What is Jewish Social Entrepreneurship?

Every time I attend something, I'm given a nametag. As those who have visited my apartment over the years can attest, many of these nametags still live in my residence. I've had many titles on many tags, depending on where I was. But at the program, jointly sponsored by JESNA's Lippman-Kanfer Institute and the UJC, and held at the Kraft Center at Columbia, trying to determine what Jewish social entrepreneurship is and how we can take it to the next level, I find myself straddling the line between the entrepreneurs and the institutions, solidly in the court of neither.

Here I'm not a liveblogger either, because there is apparently no working wifi at the Kraft Center (or at least not for us)—good for concentration, bad for liveblogging..Previous iterations of my nametag have listed blogs and publications galore. But having stepped down from my editorship at PresenTense and my singles column at the Jewish Week, this tag contains my most succinct description to date: “writer.” Maybe a little too short, especially for a writer who runs long: I add my twittername (two of them actually: EstherK and ROICommunity), in case anyone is interested in taking tech to the next level.

Conference coordinator Jon Woocher (who has the best title ever--Chief Ideas Officer) explains that we’re here to enhance the impact of Jewish social entrepreneurship and how to use the power of conversation as a lever for change. Then, he introduced Paul C. Light, a professor at NYU’s Wagner School, who spoke about what “social entrepreneurship really means,” and helped to identify some “myths” about social entrepreneurship that turned out to be true.

Social entrepreneurship isn’t the same thing as innovation, he said, noting that although doing something new and innovative might be embedded in social entrepreneurship, the term itself really refers to trying to solve an intractable problem through pattern-breaking change. “Innovation is not about finding a solution; social entrepreneurs are known for their hubris and audacity of their ideas.”

Light noted that social entrepreneurs think differently from other high achievers; their persistent optimism keeps them going, even if you tell them they’re going to fail. “They’re just not going to stop.”

Among Light’s other observations:

• Opportunities for real change come once in a while.
• The most successful ideas come from groups who support each other—collaborative      entrepreneurs are more successful.
• The myth of opportunity is that it happens and we react; but we can create opportunity.
• You can’t be good enough. You have to be excellent.
• Start by dreaming big. Be audacious, even irritatingly so.

What else makes an entrpreneur, or a leader? Stay tuned for more on this subject.

Comments

[Isaac Hametz]

To paraphrase from "The Power of Unreasonable People" (a great book) by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan, a social entrepreneur is someone who identifies a situation in which the market has failed to provide goods or services to a group of people and develops a new model that addresses those failures. A great example is the environment. For a long time the environmental costs of producing, distributing, and disposing of goods was ignored. With the advent of eco-capitalism, environmental costs are now added to (or subtracted from) the end product and now there are systems in place where people actually get paid for their trash (see terracycle - http://www.terracycle.net/).
In short, social entrepreneurship is a new economic, environmental, and social model that affirms, there is more to life than a monetary bottom line. Its about being good people before being good businessmen/women. And its about realizing that we're all only here for a short time, so lets make the best of it while we can.
Viva la Revolucion!