YSEC’s first meet up of the year is happening this Wednesday, January 27th from 6:30pm-9pm at 215 Spadina Ave (CSI offices). You should be there and here’s why.

1. Meet and mingle with the changemakers community
2. The best way to meet with and ask questions to YSEC staff and members about SE opportunities
3. You’re curious about SE and how to get started. Meet with peers in the same stage and learn from those who have already started their projects.
4. You’re full of great ideas and this is great place to get feedback on them, and maybe even find new collaborators to help you bring them to action
5. Get introduced to YSEC and Centre for Social Innovation.

Every meet up leaves us feeling energized and excited from hearing all your great ideas and loving all the great connections made. We can’t wait to see what this month’s event will reveal.

(source: http://www.newciv.org/c4c/may2001.html)

If you’re looking for places to go and things to do this week, take a look at our favourite SE events of the week.

1. Canada’s Role in the Global Water Crisis. When: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 (4:10pm – 6pm) Where: U of T (41 Willcocks Street, The Faculty Club, Second Floor)  Why: Join Dr. Zafar Adeel, Director of UNU Int’l Network on Water, Environment and Health, discuses how Canada can become a leader in the push to help the, roughly, 1 billion people without access to safe drinking water and about 2.6 billion people without access to adequate sanitation facilities. Follow this link for more information.
2. Build Social Capital with Smojoe. When: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 (6pm to 9pm). Where: 215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 120 (CSI).  Why: For just $40 you will discover everything there is to know about Google Page Ranks, essential blog widgets, how to optimize the “finability” of your posts and YouTube videos, and how to turn readership into sales. Moderated byRob Campbell from SMOjoe social media, who will get specific about the fundamentals of online marketing. For tickets click here.
3. Health, Housing and Human Rights: Exploring the Connections in Canada and Globally. When: Thursday, January 21, 2010 AND Friday, January 22, 2010 (various times) Where: Various locations around at U of T Why: This series of events with Miloon Kothari, the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, discusses housing policies as they relate to human rights. For more information of the different lectures part of this series just click here.

Make it out to one of these events and tell us your thoughts.  Do have an event to tell us about?

David Bornstein gave a keynote speech that touched upon something extremely relevant and timely – the observation that news/media perpetuates one (negative) view of human nature and social entrepreneurs provide a new, positive and empowering view of the world. A world where human nature is one of compassion, empathy and inspired action to help each other as well as the environment. Bornstein noted that the Milgram experiment highlighted something particularly interesting, and not commonly known – that 90% of participants in the experiment would change their behavior if they saw the person before them change their behavior first. People will follow/replicate what they see.

Or as Gandhi eloquently put it:

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

Everyone is a Change Maker, including you.

Learn how to podcast and get message out on the viral scene. Toronto Net Tuesday: Podcast Basics is on from 5:30pm-8pm at CSI (215 Spadina Ave W, suite 120). Have these pros teach you the basics of putting together a message anyone can access from the great indoors.

There’s no denying that Twitter is one of the strongest tools for outreach. So come join CSI again on Wednesday, January 13th from 6pm-9:30pm and learn how to increase your audience.   Network Your Way to More Business Using Twitter will cost $45 (early bird, $60 at the door) and they’ll teach you the tips and tricks to expanding your enterprise in just 20 minutes a day.

The CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101, hosted at the MaRS centre, is going strong. On Wednesday from 5:30pm-6:30pm this series brings you part 1 of Marketing that Matters: Transforming your ideas to income. If you already have an idea you want to put forward, this marketing session will help you plan out your demographics and demonstrate key trends in ensuring messaging success. Already have an organization started? Come out to learn the latest techniques and see how you can incorporate them into your practice.

Thursday will keep you busy with forward thinking events that are sure to inspire. The first is hosted at OCAD (100 McCaul Street) and will run from 6:45pm-8:15pm. Unfinished Business Lecture Series – After the Collapse: Technology, open and the future of government is an open discussion about the future of technology and a shifting government. David Eaves will look at how open methodologies, technology and social change is reshaping the way public service and policy development will be organized and delivered in the future. So if you’ve got something cooking, come listen to David’s thoughts on the future and join the conversation.

If you’re looking for more guidance in planning your future, then drop by the CSI offices (215 Spadina Ave W, 4th floor) for ENTREPRENEUR ADVISORY ROUNDTABLE Theme: PINK SPOON MARKETING (Harnessing the Power of the Free Taste to Build and Grow Your Business). For $35 you can look over your plans with experienced consultants. These dedicated experts will help you structure your current plans for solid future growth. Space is limited, so it’s worth signing up now.

