Over the past month, a recurring question arises from curious audiences we’ve come across in San Francisco, Berkeley, Marin, Mountain View, Los Angeles, Seattle, Washington DC, New York, Brooklyn, New Haven, Boston, and several other locations. I was just in an interview this morning about the book launch, and again the question was asked: “What were the common qualities among the twenty-seven social entrepreneurs you interviewed?”

 As last week’s blog focused on the eclectic diversity of social entrepreneurs from The Tactics of Hope, this entry identifies the elements that unite them, and there are four main common qualities:

1) A stubborn, healthy persistence. Every social entrepreneur, whether Matt Flannery or Priya Haji, Tim Williamson or Karen Tse, articulated a host of negativity they had to overcome in achieving their organizations’ goals. Many say, “No, you cannot do this, it will not succeed,” to a new or unorthodox idea. To the social entrepreneur, such negativity often becomes not a barrier, but an opportunity to demonstrate success in what others are shortsighted to think is impossible. In fact, often, the negativity of others is exactly what fuels a social entrepreneur to succeed in the face of extreme adversity.

2) An ability to listen deeply to the needs of the community. As Lynne Twist of the Pachamama Alliance told us in her interview, “The charitable relationship adopted by too many organizations and individuals is one of us helping them. This way of thinking is counterproductive.” Paul Farmer adds to this notion in his profile: “We (Partners in Health) are partners not only with other nonprofit organizations who may enhance our reach, but also most importantly with the communities themselves. We ask the people we serve what ails them and then do whatever it takes to make them well, just as we would if they were a member of our own family.” The process of listening deeply to communities becomes a partnership through which the sustainable model of the social entrepreneurs’ initiative is made possible by a succession of ownership that is rooted in and derived from the community itself.

3) The capacity to boundary-ride. As John Catford wrote as early as 1998, and as we have included in the epigraph to the Introduction of our book, “[Social entrepreneurs] make markets work for people, not the other way around, and gain strength from a wide network of alliances. They can ‘boundary-ride’ between the various political rhetorics and social paradigms to enthuse all sectors of society.” The ability to boundary-ride often mean ignoring the distinctions between for-profit, non-profit, government, and academia to maximize players from any sector that can further a social entrepreneur’s vision for progress.

4) A business-like focus on results. As John Wood articulated in his interview for Tactics, “The NGO sector often doesn’t think enough in business terms. Too many organizations don’t track or present their results proudly. We try to bring a business philosophy to Room to Read with a balanced eye on both the social and financial bottom lines…providing the link between the quantitative and qualitative, while allowing our investors to decide how to allocate their funds, whether for books, scholarships, libraries or even entire schools.” Bringing business into the social sector often means becoming managerial and practical, rather than lofty in idealism, while setting benchmarks that every employee and volunteer internalize in their daily efforts to achieve the organization’s ambitious, yet tactical, goals.  

It is often asked whether social entrepreneurs are products of nature or nurture. While it is very difficult to train someone to become a pure social entrepreneur, these 4 cross-issue characteristics are a critical start for any potential change-maker.

To learn more about cross-thematic qualities of social entrepreneurs, please visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org

The Tactics of Hope is written for individuals around the world who are concerned about global challenges but not clear what steps they can take to move from concern to action. On every page the book puts forth this vision statement, and in selecting the twenty-seven social entrepreneurs, Wilford and I, as any authors do, internalized two guiding questions in the writing process: “Who is this book about?” and “Who is this book for?”

This book is about you. Regardless of a reader’s background, The Tactics of Hope argues that we all have the capacity to claim our power like never before. It provides a big dose of hope and suggests tools and guidance from social entrepreneurs in corners of the world as diverse as the Himalayan Mountains, New Orleans, the Amazon Rainforest, and the coral reefs of Indonesia.

Wilford and I spent many weeks selecting the 27 social entrepreneurs whose stories we were to write in the first-person, effectively walking in the shoes of these incredible individuals, humbled to tell their story in their own words. To start, we devised the mosaic, or matrix, on a white-erase board with 100 squares with male and female social entrepreneurs plotted across the world on geographic and issue area guidelines.

To identify the individuals, we pulled from trusted personal contact recommendations, newspaper articles, Google searches, and above all from the pre-existing support networks and grand champions of social entrepreneurship internationally: Skoll Foundation, Ashoka, Echoing Green, the Schwab Foundation, and Draper Richards.

Among the 27 social entrepreneurs profiled in The Tactics of Hope, twelve are Skoll fellow winners, among them Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health, John Wood of Room to Read, Matt and Jessica Flannery of Kiva, Andrea Coleman of Riders for Health, John and Susan Collin Marks of Search for Common Ground, and the Kuhn family of Roots of Peace. The Skoll Foundation recipients are immediately accepted solely by the foundation’s stamp of credibility. In writing the stories, however, we did not just want social entrepreneurs who already had achieved global successes. So we went back to adjust the board matrix.

Returning to our vision statement, Wilford and I felt it was critical not only to highlight the success stories, but also the stories of struggle, failure, and obstacles overcome. Moreover, we wanted to include profiles of individuals who were still in their early stages and had not yet grown to the “celebrity” status of social entrepreneurs like Muhammad Yunus.

