and realities. What I may now be mistaking for a consumer culture of apathy may be the manifestation of an aspect of Indian culture that I’m not grasping.

The GSE team attended our last CSIM session in which the founder, Mr P N Devarajan, spoke to us along with other CSIM students, interested in social entrepreneurship. Not surprisingly, many of the CSIM students there seemed to have extremely good jobs at Honeywell, Samsung, and other corporate companies. I say “not surprisingly,” because it has been a common theme throughout many successful NGOs that we have visited, that the founder had previously worked for theses types of companies.

Before Mr. Devarajan spoke, Professor Moledina opened the discussion explaining what Global Social Entrepreneurship was and how is was distinguishable from Social Entrepreneurship. Throughout the lecture he turned to the four of us (Erika, Sarah, Kipaya, & me) for our interpretation and definition of GSE and how it differs from SE. Kipaya, who was the only one of the four of us that has participated in local social entrepreneurship gave an insightful explanation. “GSE is certainly about the identification of a social problem and providing a meaningful solution (which is a pretty standard definition for SE) but global takes it a step further. A global social entrepreneur must be able to understand the eco-system he/she is in and tailor their response to that eco-system, as a solution in one eco-system may not work in another one.” It seemed that once Kipaya had said this, the other Indian students in the room began to take what we were doing much more seriously and with greater curiosity.

I have to say (and I think the rest of the GSE team will agree with me) it was a cool and fulfilling experience to be collaborating with fifteen other CSIM Indian students, many of whom have gotten a graduate degree and have high paying jobs in the IT, corporate, or other sectors in Bangalore. I attribute this to the high level of respect and prestige the GSE program at Wooster has garnished in its short two years of sending students to Bangalore. Like Kipaya stated, it is the understanding of “eco-systems,” that distinguishes GSE from other SE programs. During the seminar in the spring, Professor Moledina not only spent time on the principles of SE, but spent a lot of time on Indian culture and etiquette. While it did not seem that important at the time, looking back, having the better understanding of the Indian culture or “eco-system,” allowed me to be a better social entrepreneur during my time in Bangalore. Having this understanding also gave me the unique opportunity to interact with some of India’s best and brightest minds as a rising junior undergraduate. Talk about a unique program!