Can Social Entrepreneurism Survive the Slowdown?

We have witnessed several decades of unprecedented economic prosperity and expansion. The social sector was an important part of this seemingly endless expansion of capital and causes. All of this optimism has ground to a halt in the last few weeks, and not, of course, just for the social sector, but for all sectors during these scary times. And, there were signs that some of the shine was beginning to come off of the social entrepreneurial wagon.

Late in September, Trabian Shorters, an experienced social entrepreneur and funder at Ashoka, wrote [1] this impassioned plea to young people with Kiva [2] and DonorsChoose [3] fantasies:

"Social change is NOT a field. It is a calling - a profession in the original meaning of the word. You may be called by your faith, your conscience, your ancestors, or your circumstances but the optimistic belief and integrity of a zealous changemaker (by whatever label) is vital to human progress. That makes it sacred."

Trabian was writing this as a reflection of the mentoring he has been doing with budding social entrepreneurs at the Wagner School [4]at NYU. He writes of his disappointment in the risk aversion of many of the young people he is interacts with and their lack of passion for this work. As you can tell from his post, Trabian is a very passionate person who came of age as a social change maker during the Clinton Administration when AmeriCorps was created in the mid-1990s. 

My take on what Trabian sees in his interactions is not so much a change in this newest generation of young social entrepreneurs, but an emerging field that is attracting many more people than it did five, ten, or fifteen years ago.  As with any popular fields, once you move beyond the 5% of extraordinarily talented people, there is going to be a mixture of competent and less competent people who may or may not have the passion for the work that the pioneers like Trabian did.

But, then the world changed [5] shortly after Trabian's post. And now the question is: How will this enormous sector with its mixture of more and less talented people, particularly young people who want to make their careers in it, survive something these young people have never experienced, a severe economic downturn?

Jeff Trexler, a professor of social entrepreneurism at Pace University, had this to say [6] about trends in the field:

"The movement has yet to grasp the extent to which it is as much a product of the bubble as subprime loans and credit-default swaps--it's not just a coincidence that do-gooders started talking business when business was good. At the peak of the bubble this gave the movement a rhetorical advantage, but as the economy tanks, this same language can make the social entrepreneur seem untrustworthy, defined by profit, self-interest and the very business practices that created the problems charity now has to solve."

This paragraph raises questions. Can a field that has increasingly defined itself as "business-like" now survive in an economy and society that turns against these practices because of the damage that for-profit companies have wrought on the economy and on people's lives? What do we do about a sector that attracts young people, as Trabian notes, who may be idealistic but possibly lack the passion and creativity that entrepreneurism requires, particularly in difficult economic times?

The answer is that we need to reinvent ourselves. We take the good (the idealism, the desire to serve people and communities), get rid of the bad (the "fakers," as Trabian calls them, who really just want to make money but put the gloss of social change on their efforts; and the measures and mechanisms of for-profit efforts that don't make sense for social change efforts), and mix them with the new (the new social media tools that enhance real, meaningful relationships among cause participants much less expensively) to create something new and appropriate for the era we are now living in.