Teen Social Venture Competition

I am excited about a current competition underway to fund social ventures founded by teens. This is a great way to capture the talented capable youth and give them the opportunity to apply themselves to improving the world. Establishing a life time of service to the needs of the poor, the abused, the hungry and the environment. The competition is the idea of Ashoka's Youth Venture and Best Buy. They are inviting teens from around the nation to select the winners. Visit http://www.GenV.net/bestbuy to cast your vote.

"It's our hope the Youth Venture partnership serves as a catalyst for other youth to become changemakers in their own communities." states Gretchen Zucker, executive director. Competitions like this will help take social change to new heights.

What Can Texting Do for Your Social Venture

South Africa is using text messages to stamp out the spread of HIV. This program called Project Masiluleke is developed and funded by a group of technology firms namely, Nokia Siemens Networks, a variety of HIV charities, and several design firms. Even National Geographic is assisting on the education. Project Masiluleke is having amazing results.

How the system works:

A message is sent using what is know as "Please Call Me" (PCM Service)

PCS is a free form of text messaging across Africa, allows someone without any phone credit to send a text to asking for a call. Similar to the "page" this person option on most American VoiceMail systems.

Each sent PCM message says "Please Call Me," and the phone number of the caller. There is also space for an additional 120 characters.Extra space is used for advertising helping to offset the cost of running the service.

Text messages are sent asking individuals to call HIV Help Centers.

Results:

So far calls to counselors at the National Aids helpline increased by 200% when messages were broadcast. Small pilot projects showed that calls to the National Aids helpline rose from 1,000 to 4,000 when the system was in use.

Apply:

He have know for a while that text message are a great way to advertise. Text messages have the better Click Through Rate than print media, calls, and email. Using text messaging in your social venture to communicate with donors, activists, and clients will do great things. Leverage this great technology to increase donations, sells and man hours.

Celebrity Endorsement of Social Ventures

Social ventures are always on my mind. Recently in a forum discussing the success of NGOs in the Darfur Conflict we came to several realizations. One that Human Right Activist in Darfur has been (comparably) so success is the use of celebrity endorsements.


Using natural tendencies of society to help remedy societal ills is the right prescription. We admire and aspire to be like our favorite celebrities. Employing their societal clout to a social venture they will be able to raise awareness and funds.

The situation in Darfur is dire but it is not be ignored. With the help of celebrities like George Clooney, Senator Obama, and Angelina Jolie awareness for Darfur is high. Lets make is style statement of social awareness and involvement.

I am interested in study how exactly celebrities choose their causes and what impact they have. What are the most successful celebrity activist. How and what do they do? Understanding these questions will help give you social venture instant viral growth. Leveraging popularity of celebrities does not trivialize the issues but in a natural way engage a normally sedated populous.

Nonprofit vs. For-Profit Social Ventures

I recently read an article at Entrpreneur.com regarding the often perplexing decision of starting a non-profit or a for-profit social venture. Arthur, Diana Ransom, illuminates the pros and cons of organizing your social venture. Most social entrepreneur tend to simply select non-profit for the fund raising benefits. Don't make the same mistake. Know your options and the reasons behind making this big decision.

The main criteria for making this decision are:

• Profits
• Tax Deductions
• Raising Capital
  
• Mission
• Scalability
• Hiring Employees
• Customers
  

Social Entrepreneurs need to make the right decision when forming their business entity. Non-profit organization isn't always the answer. Educate yourself before organizing your social venture.

Sam Goldman Social Entrepreneur

After several years in the Peace Corp Sam Goldman found a need and through education and determination he was able to make a difference in world. Sometimes before we get our ah ha moment we need to be active. Meaning we need to get involved in doing before the idea presents itself. This is a lesson well know among social entrepreneurs. It is hard to sit back an generate a unique and useful idea while being only a spectator. Sam Goldman's social venture really took shape after time spent among the very people he wished to aid. He had to understand their needs and their situations before he could invent solutions. Congratulations Sam Goldman and good luck. Watch at this interview with Sam to hear his story- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHZfNAqAPGo

Social Venture Networking Event

Social Entrepreneurs from around the world will be gathering at the Social Capital Markets Convention October 13th-15th in San Francisco. This is a great place to network with other social entrepreneurs and find funding for your business. Doing well and doing good is the mantra of a new generation of entrepreneurs and the organizations that invest in them states http://socialcapitalmarkets.net. Jump over to their site an sign up for this amazing event.

