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What If Social Entrepreneurs Had The Same Tools Available As Business Entrepreneurs?

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At today’s Continuity Forum, Ashoka’s Director in South Florida, Lorena García Durán, took the stage to congratulate the *abc Foundation on bringing together the business and social entrepreneurs of the Americas, and reminded the forum that if we want real social change, we need to give social entrepreneurs the same tools as business entrepreneurs have been getting all along.

When Ashoka started 32 years ago it was Bill Drayton, younger then, walking through India with a set of paper cards and pen, asking around about who were the people solving real challenges of the communities that were most impressive. (Let’s stop for a minute and try to imagine how hard it would have been to do all his research back then without the internet.)

After a thorough research of these people, he coins the concept of Social Entrepreneurship and receives the McArthur Genius Grant of 1 million dollars with which he launches Ashoka. It’s his main goal to change the world, by investing and supporting the leading social entrepreneurs, who we call Ashoka Fellows, 30 of them featured during this Forum.

If you take a closer look at the principles that move our social entrepreneurs, you’ll see that they do not differ from the principles that drive business entrepreneurship forward.

The biggest difference lies in the ecosystem and resources available for business Vs. social entrepreneurs. Capital, talent, mentorship and M&A (merger and acquisitions) markets are easily available for biz entrepreneurs. America has developed because of these dynamics.

But this wasn’t always the case. Venture Capital is a pretty recent invention. Stock markets weren’t always there. Business associations and government policies have been created to respond to the demand of business entrepreneurs, making it easier to launch and grow.

Now imagine what it would be like if Social Entrepreneurs could count on the same tools. And furthermore, if anyone willing to solve a social problem and change-making ideas were to receive the same type of support and boost.

Ashoka exists to help communities, and countries, and ultimately the world, to create environments where change-making and social entrepreneurship flourish.

Let me share with you a very clear example: Ashoka Fellow Felipe Vergara, whose organization Lumni, is transforming the field of human-capital-financing by giving students the opportunity to invest in their own education using the value of their future earnings. When Felipe was elected as an Ashoka Fellow he was in one country and provided services for less than 200 students. Since then, and also as an obvious consequence of his model’s success he will reach the 12,000 students in 2013 in 5 countries. He has been recognized by the Clinton Global Initiative, won the Poder *abc Award as the “Social Entrepreneur Of The Year” and last year at the World Economic Forum, he received the Schwab “Social Entrepreneur of the year”-award for Latin America.

We have some of the best social entrepreneurs of the region in the room; some of the best people, with the best ideas. Ask them how hard it is for them to raise money, hire people, get connections and scale their models compared to business entrepreneurs. That’s where we come in.

Ashoka’s biggest role is to connect social entrepreneurs with the resources they need to scale their idea. Connect them to business entrepreneurs who - as them - are eager to see the change in the world, but want to do it in the most efficient and high impact way. As a result, we also help business entrepreneurs discover where they can have the biggest impact in the world.

But, we’d like to someday be redundant.

Just imagine what all of us could do to build bridges between business and social entrepreneurs, highways for innovative ideas to fly faster, markets for philanthropic capital to reach impact more effectively, networks of change-makers learning and collaborating.

Imagine no more – seize the moment instead. The opportunity is right in front of you. Just look around you. The business and social entrepreneurs at the *abc forum are already collaborating in high impact strategies. The world is already showing us some of the most innovative solutions built together by business and social. Now is the time to push forward and turn these connections into a global changemaker movement. The questions is, are you in?

For more new ideas and innovators in this space, follow the *abc Continuity Forum via the twitter tag #abcforum