Like what you see? Just follow the event links for more details on registration. What did you learn from your events this week? Email us and let us know what you’ve been up to on your SE Adventure.  

A: Autonomy

B: Belonging

C: Capability

The more we learn our ABCs, the more literate we become in the art of working with people. Everyone wants to feel like they have a say in their job and are given the space to do it.

If that surprises you, then take a random poll and ask everyone you meet how much they like their micro-managing boss, and for once, they might all agree on one thing. Everyone wants to feel like they belong to something larger than themselves. Now that might be a tricky one to back up, but consider this, “fitting in”, making a contribution, having a national identity, having friends or meditating in the woods, are all things we do to feel that we are part of something larger than ourselves. Finally, people want to feel and be capable at what they do. No one comes to work saying to themselves: aha! I can’t wait to do a bad job; I mean a really bad job!

If we are able to give people autonomy, belonging, and capability, we will naturally increase their satisfaction and performance. A very interesting theory, but what are its practical implications?

Deming, in his book The New Economics, offers some tips around designing a job description that will increase the performance of the employee and the flow of work in a business or organization.

“A job description must do more than prescribe motions; do this, do that, this way, that way. It must tell what the work will be used for, how this work contributes to the aim of the [organization or business].” Also, a job description needs to explain the work-flow. How will this work benefit other divisions or departments? How will knowledge be transferred? Where does the employee fit in the work cycle?  This job description will have the motions, but the motions will be self-explanatory when you know the purpose of each task, to whom is it useful, how it will be used, when and to whom it will be handed over in the cycle.

When an employee understands the purpose and flow of work, there is no need to micro-manage them. They want to do a good job; they have the understanding necessary to do a good job; let them!

- Lulwa

The aim of the workshop was to change mindsets about finances—one of those elemental aspects of businesses and organizations that many social entrepreneurs look back and say “Oh, (insert expletive here). I really should have paid more attention to that”.

YSEC’s market research told us that financial literacy, AKA basic comfort with finance decisions, are a major obstacle for a lot of aspiring young social entrepreneurs.

Discussing sources of funding

So, we planned the series of workshops cheekily entitled “Finance is $exy” and had the first one be about “How to Get Started”. John Baker gave a crash course on things like venture capital, angel investors, revenues, costs, and how to communicate financial issues to your team, punctuated by Marvin Gaye playing through his speakers during group activities—just to get the atmosphere going.

Baker emphasized that corporate structure (whether nonprofit or for profit) should be determined by the finances and not the other way around. Basically, the first step should be to look at your sources of revenue, and then your expenses, and based on this financial reality, decide what type of structure makes the most sense for your initiative.

Real case studies drove the point home, and discussions punctuated by Q and A sessions allowed participants to ask questions specific to the growth of their organizations.

The workshop was packed with information—as there’s a lot to cover, and all of it is important for a firm grounding before launching a youth-driven social enterprise.

Look out for YSEC’s upcoming workshops in the Finance is $exy series, which covers more financial issues: budgeting, how to present your finances to different funders and other stakeholders, and how to keep track of your dollars.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robandstephanielevy/2370634858/

Here’s social enterprise’s ‘chicken and egg’ problem: What came first the ‘social’ in entrepreneurship, or the ‘entrepreneurship’ in nonprofits? I’m impatient with most circular arguments, but this one might be fruitful. If innovation and trailblazing are integral to social enterprise, then it’s useful to ask: what part of the definition of ‘social enterprise’ is truly new? What is so innovative about social enterprise?

Early last week I braved an early exit from my microeconomics class under the angry glare of my professor to attend a meeting arranged by Social Innovation Generation at MaRS  for Ben Ramsden, founder of the UK based Pants to Poverty. Pants to Poverty sells underwear (I have a bright pink pair sitting on my desk), that is made out of a ‘golden supply chain’—a manufacturing process that has a double bottom line.

Also attending the meeting were an assortment of youth run organizations, amongst them Free the Children’s new social enterprise Me to We,  Football for Good, and of course, the Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada.

It turns out Pants to Poverty builds its marketing as a play on words. The term ‘pants’, in that precocious British slang, means “that’s shit”, or alternatively “underwear”. Literally, consumers buy pants to say ‘Pants to Poverty’. The premium cotton underwear that littered MaRS’ conference table had been made by a farming cooperative operating out of India’s suicide belt , created through factories practicing safe and fair wages, packaged by the cotton waste from that factory, and (it seems almost inconceivable) sold successfully to the same target market as Calvin Klein.

