Bill Drayton: Phenomenon behind the rise of Social Entrepreneurship.

Bill Drayton: Phenomenon behind the rise of Social Entrepreneurship.

Every one of us wants to be someone, a person others recognize and respect for great deeds. Every one of us come with unique ideas and insights to existing problems thus bringing different perspectives and solutions to solve modern problems. However, not all these aspiring individuals have the capability to deliver extraordinary solutions and drive the change themselves.

That’s where the term social entrepreneurship comes in. For over 4 decades, social entrepreneurship or ‘quiet revolution’ has supported common citizens who come upfront with the ideas to impact and improve the lives of people around them.

Think of Florence Nightingale, who in the 19th century invented modern nursing during the Crimean War. Or Margaret Sanger, who launched the birth control movement in America by founding American Birth Control League in 1921.

In 1960, a Harvard-trained attorney Roy Prosterman during his visit to South Vietnam realized how giving farmers rights to their property would lead them out of dire poverty. His organization, now

known as Landesa, has been supporting rural land reform ever since and has improved the lives of 150 million people across 50 countries.

While this quiet revolution has been going on for decades it was in 2006 that social entrepreneurship gained global recognition when Mohammed Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for launching a microfinance firm to support small businesses started by the individuals and communities belonging to a lower economic class.

However, it was Bill Drayton, named as one of America’s 25 Best Leaders in 2005, who is responsible for the rise of the phrase ‘social entrepreneur’.

Entrepreneurship in the early days Known as one of the most prominent social entrepreneurs, Bill started his entrepreneurial journey during his childhood when he started and ran a student newspaper. His inspiration for entrepreneurship originates from his parents’ change-making journeys.

Growing up, Bill continued his endeavors by building Asia Society into the largest student organization. He was also an active member of the NAACP. Bill launched several organizations while pursuing his education that included Harvard’s Ashoka Table and Yale Legislative Services. After graduating from Yale Law School, while working as assistant administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Bill launched emission training, the foundation of the Kyoto Protocol.

Later while working for McKinsey and Company he founded citizen-sector organizations Ashoka and Save EPA, which served as the predecessor to environmental safety.

Rise of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public Founded in 1980, Ashoka has been instrumental in capitalism to drive social change. Through Ashoka, Bill not only provides necessary start-up capital to social entrepreneurs but also monitors the social returns.

“Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry,” he says.

The citizen sector around 1980, when Ashoka was founded, was more structured and followed businesses to become competitive and achieve individuals’ goals to become an entrepreneur.

However, Bill believes that the citizen sector now is going under rapid transitions. And rightly so as he highlights that businesses and society today can work together which was practically impossible earlier.

He believes that “The one single factor that determines society’s success is the percentage of change-makers within it.”

Under his organization Ashoka, Bill and his team have built a network of thousands of electors, nominators, and supporters, who constantly search in their countries and communities for people who bring fresh ideas and the ability to make these ideas work on a large scale.

Initiating a Movement ‘Everyone a Changemaker’ Bill has always focused on four characteristics of social entrepreneurship – idea, creativity, entrepreneurship, and ethics. And seeing that many organizations take heavy responsibility to support social entrepreneurship, Bill led a significant part of Ashoka to refocus on launching a movement ‘everyone a changemaker’.

“If everyone is a changemaker, there’s no way a problem can outrun a solution,” he says.

Talking about his new initiative Bill, during an interview with Forbes, gave an example of diverse income distribution and ‘us Vs them’ politics in several countries that swept the world.

According to him, these two factors are driving a downward mirror curve, which shows the rapidly changing world. The old system was based on empowering people with certain skills which they could repeat for a lifetime such as assembly lines and law firms.

However, this century-old system is dying faster as more individuals fail while others adapt to the new reality where everyone has to be a changemaker whether it’s by establishing a business to lead the social change and sustainable cause or by buying from these businesses to support a social cause.

But did you realize this again is creating another inequality, which as Bill says, is unlike the inequalities of gender, race, religion, and many others? This inequality of not having the skills or ability to be a changemaker is depriving millions of kids and youngsters of a chance to contribute to the change.

Bill emphasizes this is why it is critical to focus on empowering children and youngsters with the skills and abilities that they have to learn and practice to be a part of today’s changing world, to be powerful, to be a changemaker.

“The most critical variable [to becoming a change-maker] is one’s willingness to permit oneself. To break the mental chains that make us small because everyone tells us we cannot,” Bill says.

Awareness-tipping – Way to the future transition “The job of a social entrepreneur is to recognize when a part of society is stuck & to provide new ways to get it unstuck.” Staying true to his words is the social entrepreneur Bill is illuminating the path towards addressing and adapting the future transition.

Bill with his team at Ashoka has been studying awareness-tipping, a classic process of people’s needs to understand what changes are happening in their strategic environment. And this includes individuals and organizations of every size from every sector.

At Ashoka, Bill and his team analyzed a similar pattern every large movement in history followed that also applies to the ‘everyone a changemaker’ movement. Organizations leading the change today, address and analyze certain situations or solutions and bring them in front of their audience through their products, services, or media promotion.

This drives the attention of their audience towards the change happening in a certain part of the world. This change becomes clearer to more people as they start to change their behavior and lifestyle accordingly which accelerates the actual process of change.

And Ashoka under the leadership of Bill Drayton is working at the core of this process empowering entrepreneurs with the increased operating budget of USD40 million across 70 countries.

Ashoka also supports 2000 fellow social entrepreneurs from the start-up phase and onwards. The Ashoka community includes prominent and proven social entrepreneurs including Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize laureate and founder of Grameen Bank.

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