What is Microfranchising?

Microfranchising is one of the latest developments in the social venture industry. By creating a scaleable simple small business plan which impoverished entrepreneurs are able to run and escape from poverty. It also helps to stimulate the economy from the bottom up.

A great example of a successful micro franchise is Vision Spring (formerly know as SCOJO Foundation). This social enterprise's business model is called business in a bag. Entrepreneur are given training in eye exams and then sell eye glasses to people in their area who lack the opportunity to get conventional medical assistance.

Visit their site to see how you can start your own micro-franchise visionspring.org
Just another example of how innovation paired with a determination to make change will empower a global future without poverty as we know it.

Innovative Social Venture Fund-Raising

I was reading Giving by Bill Clinton today and the section on Giving Time really struck me. I am not actively involved with a social venture at this point in time. We don't all have money or special skills but we all do have the same 24 hours every day. I am committing myself to spend time everyday, at least an hour to building my own social enterprise.

I would like begin a non-profit that focuses on fundraising through sms advertising. Every micro credit institution could use more funding. This system will send, via user opt-in, advertiser specials: giveaways, exclusive offers, and promotion notifications via text messages. Most importantly this would raise money in a non-intrusive way for a special causes. Using technology to make the world a better place in a way that is economically sound. It creates value.

We don't have to settle for the way things have been. We can be active agents of change like famous Paul Farmer. Later this week I will explain Farmer's inspiring story.

How to Start Micro Lending with Kiva.org

Have you ever asked how you can help end suffering of empoverished people in distant lands? Thanks to innovations of social entreprenuers like Matt and Jess Flannery you can easy loan a small but, vital amount to a growing small business.

A list of entreprenuer represented by a micro credit institution are listed ranging store owners to fishermen. As a lender you chose one and select the amount you wish to lend. Boasting a 99.7% collection on loans you will be able to re-loan the amount.

According to internet statitics, as of July 27, 2008, Kiva acquired around $37,281,060 in loans from over 320,425 lenders. Funding a total of 52,847 loans. It is estimated that the average loan size is about $480.44

Kiva.org is a social venture enjoying great success. It has quickly become one of the most visited sites on the web. It's clean simple design, clear instructions, and personification of micro-lending has fueled its burning success and allowed thousands of people to make a difference.

Visit kiva.org to start micro-lending.

Good to Great and the Social Sectors Review

Brilliant business writer, Jim Collins, lent his expert knowledge of business greatness to the social sector in Good To Great and the Social Sectors. This is a must read for anyone with a leadership role in a social venture.

Collins explains that true leadership exists if people follow when they freedom not to. Most social ventures rely on donors, volunteers, and underpaid idealists that are not required to follow every command of the CEO. To truly lead in the social sector one must become a true leader.

Without executive all saying power social venture leaders navigate diffused power structures employing a governance style of leadership called legislative. Employing Legislative leadership requires leaders to place the cause, the movement, the mission first- not themselves proving they will do whatever it takes accomplish the objective.

Good to Great the and the Social Sectors will give you insight form, lead, focus, and grow your social venture. Read it.

Empower Playgrounds Empowering Children

I recently came across an innovative social venture taking place in Accra, Ghana. Ben Markham, founder of Empower Playgrounds, with help from 15 BYU students is installing merry-go-rounds power generators at poor schools in Ghana.

The concept is brilliant in its simpleness. Providing the children with recreational diversion and using their abundance of energy to store power for the school. The organization plans to install 8 generators this year.

This is another great example of how the social venture movement is changing the world. To learn more about Empower Playgrounds visit their website at empowerplaygrounds.org

The Warren Buffet Perspective

Warren Buffett stated "My gift is nothing. I can have everything I need with less than one percent of my wealth. I was born in the right country at the right time, and my work is disproportionately rewarded compared to teachers and soldiers. I'm just giving back surplus claims that have no value to me but can do a lot for others. The people I really admire are the small donors who give up a movie or a restaurant meal to help needier people. (Expert for Giving by Bill Clinton)

Having donated 30 billion to the Gates Foundation, Warren Buffett has truly improved the lives of many others. I feel it is so important to keep the right perspective. Mr. Buffett is a great example.

Meaning Behind Any Social Venture

If you ever feel bogged down and discouraged while working on your social venture read this article. It will really change the way you feel and help you find the motivation you need to keep making a difference.

