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Individuals who find opportunities to create a new product or service (or find new ways of improving existing products and services), are called business entrepreneurs (BEs). But what about creative individuals whose primary goal is not economic profit, but “value” for their communities? We call these people social entrepreneurs—or SEs.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of dictatorships, the spread of democracy, and the advances of technology in the past thirty years, a growing number of ventures have been started in the “citizen sector” (contrasted with the “private sector” of BEs and corporations, or the “public sector” of government). Enterprises created by individuals in the citizen sector, however, identify some form of community service as the entrepreneur’s main mission. These SEs may use a business model that seeks profits from some type of ancillary operating activity, but the profits from these ventures are reinvested in their main, nonprofit operating activity. Examples include providing clean drinking water; alleviating poverty; improving healthcare, legalizing rights for the disabled; providing electricity to remote villages; implementing new education methods and technologies into schools. Social entrepreneurship is a relatively new term, and while many people have differences about the definition of social entrepreneurship, most do agree that social entrepreneurs are those people who start enterprises that may or may not be profit-driven, but whose mission is driven by creating solutions to societal problems.
Just as citizens provide “the market” from which the entrepreneur derives his profits, many successful BEs believe that their companies should provide fellow citizens with more than just the value of the goods and services from his business. We call these BEs “humanitarian capitalists,” and they share many of the same attributes as SEs. In fact, many BEs explicitly build community service and environmental protection into their business models. These entrepreneurs understand that they have a social responsibility to improve their communities while making profits, and rather than focus solely on “single bottom line” profits, these people focus on the “triple bottom line”—profits, people and planet.
SAGE judges will be looking for ways that your students have shared their time and resources to better your community. One way to do this is for you and your fellow SAGE students to create at least one social enterprise.
By including social entrepreneurship as a judging criterion, SAGE provides high school youth from around the world with their first opportunity to arrive at the belief that they can solve problems. Judges will favor community service activities that relate to some aspect of teaching entrepreneurship, financial literacy, personal financial management or technology to others (many teachers will tell you that they first gained a mastery of their subject when they had to explain concepts to others). Once your SAGE team has mastered entrepreneurial and other business skills, you can demonstrate your knowledge and skills by sharing them with others, such as grade school or middle school students.
Some high school teachers link community service to course objectives. When they do this, teachers are implementing an experiential learning strategy called “community service-learning.” Also, when a high school SAGE team seeks out and enlists the services of a SAGE mentor from a nearby university, the university student is also getting a chance to apply their new knowledge and skills by becoming business consultants to the SAGE team. This, too, is a form of service and learning; hence, service-learning!
Here are some outstanding web sites related to BE, SE and service-learning.
http//www.nfte.com |
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