"What, after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities and courage to advocate them."
-Jane Addams
After two wonderful years, we're formally announcing that there will be no more regular posting on the Social Entrepreneurship blog on Change.org. It's been quite a ride.
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About half way through college, I began to hear a new term all around me. It was "social entrepreneurship," and the idea, at least according to this book "How to Change the World," that everyone was reading, was that there was a new group of changemakers who were not wedded to the dogma of the past and were finding innovative ways to combine business and nonprofit know-how to tackle the world's biggest challenges.
The concept was like a brilliant spark for many of my peers. We were part of an incredibly lucky group who had had the chance to see the world up close much earlier than generations before us. Social entrepreneurship felt like an approach to change that could learn from the failures and successes of past development strategies to create something more scalable and more sustainable.
Of course, social entrepreneurship was not, in 2004, new. The field had decades of history, and heroes who were building an infrastructure long before there were any cover stories to reward them. But if the groundwork was laid in the past, it is in the last half decade that the field has really come into its own.
For the last two years, this blog has been covering the accelerating cultural importance of "social entrepreneurship." We've covered the brilliant innovators who are reshaping fields as diverse as health and access to finance. We've looked at the trends shaping investment and the development of new metrics. We've watched the Obama administration's foray into the social innovation space. And we've always tried to cover the critics and skeptics who wonder about the hype and efficacy of this nascent movement.
If one theme has stood out more clearly than any, it is just how young the field remains. However exciting or alluring it seems in print, the social entrepreneurship space is growing in fits, kicks, false starts, flops, failures, and improbable successes. It is messy, chaotic, incomplete, and still wonderfully full of possibility.
One of the joys of covering the field from Change.org has been that this company is, itself, an embodiment of the challenges and opportunities of startup social ventures. What began as a Facebook for social change advocates evolved into a media hub for important causes and continues to develop as a platform to coordinate the most important collective action campaigns in the world.
Over the next few months, Change.org will be increasingly focused on its mission of channeling people into high-impact collective action campaigns. We've seen how powerful it can be to get 1,000 people to email a local mayor or business, and learned how to help our readers enact change in real time. Yet with this evolution, the time is right to refocus on actions and specific cause areas, and end our more general coverage of the social entrepreneurship field.
There is still much to accomplish in this movement. While I've loved working with our writing staff to build this community, my belief is that to truly unleash the power latent in the growing network of social entrepreneurs, we need better tools to help people harness their social capital.
My full time focus will be on building Assetmap, a platform designed to transform the way individuals and teams use the resources in their networks to support one another. I'll be moving my writing under the company blog, and covering topics like social capital, the psychology of teams and giving, and more.
I believe wholly and absolutely that we've barely scratched the surface of the importance of social entrepreneurship. This field carries with it not simply innovative organizations, but also an entirely new way of conceptualizing value and organizing business and society. For champions of a world in which companies and nonprofits are partners in enabling equality, opportunity, and human rights, our story is just beginning and time is on our side.
I'm glad to have spent the last two years sharing some parts of that story with this community of readers, and I can't wait to see what the future will hold. Thanks to all the writers and Change.org staff who have made this journey possible.
To follow my next steps, visit http://blog.assetmap.com or sign up to be the first to know when Assetmap is available.
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