Duane Shank sent an NY Times Op-ed by Nicholas Kristof around to the Sojo staff entitled "Do-Gooders with Spreadsheets." I'm pasting an exerpt below. To view the entire article, you can e-mail a sojostars blog contributor or subscribe to NY TimesSelect - if you are a subscriber, the link to the article is at www.nytimes.com/ontheground.
Kristof is reporting on his experience at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and notes the presence of a lot of "social entrepeneurs" at the Forum:
"So what’s a social entrepreneur? Let me give a few examples among those at the forum in Davos.
• In Africa, where children die of diarrhea from bad sanitation, Isaac Durojaiye runs a franchise system for public toilets. He supplies mobile toilets to slum areas, where unemployed young people charge a small fee for their use. The operators keep 60 percent of the income and pass the rest back to Mr. Durojaiye’s company, Dignified Mobile Toilets, which uses the money to buy new toilets.
• Nic Frances runs a group that aims to cut carbon emissions in 70 percent of Australian households over 10 years. His group, Easy Being Green, gives out low-energy light bulbs and low-flow shower heads — after the household signs over the rights to the carbon emissions the equipment will save. The group then sells those carbon credits to industry to finance its activities, and it is now aiming to expand globally.
• In the U.S., Gillian Caldwell and her group, Witness, train people around the world to use video cameras to document human rights abuses. The resulting videos have drawn public attention to issues like child soldiers and the treatment of the mentally ill. Now Ms. Caldwell aims to create a sort of YouTube for human rights video clips...
'The key with social entrepreneurs is their pragmatic approach,' said Pamela Hartigan of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, which is affiliated with the World Economic Forum. 'They’re not out there with protest banners; they’re actually developing concrete solutions.'
...they are showing that what it really takes to change the world isn’t so much wealth or power as creativity, determination and passion. "
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
This is super-exciting stuff to me. It touches on some things that have been brought to light through working on the business, profit-making (specifically advertising) end of a non-profit - in that some of our capitalist, consumerist, free market-driven principles can be used for good. This idea of social entrepreneurs and self-sustaining, good-doing companies is that they can both focus on making profits, but also keep needs of communities as priorities. In my Global Politics class at Hendrix, we looked at different approaches to globalization. It seemed to me then that arguments that globalization can help lots of people (while compelling, and I want to believe that there’s still hope for the direction the world is headed, especially with the consideration that if globalization could be done better, it would actually help people), I couldn’t quite reconcile some of the fundamental differences between the paradigms of capitalism and socialism, globalization and “small [and local] is beautiful” movements. But this is just an amazingly concrete way that capitalism and socialism (or some form or aspects of them) can peacefully co-exist. Though I’m still unsure if certain free-market vs. fair market assumptions and the worlds they come from are reconcilable.
Anyway – exciting stuff, nonetheless – exciting for the possibilities for good in the world, and also exciting vocationally for folks that are trying to make sense of varied passions and interests.
Another note: he mentions the book How to Change the World as "a bible in the field." I would be interested to read this some time soon.
Post a Comment