I had felt very strongly that we should write about a social entrepreneur who was introducing new tactics to help rebuild communities in the south after Hurricane Katrina. There I found projects-born Rosalind Jones Larkins who had not been recognized by any major social entrepreneurial organization.

         

Rosalind is still desperately in need of more funding, and in our interview we connected deeply as she was so clearly a social entrepreneur, even though she was just still in the early stages of her vision and had never even heard that term before. In our moving interview, she said to me: “David, I came from under the gutter, but you know what? I’m changing many more lives than just my own. People ask me how I do this: it comes from a burning realization inside that quitting was never an option…”

To read Rosalind’s story in her own words, or any of the Skoll winners mentioned in this blog, come visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org

“What we need is an entrepreneurial society in which innovation and entrepreneurship are normal, steady, and continuous.”
-Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1993

Millions of individuals around the world are concerned about international issues but are not clear what steps to take to move from concern to action. In The Tactics of Hope, we seek to give tactics that are grounded in these realities, and which move readers to become changemakers. Here is a sample from Chapter II, entitled: "Becoming A Social Entrepreneur", and we encourage you to share these with any friends and family members who might need some guidance:

First Steps
Whether you are aiming to become a social entrepreneur or simply want to take some meaningful action to address an issue that concerns you, the following are some practical steps that may help guide your journey:

1. Get clear what you are passionate about.
You are undoubtedly concerned about a lot of things, but what are you truly passionate about: Teaching disadvantaged children in your neighborhood? Ending homelessness? Caring for battered women? Creating new hope for refugees in Sudan? Decreasing the impact of global warming? Improving market conditions for indigenous artisans? Helping resolve conflicts in the Middle East? Something else? If you are not passionate about what you choose, you won’t commit to it fully, and you are likely to lose interest when life’s other challenges give you the excuse to let your initiative slide.

2. Determine what skills you have that are relevant to the issue.
Passion is essential, but not enough. What skills or capabilities do you have that will help sustain and fulfill your passion? Do you have money to invest, or are you a great fundraiser? Do you have knowledge of the issue, or knowledge of the people and the culture where the work needs to be done? Do you have a network of friends and professional contacts you can draw upon? Do you have specific professional skills that will be required for the initiative to be successful, such as accounting, marketing, finance or production? Are you a good leader who can recruit and lead a team to help achieve your goals?

3. Consider whether you have the personality to be a social entrepreneur.
Not everyone has the disposition to be a social entrepreneur. Here are several important attributes:
•    Great determination, coupled with a willingness to take risks, experiment, and occasionally fail and have to start again. When Richard Branson was asked by one of the social entrepreneurs profiled in this book for assistance, he asked her how many times she had failed, gotten up and tried to achieve her goals another way. He said he could not help her unless she had failed at least twice, reassessed what it would take to be successful and tried again.
•    The ability to “boundary ride”—to imagine possibilities that are radically different from traditional approaches to the same problem. Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh, the visionary behind microcredit lending, was a good example of “boundary riding” when he defied the prevailing view that one could not “bank on the poor.” Yunus realized that many of the poor who had no collateral could still be reliable borrowers, and that banking on the poor was well worth the effort because it would address an important social challenge and could also become self-financing and possibly profitable.

4.    Determine which of these three ways of being of service interests you most and would be a good fit, given your capabilities:
•    Giving money to an organization that is addressing the issue.
•    Working for an organization that interests you, as a volunteer or as a paid employee.
•    Starting your own initiative by replicating an existing initiative, or developing your own.
These options are very different in terms of the financial resources, time and talent you may have to invest. One is not better than another and each has great value. For example, it may be wise to take on something relatively small and straightforward first, like going to www.GlobalCool.org and developing a plan to reduce your personal carbon footprint over the next year by one ton. Or, you may decide you want to become a volunteer at another environmental awareness building organization,  such as the Pachamama Alliance, profiled in Chapter 9. Or, you may decide you want to replicate the PlayPump water system described in Chapter 3 to bring clean water to poverty-stricken areas of your own country. Social entrepreneurs, unlike those in competitive businesses, are usually willing to share their ideas with others who want to replicate them.

5. Log on to www.TacticsofHope.org
Chapters 3 through 9 provide examples of numerous initiatives that you might give money to, work for or replicate on your own. The personal stories of the social entrepreneurs profiled in these chapters provide valuable insights about potential obstacles you may face, and how to overcome them. We have also created a website to help you determine your next steps, direct you to other sources of information about the growing field of social entrepreneurship, help you identify other initiatives of interest and provide contact information with many of those with whom you may want to collaborate.

6. Take that first step.
Each of the profiles in the upcoming chapters has a section in which the social entrepreneurs share their own journey from concern and passion to action. A few did a great deal of research, consulted the experts and came up with a strategic plan as their first steps. Others just jumped right in and followed their instincts, taking one small step after another. Both approaches can work well, depending on the individual and the initiative. Procrastination does not work well.

