Conclusion

Turning What Is and What If into What Can Be

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail…. Dream. Discover.

—Mark Twain

IF I WERE TO WRITE OUT THE DEFINITION OF THE WORD RIPPLING AS I use it, this is how it would go:

By the time you read this chapter you probably don't need a definition; chances are, you've absorbed exactly what rippling means, in the true sense of the way I apply it, by experiencing the examples in the book. But if it is going to shake the foundations of poverty, inequality, and injustice, rippling doesn't solely refer to spreading an idea that is powerful enough to spill over borders—it also means “shifting the frame” within which a problem is stuck. It requires going beyond a cause-and-effect approach. It is the theoretical “making lemons out of lemonade,” the practical “waking up in the morning and appreciating being alive, rather than grumbling that you'd rather sleep more,” or (in the frame-shifting words of Thomas Edison) it is the rational “I have not failed. I have merely found ten thousand ways that won't work.”

Just like ocean tides, rippling has both a push and a pull quality that encapsulate its ecosystem. It thrusts innovation and cutting-edge thinking outward, and turns it into a source of energy that magnetically pulls changemakers inward, thereby closing the gap between their values, beliefs, circumstances, and goals. Subsequently, that force field of magnetized energy catalyzes collective action and “creates a space where people can find their way into new possibilities.”1 This push-and-pull dynamic and the space created between the nexus of its ebb and flow become part of a newly developed ecosystem that supports Ashoka's “everyone a changemaker” world.

The image of ripples in a pond provides a simple way to understand the entrepreneurial ecosystem, but it runs the risk of going back to an image of all things in entrepreneurship being about the entrepreneur…. But below the surface of any pond, teeming life forms can be easily missed when focusing only on the surface. Fish, plants, algae, insects, objects, and more all serve a function. And the most distinguishing feature of an ecosystem isn't any one of these things, just as it isn't the pebble or the person throwing it. It's the interdependence of its community members on one another—for survival, evolution and enhancement. While it may appear that an ecosystem forms or functions to support the needs of one, in reality each member supports the needs and aspirations of the others.2

The Outlook Is Partly Sunny

I would also like to define the oft-overused word change in the rippling sense of the word.

When it comes to the system-changing ideas of the social entrepreneurs in this book, change refers to big change, monumental change, change that leaps from household to village, from village to city, from city to country to the world. It means, as my colleague Al Hammond has observed, “To pursue global spread and scale a social entrepreneur must consciously build a supportive ecosystem that is both local and global, can nurture bottom-up and top-down elements of the venture, and can help propagate the idea across national boundaries.”3

Driving change of this magnitude is not easy to imagine, much less to accomplish. To do this successfully, many people need to be inspired, involved, engaged, and active. All people have the potential to change their own communities for the better—directly by tackling social problems and indirectly by supporting others' ideas. This takes work, time, and persistence on everyone's part. Together, the collective impact is so strong and expansive that it can't be contained by artificially determined geographic borders. It spills out with a one-way flow that cannot be contained. Like Superman, this type of change is more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound—or more to the point, it's able to leap tall problems in a single solution. (Editorial license exercised!) When societies embrace and promote this belief, a new global system emerges: an “everyone a changemaker” world.4

From Common Sense to Common Practice

In the Introduction, I referred to my entrancement with social entrepreneurship when I first discovered Ashoka. In retrospect, after interviewing the eighteen Fellows you have just met in this book, I discovered a number of additional common factors that sustained my respect and increased my admiration.

Micro Intentions, Macro Changes

One and all, these Fellows never thought they would end up doing what they are now doing. They are all amazed at where they are and how they got there. It all originated from their intense compassion to involve themselves in righting an unfair or unequal situation or from their empathy for a repugnant human condition. And it just seemed to grow from there. Since they all think in systems, going beyond cause-and-effect approaches means that there is always one more hurdle to overcome, one more solution to be implanted in the holes in the dyke to restrain human misery. It seems in all these cases that, in the words of William Easterly, “The right plan is to have no plan.”5 However, having a vision is imperative!

The Stickiness of Past Experiences

Each innovation started with a brain click that was turned on by a situation that reminded each of the Fellows of some intimate connection to the problem on which they focused. This relevant connection is what fueled their passion and sustained their persistence. It was as if they did not pick the problem they chose to solve; the problem seemed to pick them by virtue of their past experiences or relationships. For each of the Fellows there was something or someone in their past—something they experienced themselves, someone they knew who was struggling with being differently abled, or something sad or negative that they witnessed years ago—that triggered their involvement. Their need to find solutions represented a situation or encounter that they didn't want others to have to experience again.

