Don’t be an Activist, be an Entrepreneur

Contributed by BL

Sometime back when I was a JC student, I spent a period of time working as a volunteer. Unlike the students today, I don’t have to clock twenty hours of social service. That experience in social work shaped a lot of my views about life.

That incident left a deep impression in my life and it shaped how I operated as an entrepreneur. I was working for a old folks home which is not funded by government aid but by a Christian group. One day, the sanitation on the top floor of the home, where most of the sickly old folks are situated, broke down. To fix that, it would cost the home a considerable amount of fortune. There is no way which we can seek help quickly because it would take us months to apply for grants and charity from the Community Chest. One of the older volunteers who share a love in astronomy like myself, came up with an idea. He suggested to me that both of us will gather a group of local astronomers down to the home. We will line our telescopes in the evening for a viewing. Since he is connected pretty well with rich people, his idea is to bring them here to let them have a night viewing and through that, we can get them to donate to get the sanitation unit repaired. I thought that the idea is far-fetched but nevertheless gave it a try. On that night, he managed to get the entire home filled with wealthy people that night. Together with a group of friends, we gathered our telescopes and showed them the beautiful planets and nebulae, in exchange for donations to the home. In the end, we managed to raise that amount of money through donations of the kind people who came to the event.

That was my first experience in social enterprise. It taught me how to use existing resources and adopted the concept of value proposition to raise funds. Hence here is the summary of this entire blog entry into one simple line, “Don’t be an activist, be an entrepreneur.” What do I mean by that? In order to put myself on the non-aligned movement, I will distinguish the difference between them with a simple example. Let’s use the recent example of the white elephants and bears. In the former case, some students took advantage of that situation and started selling t-shirts. They took a disclaimer that they are not politically motivated. In the case of the bear, you see the protestor standing outside the Istana, campaigning to save bears. Actually, imagine you can take the best out of both situations, you want to protest against an injustice and raise money to address that injustice. The way to do it, is to sell t-shirts saving bears and channel the money into saving bears. I never sympathize with the green peace activists because they are doing more to destroy their cause than to help it, similarly with the eco-terrorists, the tree huggers and the animal rights militants in the west. An activist only knows how to protest and makes things worse, but an entrepreneur knows how to bend a corner and solve the problem in small steps that lead to a big change down the years to come.

A social entrepreneur usually recognizes a social problem and uses traditional entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to bring about a social change that is both innovative and sustainable. If you think a little harder about my story, you will know that our venture using telescopes to raise money for a home is not a sustainable venture. Historical examples of leading social entrepreneurs are Florence Nightingale (UK), the woman who founded modern nursing and helped to improve hospital conditionl; Jean Monnet (France) who is responsible for the reconstruction and modernization of the French economy. In modern times, we have the Big Issue in UK, which helps to publish street newspaper so that you can buy it and help the homeless.

There are also interesting organizations that work on social entrepreneurship, for example, Ashoka, whose mission is to “shape a citizen sector that is entrepreneurial, productive and globally integrated and develop the profession of social entrepreneurship in the world“. In the realm of business plan competition, the Cambridge University Entrepreneurs 3P competition (which I was involved at one point of time) is set up to promote business plan entries that brings about social innovation and change.

The term “social entrepreneurship” can be misleading if you confined it to just solving social problems with entrepreneurial methods. In UK, the term also means that you are creating a new technology that will institute a social change of attitude, for example, creating a car engine that will use environmental friendly fuels and reduce less carbon dioxide emissions. An example of such a type of social entrepreneur is Jeremy Leggett, CEO, Solar Century, who is touted to be one of the key players in putting the climate issue on the world agenda.

In Singapore, we find that social entrepreneurship is only restricted to social change, environmental lobbies and charities. I believe that there should be also focus on getting the technologists and scientists to come in to solve problems for the society. There is more to be done, but the first thing is to change your mindset from convincing you not to be an activist or cynic, but an entrepreneur who can make a difference in people’s lives.

References:
1. Social Entrepreneurship

Technocrati Tags: Social Entrepreneurship, Singapore Entrepreneurs

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