Pioneers of Change SE Community of Practice

The Social Entrepreneurship Community of Practice

Intent

This community of practice is exploring social entrepreneurship. It engages pioneers who are social entrepreneurs themselves or who are working to support the field of social entrepreneurship. We exchange ideas in order to make our ventures more impactful, to share challenges and opportunities, to understand our work better, to explore the meaning of social entrepreneurship, and to draw useful lessons from our experiments for the broader Pioneers of Change network. To contact the hosts of this group email Charlotte (charlotte.hochman@gmail.com), Neema (nmgana@yahoo.com) or Maria (maria@pioneersofchange.net).

Principles

1. Write about things related to our personal experience. Information is everywhere; this Community is about linking people’s experience and thinking. Please don’t send wikipedias but your own thoughts!

2. Think of this Community when you need to tap into the knowledge, experience and resources of others. Bring up your Needs!

3. This Community is a collaborative space and not a channel. Take the initiative and host your own conversation, respond to people, feed the discussion. Use it, use it, use it!

Invite others

To invite people you think would be interested in this Community simply tell them to subscribe here: http://pioneersofchange.net/communities/socialentrepreneurship

The online space

Go to http://pioneersofchange.net/communities/socialentrepreneurship/ to have a look at the articles and links, as well as archived emails related to this list. For suggestions here please contact the hosts of this group.

About the hosts

Neema, Charlotte and Maria are the current hosts, please get in touch with them if you have any suggestions or if you would like to join the hosting team.

Chaordic Coaching II

So, I had my 4th coaching session yesterday. We have defined my new job title “Initiator & Facilitator of Change Networks” and a couple of personal principles that are based on my vision and values. Hopefully, these principles will help me in creating my new job when I return to Berlin in June:

I ask powerful questions that touch people’s heart
I challenge myself to constantly learn and develop myself & my professional practice
I am fully present
I create & maintain a balance between preparation & openness to what is really emerging
I am always action-oriented
I trust the people I work with like I would like them to trust me
I am not afraid to let go

I will test those principles as being chair at the AIESEC in Portugal Discovery II conference next week.

Very excited to see how things fall in place

P.S.: I have to read those two books pretty soon: The Art and Heart of Netweaving and The Birth of the Chaordic Age

Who really made an impact in your life?

“If you had to name someone – a parent, a grand parent, a mentor, a teacher – elementary, high school, or college – who at some important point in your life did or said something which really had an impact, who would that have been and what was it that he or she did or said that you remember so strongly?”

How Do I Make a Difference?

How do I make a difference?

It’s a question we hear a lot at Americans for Informed Democracy. We hear it at our leadership summits, where top college students come together to discuss a new vision for the U.S. role in the world. We hear it on our conference calls, when chapter leaders share their zany (– and often brilliant!–) ideas for new projects. And we hear it at our office, as we ask ourselves how we do a better job of empowering our generation to take on today’s global challenges.

Amidst all these conversations of how young people make a difference, we are always surprised to see media coverage that portrays us as the “do nothing generation.” Indeed, it seems like everyone our age wants to “do something.” But we’re taking a different approach than past generations. Activism in the 1960’s and 1970’s was overwhelmingly focused on governmental change. Young people then held massive rallies, marches and sit-ins around civil rights, women’s rights, and the Vietnam War.

But today’s young people are more focused on issues beyond the headlines, like climate change, poverty, and health. And we’re not just looking to the government for answers. Instead, we see ourselves as a large part of the solution, which is why we’re joining socially responsible companies, buying fair trade products, and even starting our own social ventures. Perhaps what is most noticeable about our generation is that we are a discriminating bunch —we don’t just want to know the cause, we want to understand why your model is the most effective way to impact the cause.

Our generation’s approach to social change raises many questions.

• Are young people today smart to be so focused on individual action or should we put more emphasis on policy change?

• Are there promising policy opportunities to tackle climate, health, and poverty that young people are missing?

• If we do take the non-governmental route, what are the most promising opportunities for young people to get involved in social change?

• Are social venture capital, micro-finance, and non-profit tech companies the best ways to go? Or are private sector opportunities in corporate social responsibility the best way to get involved in innovative, high-impact social change?

Join Seth Green in the discussion

Three Letters from Teddy

There is a story many years ago of an elementary teacher. Her name was Mrs. Thompson. And as she stood in front of her 5th grade class on the very first day of school, she told the children a lie. Like most teachers, she looked at her students and said that she loved them all the same. But that was impossible, because there in the front row, slumped in his seat, was a little boy named Teddy Stoddard.

This compassionate story is guaranteed to capture your heart as it did mine.

I invite you to watch it:
http://www.makeadifferencemovie.com/

My question to you is:
Do you have a special teacher that has had an impact on your life? Whether it be something they said, how they helped you or made you feel special and understood.

There is nothing more beautiful on this planet than to experience and see people helping each other.

Tune Your World

The Calabash Music™ Blog is your entry into the global music scene giving access to all the great, but hard-to-find, music and videos from around the world.

Do you believe we can change in the world through music?

At Calabash Music they have launched a new campaign that is called ‘Tune Your World’ as a creative approach to economic development in Africa.

If every American would buy 10 downloads by African Artists — We would DOUBLE the amount of money the US is currently sending to Africa. This is what we mean by ‘Tune Your World’

Where does the money go?
At least 50% (in some cases 100%) of your purchase will go to African Artists, or an African relief NGO and stay in Africa. With this money, musicians will be able to buy new instruments, recording or performing equipment, complete their education, or put a new roof on their house.

Together we can create a thriving music economy in places where the music industry has never worked very well.

