Interview with Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club in San Francisco.

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Carl Pope worked in the Peace Corps advancing family planning in a small village in India from 1967 -1969.  His work in the Peace Corps had a profound impact on him and indirectly led him to the environmental movement.  It also motivated him to look very carefully at how a political or bureaucratic system looks to the people on the front lines because it may not be the same as it looks to the people in the institution.

Carl defines "social entrepreneur" as someone who combines a new idea with social capital to create a social service or social movement that is new.  He differentiates this from "entrepreneurship with a conscience" as exemplified by venture capitalists investing in alternative energy.  Their driving force is profit, although they may want to earn that profit in an environmentally benign way. Pope's example of social entrepreneurship is the Sierra Club's work to organize the skills of Native Americans in the Southwest United States to develop alternative energy sources on their reservations- thus building a new economy that helps people's livelihoods.

He notes that the efforts by British Petroleum's movement into alternative energy research is not social entrepreneurship, it is brand building and positioning for market share in what may become a profitable industry.  He says is could be enlightened investment  and could lead to very positive research, but it is commercial, not  social entrepreneurship.

Pope feels that social entrepreneurship is critical today because, in addition to stopping bad things from happening, we also have to start good things happening, and that requires entrepreneurs. He says that the "triple bottom line" many social entrepreneurs work with is still at a very early stage because we have not yet figured out how to measure the social and environmental bottom lines.  He points out that in an industry like carbon offsets, it is not clear that the money spent actually results in the environmental benefits claimed. Pope's view is that for social entrepreneurship with a triple bottom, the social and environmental bottom lines come before the profit bottom line.

He is personally interested in finding ways to insure that those who make decisions pay the price for them.  He says that many environmental problems result from the fact that people don't pay for resources they use – including the commons.  He says that designing mechanisms to insure this may be the single most important environmental challenge and he encourages social entrepreneurs to tackle it.

He advises social entrepreneurs who think they have a new idea that is not  in the world today, to ask why.  There may be hidden obstacles that have stopped others – he feels the world needs shrewd strategy as much or more than originality.

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