What is a social entrepreneur? Ashoka Fellows prove every day that the most powerful force for change in the world is a new idea in the hands of a leading social entrepreneur. The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck and to provide new ways to get it unstuck. He or she finds what is not working and solves the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry. Identifying and solving large-scale social problems requires a social entrepreneur because only the entrepreneur has the committed vision and inexhaustible determination to persist until they have transformed an entire system. The scholar comes to rest when he expresses an idea. The professional succeeds when she solves a client's problem. The manager calls it quits when he has enabled his organization to succeed. Social entrepreneurs go beyond the immediate problem to fundamentally change communities, societies, the world. The past two decades have seen an extraordinary explosion of entrepreneurship and competition in the social sector. The social sector has discovered what the business sector learned from the railroad, the stock market and today's digital revolution: That nothing is as powerful as a big new idea - if it is in the hands of a first class entrepreneur. In country after country the number of citizen organizations is up hundreds, often thousands-fold. Tiny Slovakia had a handful of such organizations in 1989 and now boasts more than 10,000. Of the approximately 2 million citizen sector organizations working in the United States, 70 percent of them were established in the last 30 years. Eastern Europe has seen more than 100,000 such organizations established in the seven years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Throughout much of the world, the scarcity of locally-controlled financial resources undermines community efforts to raise their children to be engaged citizens. On all continents, communities that lack access to resources struggle against environmental degradation, poor public health, and disheartened citizenship. Ashoka Fellows focus on practical, innovative strategies for the co-existence of social justice and economic development. They are attuned to the real need for the resources that keep a region politically and socially healthy. From among a broad range of strategies, the JDW Network focuses on economic development to assist under-wealth communities in different ways to expand opportunities for the residents of the Enterprise Community and beyond. A third broad area of our strategy is empowering those already participating in the Charleston economy by providing entrepreneurs in Charleston informal economy with incentives and training to move into the formal sector. To the extent that local communities can develop and sustain resources,
Ashoka Fellows are helping them to avoid the impossible pulls between
the poverty associated with isolation from the global economy, versus
submission to the dictates of corporate globalization. Contact
information: The JDW Network |