How can you make this change happen?

1. Buy 10 songs by African Artists.

2. Forward this URL www.tuneyourworld.com to your friends and family.

It’s that simple.

Tune Your World.

About Relevance

Hmm, my turn to write. First thought: “look what the others did…”. Did not really work this way. Why? Well, there are not so many “others” around. For some reasons, this blogg is not on a high priority list of those who have been supposed to leave some comments - including myself(despite the “usual three or four subjects”). This means for me: a) this blog is not a very sufficient way of communication for us, b) people do not find the blog relevant or c) the potential users do not know how to use it. For me, statements one and two suits well.

Anyhow, I do not have any better ideas, and I am trapped between my sense of responsibility, my willingness to contribute and at least I open my mouth (not literally). Well, here we go:

So I share two things: One usefull and one useless. Its upon you to decide which one is what for you:

- Strengthsfinder 2.0 has been released. Go, buy the book by Tom Rath at amazon or whereever, visit the www.strengthsfinder.com hompepage - do the test and learn about yourself by digging into your strengths.

- Check out www.askaninja.com and learn from a true ninja.

Take care

Marcus

Are ya kidding me?! No complaints for 21 days

This is a great movement…but is Germany ready for this

By George Lewis
NBC News correspondent
TODAY
Updated: 9:43 a.m. ET March 6, 2007

KANSAS CITY, MO. - We all complain, right? It’s just human nature. But a few months ago, the pastor of a Kansas City church told the people in his congregation he wanted them to break that habit.

“The one thing we can agree on,” said the Reverend Will Bowen of Christ Church Unity, “is there’s too much complaining.”

He said churchgoers were griping mainly about trivial things, such as the choice of hymns at the Sunday service or the informal dress code at the church’s Saturday night worship.

And so he asked his flock to take a pledge: to swear off complaining, criticizing, gossiping or using sarcasm for 21 days. The Rev. Bowen said the inspiration for the no-complaints campaign came to him while taking a shower. And now, the idea has begun to spread far beyond middle America.

People who join in are issued little purple bracelets as a reminder of their pledge. If they catch themselves complaining, they’re supposed to take off the bracelet, switch it to the opposite wrist and start counting the days from scratch.

And now that the church has been written up in several publications, the campaign has mushroomed. On Saturdays, volunteers crowd the church basement filling orders for the no-complaints bracelets, 126,000 so far.

I wondered how hard it would be, so I put on one of the bracelets and started counting the days. And I didn’t complain when my TODAY show producer mounted a camera in my office to record my every working moment, trying to catch me in the act of griping about something or other. (It turns out it’s the same equipment that “Dateline NBC” uses on its “To Catch a Predator” segments.)

It only took two hours for the camera to catch a complainer — me — when my computer crashed and I uttered an expletive that we won’t repeat here. Then, after work that day, I caught myself complaining about a news item I heard on the radio on the drive home. Day one ended with two relapses.

Day two, I complained about my shoulder hurting. (No, I didn’t wrench it switching that bracelet back and forth.) I was discovering what everyone who takes the pledge finds out: that going 21 days without complaining isn’t as easy as it seems at first blush.

The Rev. Bowen said it took him three and a half months to put together 21 complaint-free days, and that it has taken others up to seven months. Those who get through it can turn in their bracelets in exchange for “certificates of happiness” issued during church services.

“We’re going to be the center of no complaining around the world,” said the Rev. Bowen, who added that they’ve gotten requests for bracelets from as far away as South Africa and Australia. Some American troops in Iraq, a place where there are plenty of things to complain about, have even asked for them. The church has set up a Web site, acomplaintfreeworld.org, to facilitate orders for bracelets, offered free of charge.

The Rev. Bowen figures that if the average person complains 20 times a day for 30 days, the 126,000 bracelets have stopped millions and millions of complaints. “That’s a lot less ear pollution,” he said, grinning.

“My life is a whole lot better than it was six months ago,” said church volunteer Patricia Platt. A teacher, she decided to ask her grade school pupils to take the no-complaints pledge along with her.

“It was really hard for me,” said a boy in her classroom, “because I’ve got two sisters, one twelve and one thirteen and they are both,” he paused and sighed, “really mean!”

Indeed, as we spoke to the children in the classroom, they often cited sibling rivalries as a big stumbling block. But Mrs. Platt said most of the children have successfully completed the 21 days.

“I think we learn to complain as we get older,” she said, noting that it took her four months to fulfill the pledge, while her pupils did it a lot faster.

Experts disagree about whether suppressing complaints is good for one’s mental health. “If people don’t need to complain, don’t want to, then great,” said Barbara Held, a psychologist and author of the book, “Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching.” “But if they do, there are ways to do it more productively and more beneficially and what’s wrong with that?”

But the Rev. Bowen believes that tamping down the urge to complain is akin to successful anger management. “You catch yourself not articulating these negative thoughts that are in your head,” he said, “and because there’s no place for that to flow, they tend to dry up.”

I’m still waiting for those negative thoughts to dry up. As of this writing, I’ve had eight relapses, with my longest complaint-free period lasting five days. I’m continuing the effort as I head off to Israel on assignment and will keep you posted if and when I make it to the 21-day mark.

Could you stop complaining for 21 days?

Being fired from a 2 billion company you started

How would you feel if you were fired from a 2 billion company you started?
An incredible story about Steve Jobs - founder of Apple on:

1) Being fired from a 2 billion company you started
2) Finding love and dealing with loss
3) Facing death (literally) and “living every day as though it was your last”

The third story will strike an emotional chord.

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away.
Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the
words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.