During the meeting with Ben, the excitement in the room was palpable. In retrospect, it was the use of business: aggressive (and cheeky) branding, and business efficiency; the excitement of delivering the underwear to consumers was what drove everything. As Ben said, people are more consumers than activists. But there’s something innovative and effective in injecting consumerism, the power of the market, into nonprofits.

I came out of that meeting convinced that at its most exciting, social enterprise straps itself into the market roller coaster and aggressively pursues the opportunity of (as Assaf likes to say) doing good better. The business aspect of social enterprise is what makes what we’re doing truly innovative.

So, there’s a certain rebellion in social enterprise. In all of us, there’s a certain need to scream ‘Pants!’ We will use the fastest, most effective method to make change. In this vein, social enterprise hopes to energize and stimulate. To startle and challenge. And most of all, to nudge the consumer in all of us towards growth.

A great line from the book Mission Inc.: “you won’t be good at social enterprise unless you’re passionately in love with the very idea of it.” Well I was never in love with business. To put it mildly, words like cash flow, generated revenue, return on social capital, or my favorite word so far is one universities use to describe their students: “revenue generating units”, ranged from incomprehensible to repugnant.

But the social part, that was my true passion. See I never really got why money was so interesting to people, when they are much more interesting than money. And like most people that didn’t understand money, I spent many a university night in my apartment with friends talking about The Man/Architect (in the clouds and counting the world’s till of money) and the end of days over macaroni and cheese. We talked about more, well normal things like: Do we have a purpose? Why Nietzsche got it right or horribly wrong? Where are we going tonight, and who’s this new hottie?

Being around people is great, but being an activist was where it was at, the passion, the conversations, the heat and fury, sometimes the self-righteousness, but always the purpose.

I strongly believed that I had a purpose, that everyone on this planet was born to contribute to something much larger than themselves. It was easy to believe in purpose when you believed in greatness, and I believed in greatness because I saw greatness from a very young age. I was lucky enough to experience both fulfillment and pleasure and got hooked on fulfillment. I found fulfillment in being a human rights activist. They spoke of the conscience in humanity. I learned much later, during my student union year, that a social enterprise does the work of humanity, with humanity.

In our student union, we wanted more accessible student-directed public space, from classrooms, to hallways, to our campus pubs. To organize in any space, students had to go through volumes of paperwork, application deadlines, dos and don’ts. Space was expensive; it took long to book; it was too small, too big, too inconvenient, and with too many rules like: “you ought to have half the attendees be university students”; “you have to have university catering” …. etc.

Those challenges made the difficult job of mobilizing students on campus, off campus, and across clubs, faculties, and campuses much more difficult. Our major campus pub was a nightmare to book. It cost around 3,000 a night and had to be booked 3 months in advance. I sincerely believed that if the university heard the concerns of enough students, things would be different, and with that belief, I believed they were the problem. As much as I would have liked for it to be the case, the problem was much deeper than this. The problem was not only space; it was in our operations. We were amateurs fumbling with a half a million dollars worth of student levy.

I then stumbled across the gold mine of opportunities. I was introduced to a guy who had connections to a huge bar owner who was willing to give us his space for free, with the shuttle busses going to and from campus on a regular basis. The bar was close enough to our campus to be appealing, much larger than our campus pub, had a lounge with pool tables, cheaper drinks, better and more affordable food. It dawned on me. You create competition; you provide a better service more equitably… you stop whining about it and get to work! The space itself held possibilities: what if we could bring our campus artists and musicians and have graffiti jamming nights? What if we could host events across clubs? With minimal overhead expenses, lesser restrictions and a place with potential, a lot of good things can happen.

They didn’t happen, partly because the student union did not have time, and in part because they were suspicious of businesses. I rethought my ideas about the evils of business, because for once I saw the potential of using an enterprise model to create the space for students to connect, mobilize and create more effective change.

With the enterprise model, the enterprise itself is the vehicle and you, with your community, are the drivers of the design, content, and purpose of this vehicle. The enterprise model gives you this imaginary plot of land and forces you to rethink and recreate the way in which you use it for the public good.

I started to fall in love with the enterprise model because it promised more successful social engagement and change. I wouldn’t want to be a business without a mission, and wouldn’t want to compromise my mission and miss out on a golden opportunity simply because I do not trust anything business.

Hence I learned social enterprise without ever hearing about the phrase itself. “Enterprising” something or other would have been a word I associated with a socially awkward telemarketer. I was told about it much later and figured: maybe it is not so lame a word; it holds the promise of making you an effective dreamer. I think the world of social entrepreneurship is the world of human opportunity and potential.

- Lulwa

What’s on your mind? What’s your story? I hope you talk about it, blog about it and share it with us.

http://www.rbc.com/innovator/mini_challenge.html