Helping, Fixing or Serving?

"Fixing and helping create a distance between people, but we cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected."

Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. When you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.


Service rests on the premise that the nature of life is sacred, that life is a holy mystery which has an unknown purpose. When we serve, we know that we belong to life and to that purpose. From the perspective of service, we are all connected: All suffering is like my suffering and all joy is like my joy. The impulse to serve emerges naturally and inevitably from this way of seeing.


Serving is different from helping. Helping is not a relationship between equals. A helper may see others as weaker than they are, needier than they are, and people often feel this inequality. The danger in helping is that we may inadvertently take away from people more than we could ever give them; we may diminish their self-esteem, their sense of worth, integrity or even wholeness.


When we help, we become aware of our own strength. But when we serve, we don't serve with our strength; we serve with ourselves, and we draw from all of our experiences. Our limitations serve; our wounds serve; even our darkness can serve. My pain is the source of my compassion; my woundedness is the key to my empathy.


Serving makes us aware of our wholeness and its power. The wholeness in us serves the wholeness in others and the wholeness in life. The wholeness in you is the same as the wholeness in me. Service is a relationship between equals: our service strengthens us as well as others. Fixing and helping are draining, and over time we may burn out, but service is renewing. When we serve, our work itself will renew us. In helping we may find a sense of satisfaction; in serving we find a sense of gratitude.


Harry, an emergency physician, tells a story about discovering this. One evening on his shift in a busy emergency room, a woman was brought in about to give birth. When he examined her, Harry realized immediately that her obstetrician would not be able to get there in time and he was going to deliver this baby himself. Harry likes the technical challenge of delivering babies, and he was pleased. The team swung into action, one nurse hastily opening the instrument packs and two others standing at the foot of the table on either side of Harry, supporting the woman's legs on their shoulders and murmuring reassurance. The baby was born almost immediately.


While the infant was still attached to her mother, Harry laid her along his left forearm. Holding the back of her head in his left hand, he took a suction bulb in his right and began to clear her mouth and nose of mucous. Suddenly, the baby opened her eyes and looked directly at him. In that instant, Harry stepped past all of his training and realized a very simple thing: that he was the first human being this baby girl had ever seen. He felt his heart go out to her in welcome from all people everywhere, and tears came to his eyes.


Harry has delivered hundreds of babies, and has always enjoyed the excitement of making rapid decisions and testing his own competency. But he says that he had never let himself experience the meaning of what he was doing before, or recognize what he was serving with his expertise. In that flash of recognition he felt years of cynicism and fatigue fall away and remembered why he had chosen this work in the first place. All his hard work and personal sacrifice suddenly seemed to him to be worth it.


He feels now that, in a certain sense, this was the first baby he ever delivered. In the past he had been preoccupied with his expertise, assessing and responding to needs and dangers. He had been there many times as an expert, but never before as a human being. He wonders how many other such moments of connection to life he has missed. He suspects there have been many.


As Harry discovered, serving is different from fixing. In fixing, we see others as broken, and respond to this perception with our expertise. Fixers trust their own expertise but may not see the wholeness in another person or trust the integrity of the life in them. When we serve we see and trust that wholeness. We respond to it and collaborate with it. And when we see the wholeness in another, we strengthen it. They may then be able to see it for themselves for the first time.


One woman who served me profoundly is probably unaware of the difference she made in my life. In fact, I do not even know her last name and I am sure she has long forgotten mine. At twenty-nine, because of Crohn's Disease, much of my intestine was removed surgically and I was left with an ileostomy. A loop of bowel opens on my abdomen and an ingeniously designed plastic appliance which I remove and replace every few days covers it. Not an easy thing for a young woman to live with, and I was not at all sure that I would be able to do this. While this surgery had given me back much of my vitality, the appliance and the profound change in my body made me feel hopelessly different, permanently shut out of the world of femininity and elegance.


At the beginning, before I could change my appliance myself, it was changed for me by nurse specialists called enterostomal therapists. These white-coated experts were women my own age. They would enter my hospital room, put on an apron, a mask and gloves, and then remove and replace my appliance. The task completed, they would strip off all their protective clothing. Then they would carefully wash their hands. This elaborate ritual made it harder for me. I felt shamed.


