Social Entrepreneurship: Ten Questions with David Bornstein

David Bornstein is the author of of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. Guy Kawasaki posts ten questions he asked David.

Here's one of Guy's questions:

Question: How can social entrepreneurs attract talent when there aren’t high salaries and options?

Answer: By offering people employment opportunities that align with their talents, interests, and values. By inspiring them with a vision of changing the world, of being part of something bigger than themselves. We have to think about an assumption behind this question—namely the notion that people seek to maximize how much money they make. Certainly, we all care about making money. But choices that people make every day—becoming teachers, having children, giving money to charity—indicate that we are complex creatures motivated by many different things.

We are also at an interesting point in America’s history. With all our wealth and freedom of choice, we seem to be obsessed with finding happiness. Everyday it seems another book is published focusing on how we can make ourselves happy. Most Americans today are phenomenally wealthy compared to their grandparents, yet many studies show we are no happier, and we actually may be less so. At the very top of the list of things that make people feel happy and fulfilled are doing work that you find challenging and deeply meaningful with colleagues whom you respect and care for. Social entrepreneurship offers this.

Great questions, better answers.


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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social entrepreneurs recommend reading.

Tags for information about: for:vsef, Social Enterprise, Nonprofit

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[Recommended Read] In Plain Sight: Reflections on Life in Downtown Eastside Vancouver

Congratulations to the editors of In Plain Sight, Leslie A. Robertson and Dara Culhane, for winning the George Ryga Award.

The CBC quotes Dara Culhane:

The book came out of a research project that started in 1999 called the Health and Home project.

[...]

We were interviewing women and talking to women about the relationship between health and housing for women in the Downtown Eastside, and as we moved into that project and got to know some of the women, they talked often about wanting to publish their stories.

From the publisher's website describing In Plain Sight:

In compiling this collection of seven life stories from Vancouver’s “Downtown Eastside,” the editors set out to create a space for the voices of women who are seldom heard on their own terms—the words of people who are publicly visible yet who, due to the blur of preconceptions that surround Vancouver’s inner city, remain unseen. To many, the women who offer their stories here are “people without history,” defined only by belonging to a neighbourhood branded by layers of stigma. Their diverse histories are rarely included in the cacophony of media depictions of urban poverty: the “drug problem,” “prostitution” or statistics on crime and violence. These women share the stories of their complex pathways from childhood into and out of the “Downtown Eastside,” through periods of addiction and recovery, strength and illness, affluence and poverty. They confront and challenge the familiar stereotypes applied to drug users, to “wayward women,” and to those who live with disease and/or mental illness.

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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social enterpreneurs recommend reading.

Tags for information about: for:vsef, DTES

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Reading List: Diminished Democracy

Theda Skocpol's Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life might also be titled Professionals at the Gate. The book explores the decline of member-based voluntary associations, since the 1960s, in the wake of growing professionally managed agencies. Diminished Democracy asks: Does the trend leave citizens with fewer opportunities to get actively involved in community and public affairs?

To get a perspective of Skocpol's work, consider reading, The Narrowing of Civic Life.

Theda Skocpol is Victor S. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology, and Director of the Center for American Political Studies, at Harvard University.

Here are links to order Order Diminished Democracy in Vancouver, the United Kingdom, or the United States.

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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social enterpreneurs recommend reading.

Reading list: The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

C K Prahalad's book, 'The  Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits' is a selection for the October Fast Company Book Club.   The book is also a recommended summer read by Wharton.
 
To read an excerpt look  here, or order your copy here [for US/UK orders]. Wharton also offers an excerpt here.
 
To read more, Strategy+Business (First Quarter, 2002), printed an article by C. K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart also titled, 'The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid'.

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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social enterpreneurs recommend reading.