In The Tactics of Hope, author Wilford Welch reassesses the value of traditional measurement of growth. The conventional measure of a nation’s “progress” is the growth of its gross national product, or GNP. Included in GNP, however, are many revenue-generating activities that pollute the earth and destroy the lives of others. People often measure their own success by their personal financial growth rate and total assets just as nations do. But, a shift in perspective is occurring. In today’s world, more and more people are questioning the notion that “more is better”—or sustainable. They are also questioning how we measure “progress.” For example:

• Since 1994 the California-based organization Redefining Progress has been challenging traditional ways in which economic, social and ecological impacts are conceptualized and measured. Its measure is called the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). It starts with the same accounting framework as the gross national product, but then makes some significant distinctions. For example, it includes the economic contributions of household and volunteer work, but subtracts factors such as crime, pollution and family breakdown that result in activities that decrease a nation’s gross national product.
 
• The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has created the Human Development Index (HDI) that emphasizes the social development aspects of each country’s development agendas.
 
• The WorldPaper created the Wealth of Nations Index in the early 1990s using 63 variables to measure each country’s progress along three dimensions: economic, social and information exchange. The underlying premise is that those countries with great strength and balance in all three dimensions are those that will make the greatest and most sustainable progress.
 
• Futurist Hazel Henderson has produced a similar index, as has the government of Bhutan. The Bhutanese call theirs the “Gross Happiness Index” which is their attempt to measure quality of life in more holistic and spiritual terms than gross national product.
 
• The World Social Forum was established in 2001 in reaction to the big business–oriented World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland each year. The World Social Forum’s seventh annual gathering, which took place in Nairobi, Kenya in January of 2007, had 66,000 registered attendees, and 1,400 participating organizations from 110 countries.       
 
• The Earth Charter, created in the 1990s, is a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society in the twenty-first century. It seeks to inspire a sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family and the living world. Thousands of people and organizations from virtually all of the countries of the world collaborated in the development of these principles.

Please visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org.

In addition to The Tactics of Hope, Wilford has been instrumental in bringing together concerned and committed global citizens to participate in "Quest for Global Healing" (www.questforglobalhealing.org). The third Quest program will be called "Beyond Sustainability", scheduled to take place on the volcano island of Hawaii in June of 2009. The purpose of each of these gatherings is to support a fundamental shift in the core values we share regarding how we deal with the earth and with each other as human beings - and the actions we take, individually and collectively - to move towards sustainability and beyond.

In The Tactics of Hope, we write that ancient indigenous wisdoms offer the best guide for us to live in harmony with the natural world. The voice of native cultures from Bali to the Amazon should become sources of wisdom that we listen to deeply in our effort to steward a global transition “beyond sustainability” to restore our planet’s environmental imbalances. All over the world, such wisdoms from indigenous cultures have been historically discounted by modern industrial dogma and the dominant cultural belief systems that tout “all growth is good”! In Tactics, author Wilford Welch writes:


 “Some argue that those who live in cities, as half the world does, and those who are consumed by a desire to have more and more, are becoming increasingly out of balance with the natural world and with each other. The Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv, explores the problems developed by children who have little exposure to the natural world. Louv calls it “nature deficit disorder.” Further, the fact that the number of people in the United States who have no one to confide in has more than doubled, to 25%, suggests that our individualistic, transaction-oriented society is resulting in many people feeling alienated and alone.”
As social entrepreneurs are “connectors” by nature, these uniquely talented leaders are best equipped with tools to help accelerate the ways in which the modern public feels connected to and informed by indigenous wisdoms about the land we sow, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the planet we share. Traditional peoples and social entrepreneurs may also share values pertinent to a sustainable future, such as deep listening, a focus on community needs, a desire to create social value rather than growth and profit at any cost, a willingness to give away rather than hold back good ideas for competitive reasons, and a recognition of the importance of thinking in systemic, holistic terms.


The Pachamama Alliance, an organization profiled in The Tactics of Hope, is a wonderful example. Committed to shifting public consciousness in both the northern and southern hemispheres, and in dialogue with indigenous communities of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest of 5 million acres in one of the most pristine and biodiverse ecosystems on earth, Pachamama has embodied at its core the earth-honoring wisdoms of ancient tradition while finding place in the politics of state-sanctioned decision-making. The Pachamama Alliance, a Quechua name referring to sacred space, time and universal community, facilitates the connective tissue between “the north” and the indigenous peoples of “the south”, empowering the latter to speak and stand for their own rights and preserve their historical knowledge base. The partnership affirms that those who have lived in harmony with their natural environment for centuries are best suited to preserve its future.


As a personal aside....a few weeks ago with Wilford and my Borderless Educations (BE) team, I heard a great debate between Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz, an epic battle of the historian vs. futurist. I had written a question down that was never answered, and so I pose it to you all:

Is it the historian or the futurist who believes more strongly that indigenous wisdoms have much to teach us about industrial preconceptions of a "Western" perspective that economic growth is driven by consumption? And is it, then, the historian or the futurist who listens more deeply to the oft-unheard voices of indigenous populations and their relationship with the natural world?


Please visit us at www.tacticsofhope.org.