Intertwined Identities

When you look at what they have accomplished you realize that in different ways, all eighteen Fellows understand that changemaking comes from the capacity to see the undeveloped potential in every single person, and to support them in discovering their own possibility. They actualize “everyone a changemaker” by truly seeing their community and looking at themselves as an integral part of it. They do not separate themselves from the people they work with. They understand that new voices, visions, and capacities are the products they are developing, and those products will make their community healthier, happier, and more educated, economically stable, and sustainable over the years to come.

Built to Last

Ashoka's social entrepreneurs build institutions around ideas. They understand that impact is not only measured in breadth but in depth as well. They are not so much about how many people they reach; they are mainly concerned with the impact of that reach, the change that ensues, and the sustainability of the system that they leave behind. They have learned that “no individual agent or element determines the nature of a system—the organization of a system arises through the dynamic interaction among the system's agents and through the system's interaction with other systems.”6 Their role is to ignite hope, turn hope into action, and catapult action to impact. To do this they need to let go—to inspire—instead of making all the decisions. They know this element of their program will intensify and strengthen their idea because it will lead to the inclusion and mobilization of multitudes of changemakers.

Turning Culture into Community

Communities are based on people doing their part and investing in their neighbors, and these eighteen social entrepreneurs understand their role in keeping their communities healthy, active, dynamic, and vibrant. They know that poverty is often about economics, and economics is about behavior that is either more or less rational as it responds to its environment.7 In turn, innovation combined with behavior change has the potential to reshape that same environment. For their solution to be effective, they have all discovered how to get people to act differently in a way that changes not only them but their communities.

The social entrepreneurs in this book are what I would consider positive deviants.8 It would have been much easier for them to close down their emotions rather than open up to a new and different reality. Life would have become much more predictable, much less threatening, and far simpler if they had just looked straight ahead and stayed on the traditional trail. Once they veered, they often (depending on their location and culture) became anomalies, but their belief in themselves, and in their vision of the way things could be, made them impervious to outside skepticism and worse. One and all, they are, as an Ashoka Fellow once described himself to me, “maybe half crazy, but not stupid.”

Accelerating Change Through Technology

Bill Drayton has often said that the key factor for success for any individual, any institution, any country is what percentage of your people are changemakers, and how well they play together both internally and externally.

One of the factors that will dramatically enable this interaction to occur will be technology. Social innovation, financial innovation, and disruptive innovation in the twenty-first century will require emerging new tools, new services, new instruments, new mechanisms—not to mention the changing of social practices and behaviors. The computer has changed the protocols around interaction along with expectations of the learning process. And the Web is the architecture that is facilitating and enabling collaborative structures that help move people, teams, and organizations together in various equations over time and space. It is estimated that worldwide there are over 2 billion Internet users (www.internetworldstats.com) and close to 5 billion mobile users (International Telecommunications Union), and it is encouraging to note that of the 800 million Facebook users (Facebook statistic) 125 million are registered in a Facebook cause, signaling how many users are getting involved in social change.

Mobile phones are now imbued with an amazing array of features and are being heralded “as the advance guard for mobile broadband networks that will extend internet access to all.”9 In a world where more people have access to mobile cell phone capabilities than to computers, the ease of mobile messaging and texting—and the advances in e-learning and long distance health care, plus the growth of simple applications and video gaming for social purposes—will allow people to flex their imagination when it comes to creating, designing, and involving themselves in social solutions. Indeed, the world is moving way too fast for anyone to succeed without coordination and collaboration, and the new and emerging technologies are already making that all possible. New technology is unlocking a range of social and economic benefits to users of even the most basic phones—from mobile banking for the unbanked to real-time produce prices for rural farmers to detecting and exposing fraudulent pharmaceuticals and to tracking adherence to tuberculosis and other medical regimens.

On the other end of the social spectrum, technology is also enabling global volunteering on a massive scale—matching people who want to give time helping others but want to do it in the comfort and ease of their own homes. One such online site, Sparked (www.sparked.com), offers convenient online volunteerism for busy professionals who don't have time to lend their expertise to not-for-profits through traditional channels. They make volunteering as much fun, as social, and as easy to use as Facebook, Farmville, or Twitter. Sparked has channeled to charities hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of skilled professional labor that was previously unavailable to the social sector. It's interactive volunteerism for the digital age, and it has coined a new term for it: microVolunteering.

New and emerging technology is helping to vault social solutions over former geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic barriers. As mentioned in a number of the chapters, social entrepreneurs and a host of changemakers are capitalizing on the use of mobile phones and computers, which in turn will enable a Richter scale shockwave of measurable change that eventually extends to the bottom of the world's deepest economic crater.

