The elusive social enterprise job

International social entrepreneurship, once the province of a few grant-making organizations, has grown during the past decade into a vast enterprise, populated by nonprofits and profit-making enterprises alike. Social venture capital firms such as Calvert Investments and the Acumen Fund are investing in startup businesses across the globe that, in addition to turning a profit, are aimed at alleviating poverty, combating disease and building up local markets. Standard investment companies are spinning off social investment and sustainable investment divisions. Corporations are devoting more and resources to corporate social responsibility programs. And even the White House and government agencies around the world have launched offices for social innovation. Take Echoing Green, a group that has handed out about $300 million to 500 entrepreneurs in the past quarter decade. Before 2007, it had only funded two for-profit enterprises. Now, more than half the organization’s fellows are building for-profit or hybrid enterprises, said Lara Galinsky, Echoing Green’s senior vice president. The result of this explosion of social entrepreneurship: Social enterprise is increasingly being done not just by entrepreneurs themselves but also by accountants, attorneys, communications professionals and subject matter experts who form the backbone of any standard for-profit organization. “To me, at least, it almost feels as if it’s another layer under our current economy,” said Evagelia Tavoulareas, a media specialist at Ashoka, another decades-old social grant-maker. “There’s every single thing you see in the regular economy but with a social edge. There are lawyers, people in finance, and [human resources].” When people ask Tavoulareas how to find work in social enterprise, she said, she tells them to think less about the industry and more about what they’re good at doing. Then she tells them to find a place they can do that with a social purpose. “The headline I tell young people,” said Echoing Green’s Galinsky, “is that being entrepreneurial isn’t necessarily about starting something. It’s in the process of how you find a good role for yourself. That requires research, networking, analysis and all the essential tenets of entrepreneurship. Apply that inward and apply that to your searching process.” She continued: “In my own career, people constantly ask me when I’m going to launch my own organization. There’s an expectation that that’s a higher place than where I am now. But I don’t have an idea or a desire to do that now. My role here is a social entrepreneurial role. And hopefully I’m passing that message along to others.” The expansion of social investment inside the private sector can be tied, in part, to the global financial crisis and ensuing recession, when traditional donor money for social investment started to dry up and traditional investors went looking for new opportunities, said Nanette Levinson, a professor focusing on social enterprise at American University’s School of International Service. For-profit investors had already begun to look at underserved areas as investment opportunities following Muhammud Yunus’ 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his microfinance work in Bangladesh, which many in the private sector took as proof that investment could be successful in the developing world, Levinson said. For many for-profit enterprises, social investment is about a social goal coupled with a belief that some version of market capitalism is the best way to get there. The Acumen Fund, for instance, describes its strategy as “patient investment,” a vehicle for investors who are willing to wait for a return and to accept more risk in exchange for doing good. Some investors, though, see social entrepreneurship as a sort of venture capital that brings high risks but can also pay off big because social entrepreneurs are, almost by definition, the first people into an untapped market. The broadening of the social investment industry was also spurred by the development of social media, which suddenly made it much easier for entrepreneurs to find like-minded partners, part-time volunteers and investors outside the confines of a few small networks and brought much more publicity to social enterprises that were already up and running. “They reached a tipping point at about the same time,” Tavoulareas said of social enterprise and social media. “It was around 2007, when Facebook was really exploding and everyone was adopting online techniques and methods of communication and networking.” Finally, the expansion was also driven by the mindset of the millennial generation entering the workforce in the mid-to-late 2000s, Galinsky said. “They were raised on computers and after 9/11 and they have a global perspective,” she said. “They volunteer at higher rates than baby boomers and they want to find a way to incorporate doing well and doing good into their lives.” None of this is to say there’s no need for classic entrepreneurs, Tavoulareas and Galinsky said, noting that both their organizations exist solely to match those entrepreneurs with startup funding. Just that the field of social entrepreneurship now comprises much more. “If you have an idea that you’ve been gripped by and that you need to give to the world for the sake of your own identity and happiness and fulfillment, you need to absolutely try to do it,” Galinsky said. “But if you’re not sure, then you need to think about what your purpose is. What’s your life’s mission? And how can that bring a social impact.”