YWSE's Take On ... Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp – Lessons on Social Entrepreneurship

By Erica Hewitt

This past June, the Craigslist Foundation held its annual Boot Camp offering resources and workshops catered towards non-profit organizations and people interested in making a change in the world. As a participant in the corporate world during the week, I enjoyed spending a Saturday to feed my passion for change and collaboration.

I learned ways to change the world for $10, how to use social media to market my organization, and loved hearing keynote speaker Arianna Huffington explain how the current recession has provided the world with a chance to make more meaningful decisions for the good of our global community. I also stopped by the YWSE table, of course!

For the afternoon session, I chose Social Entrepreneurship. The workshop was facilitated by Jonathan Greenblatt, co-founder of All for Good and co-founder of Ethos Brands/Ethos Water and Nora Silver, Director of the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

I learned that a social entrepreneur seeks to be an agent of change, to act boldly, and take risks with a heightened sense of accountability. This can take shape through for-profit organizations such as Revolution Foods and Zipcar or non-profit organizations such as CityYear and Room to Read. There are also social intrapreneurs, employees who innovate inside their company.

We are seeing increasing opportunities to make an impact – new partners in government, corporate America’s growing acknowledgment that it pays to do the right thing, and more and more networks and technology to connect like-minded individuals. With growth come challenges: for example, what are some exit strategies in which the mission of an organization can remain intact even if it is be absorbed by a corporation (e.g., Starbucks’ purchase of Ethos Water)? As this field becomes part of the larger discussion of social activism and accountability, we need to develop methods to scale the impact and understand core competencies required.

The major takeaway for me and other YWSE’s is how multi-faceted social entrepreneurship can be. There are so many ways to implement the idea of social good created from a double bottom line. Anyone can steer the wheel towards change. Anyone can take a small idea, create a mission, and make change happen!

Listen to podcasts from the Boot Camp here.

Comments

[twitter.com/DSzykier]

This is amazing Erica, I had no idea you were involved with this.