One day a woman I had never met before came to do this task. It was late in the day and she was dressed not in a white coat but in a silk dress, heels and stockings. She looked as if she was about to meet someone for dinner. In a friendly way she told me her first name and asked if I wished to have my ileostomy changed. When I nodded, she pulled back my covers, produced a new appliance, and in the most simple and natural way imaginable removed my old one and replaced it, without putting on gloves. I remember watching her hands. She had washed them carefully before she touched me. They were soft and gentle and beautifully cared for. She was wearing a pale pink nail polish and her delicate rings were gold.


At first, I was stunned by this break in professional procedure. But as she laughed and spoke with me in the most ordinary and easy way, I suddenly felt a great wave of unsuspected strength come up from someplace deep in me, and I knew without the slightest doubt that I could do this. I could find a way. It was going to be all right.


I doubt that she ever knew what her willingness to touch me in such a natural way meant to me. In ten minutes she not only tended my body, but healed my wounds. What is most professional is not always what best serves and strengthens the wholeness in others. Fixing and helping create a distance between people, an experience of difference. We cannot serve at a distance. We can only serve that to which we are profoundly connected, that which we are willing to touch. Fixing and helping are strategies to repair life. We serve life not because it is broken but because it is holy.


Serving requires us to know that our humanity is more powerful than our expertise. In forty-five years of chronic illness I have been helped by a great number of people, and fixed by a great many others who did not recognize my wholeness. All that fixing and helping left me wounded in some important and fundamental ways. Only service heals.


Service is not an experience of strength or expertise; service is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe. Helpers and fixers feel causal. Servers may experience from time to time a sense of being used by larger unknown forces. Those who serve have traded a sense of mastery for an experience of mystery, and in doing so have transformed their work and their lives into practice.



Rachel Naomi Remen,m.d. is Associate Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at U.C.S.F. Medical School and co-founder and medical director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. She is author of the bestseller, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal

Utah Special Olympics

I was given the opportunity to work with the Utah Special Olympics. While not a social venture its social impact it merits entry on this blog. I love working with the Special Olympics. As an organization it is very structured and professional. As far as its social impact it is amazing. Volunteers were deeply touched and felt the joy of true service.

I was truly impressed with the amount of volunteers that came to participate. Athletes were given a great experience and an opportunity to compete and "fit in". Volunteers walk away with the rekindled feeling of empowerment and a sense of the greater good. My volunteer time helped to refocus me on the responsibility I have to give back to my community. I love the atmosphere at the games. You only want the best for everyone. If only we could institute that same ideology in rest of society

It remind me of why I want to be so actively engaged in social ventures. There is no greater feeling than giving pure service. Don't miss an opportunity to get involved with this great organization. Visit www.specialolympics.org to learn how you are needed.

Banker to the Poor

I recently read the inspiring story of Muhammad Yunus recorded in the New York Times BestSeller "Banker to the Poor". This book concreted in my heart a desire to be actively involved in changing the world. Working within his circle of influence Muhammad has been able to create a social venture that has affected the lives of millions of people in many countries. Detailed in this book are the highlights of Muhammad Yunus traits that have enabled him to create lasting social change. Also the book details the challenges face by his organization the Grameen Bank.

This is a book that will change you. It will change your heart, thoughts, and actions. Realizing that we are all empowered. We can make changes. We need to support programs that are succesfully running micro-credit and micro-franchising.

Realizing that he can act and can make a difference lead Yunus to create on the most successful social venture of all time. I highly recommend reading his story.

Social Venture Highlighted: Coast Coconut Farms

Operating and benefiting beautiful Kenya, Coast Coconut Farms, is a growing social venture headquartered in Utah.

Coast Coconut Farms was founded in 2005 thanks to the The Pope Foundation. The mission is to create an economic development project to provide sustainable employment, management and ownership opportunities for the rural people of Kenya. There is a large production facility and many small micro-franchises that currently produce oil.

The smaller micro-franchises are owned by individuals in remote areas. Employing 1 or 2 local villagers and produce small quantities. Some of this oil is sold in their local villages/markets and the rest is sold to Basa Body for use in cosmetics. These systems are no waste using, Direct Micro Expelling process which is sustainable and environmentally sound.

The biggest challenges have been quality control and proper management. Founders stated "It's important to do your homework. Highly, recommends doing a fesability study. Often people will start with a lot of assumptions."

What a great example of how social ventures give back in a positive and constructive way.
If you would like to help support and know of any potential buyers for coconut oil please visit basabody.com