Sustaining social entrepreneurship: Helping good works stay well

College students, young business entrepreneurs, and community innovators increasingly join the "hot" field of social entrepreneurship. What does this mean?

Social entrepreneurship comes about when individuals imagine ways to bring together social needs and economic opportunities. Young leaders who start social entrepreneurial ventures want to bring their energy, imagination, and desire for meaningful results to bear in situations where government and business have not achieved social value. Young social entrepreneurs initiate their work trying to put the best thinking in both the business and nonprofit worlds to work in the development of their vision.

While many young social entrepreneurs get off the ground with strength and optimism, their start-ups need ongoing scrutiny and strategy to sustain themselves. Dependency on donations, grants, fellowships, and other short-term financial and human resources wears down leaders. Financial returns often do not repay the time and energy spent writing grants, pitching to potential donors, and recruiting and managing volunteers. Patching multiple sources of money together takes time away from direct organizational service and development of revenue from products, services, and expanding markets.
If social entrepreneurial organizations want to break through to sustainability, they have to keep in mind some key issues and questions as they move forward:
1. Human resource time spent in seeking external funding declines, but quality of social value grows and adapts to changing client needs.
2. Salaried personnel numbers and time commitment change in relation to growth in earned income.
3. Reliance on generous friends and the same pool of volunteers decreases.
4. After three-to-five years of operation, start-ups begin to develop creative new models of hybrid or partnered for-profit and non-profit organizations that invent and test creative marketing strategies and product and service development.
5. On-going formative evaluation responds to internal organizational questions as well as to external norms of judgment and support criteria. A special difficulty for community organizations working with marginalized populations in under-resourced regions is the role of outsiders, often relatively short-term foreign well-meaning friends and supporters. When and how can or should local communities define new roles for these critical friends or, in some cases, detach themselves from this kind of co-dependency?
 
This webpage benefits organizational leaders, employees, participants, funders, volunteers, and researchers interested in how to keep the good work of young socially-engaged entrepreneurs healthy and creative in their communities by addressing the tough issues of sustainability. The International Youth Research Network at Brown University created and collected materials on this site. This research group works with the Watson Institute for International Studies and the Swearer Center for Public Service under the direction of Professor Shirley Brice Heath. The team carries out research and publishes studies of community environments in which young people bring business and social value together to support improvements in education, health, and the environment in under-resourced communities around the world.
The International Youth Research Network's first seminar took place in September 2008. Our second venture will be another seminar March 6-8, 2009 and will include returning as well as new participants and advisors. See the "Seminar Retreat" section for more details.