The Vitality of the Virtuous Cycle: From Margins to Mainstream

Most innovations start small, as part of the citizen or the business sector. In the United States, small businesses are said to be the backbone of the economy as they are responsible for employing more than half of all employable people. Similar statistics exist for most developed and developing countries around the world. And the citizen sector is no wallflower when it comes to the comparative numbers of people it employs. Indeed, the largest employer in Bangladesh (the poorest country in the southern hemisphere) is BRAC, now a global nonprofit organization that employs more than ninety thousand people in Bangladesh alone. Because social entrepreneurs know that scale is not based on numbers alone but on how those numbers will impact the world, their organizational structures make it possible for changemakers to move ideas through society to get hundreds of people from every continent to spread their solutions. Inherently, their institutions create a cycle of hiring and employment, anywhere from one to ninety thousand, that in today's world should be recognized as a jobs creation contribution as important as small business's (which in essence many of these organizations could be considered).

As they co-create and grow these organizations with the communities that benefit from them, they are constantly training changemakers, who are consistently developing new skills. They increase employment opportunities by involving community and corporate partners in the effort. They create sustainable jobs that in turn cascade into employment opportunities for people at all levels of the capabilities spectrum. The more effectively they scale, the more they increase their ability to employ huge numbers of changemakers—and those agents of change, in turn, employ others. The potential of the citizen sector to effect employment as a secondary consequence of its solution-development focus is, in the middle of today's world economy, especially worthy of attention. Indeed, “The social economy is the next new economy.”10

Then; Now; From Now On

When I resigned from the job I alluded to in the Introduction to join Ashoka, my perceptive former boss said to me, “If I thought you were leaving because of time or money, I would try to rectify the situation—but I know you are leaving for heart, and there is nothing I can offer you to have you stay. You need to follow your heart.” Her words capsulated the long process of introspection that had led to my resignation. I realized that I had felt I had so many commitments—to my job, to my ailing parents, to my daily life and lifestyle—that I couldn't distinguish those from what was most meaningful and significant to me, nor could I separate them from the type of life I wanted to build for myself. When I finally decided to take the time to reflect deeply, I asked myself what was the only thing standing between me and fulfilling my desire to support social change in the world. It came down to fear of jumping off the high board into a strange pool and being afraid that I would have forgotten how to swim. So the action I decided to take was to jump in heart first—and that seemed to conquer my excuses, my indecisiveness and my fear of drowning. As Joseph Campbell once said,

“We must let go of the life we have planned so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”

Not Either Or, But Both and More11

In 2011, French diplomat, ambassador, concentration camp survivor, and French Resistance fighter Stephane Hessel published the English-language edition of a book called Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage). “This is what I tell young people,” he says. “If you spend a little time searching, you will find your reasons to engage. The worst attitude is indifference.12 If you look closely (and maybe not so closely), I'm sure you will find plenty of reasons to engage wherever you live. For at one time or another haven't most of us thought it shameful that there are people living on the streets, or been outraged about violence in our neighborhood, or annoyed with a less-than-acceptable school system, or furious with a nonresponsive public program that we had counted on for help? If you've thought it disgracefully shameful that children in many countries are dying by the thousands of preventable diseases for lack of vaccines and medication; if you've heard yourself saying, “Why doesn't someone do something to fix this?” then instead, ask yourself if you just might be that someone who could help. Think about the people in this book who used to be just like you: a housewife, a corporate banker, a journalist, a teacher, a veterinarian, a social worker, a security guard, a widow, a PhD microbiologist, a truck driver, an activist, a computer systems expert. Everyone in the book started by changing the ways things were—on the ground around them. You don't have to become a social entrepreneur and build your own solution; even trying to find out more about the issues—so your annoyance is fully informed—is a move in the right direction.

Ask yourself, if you were starting out all over again in your career or life path, how would you reframe yourself? Where would you find fulfillment? What would you redo or re-create, and why are you feeling that it is too late to do it now? Feel free to use this book as a permission slip to begin the introspective process and envision how you fit into the social iconography. Give yourself permission to see the opportunities and instead of saying it's impossible, say, “I'm possible.” Channel your annoyance, your indignation, your outrage, your empathy, your sense of sadness into a positive action.

The way people imagine society affects what they do and how they perceive everyday occurrences. The value of what you see depends on how you see it. It is difficult to make a better future until you can imagine one, so imagine yourself creating the future you want to see in the world. Unless you can envision an alternative future for yourself, your family, your community, and the world, we will never have one.

Social entrepreneurship is all about bringing new opportunities into the arena of solutions and sponsoring a process that will enable new people and voices to participate in the emerging system being created. Maybe you are just that new opportunity—and maybe, if you are not already there, you will soon find your way into the arena. Maybe this book will help get you there.