Introduction

Rippling Solutions into System Change

JUST ABOUT ANYONE THE WORLD OVER WHO HAS USED A CELL PHONE or a computer, posted on Facebook, or tweeted understands exactly how fast the world is changing. The old ways of doing many things have evolved, accelerated, transformed, been reorganized and restructured. From the slums in India to the mountains of Nepal, from the farms in Kenya to the streets of New York and the pampas of Argentina—all lives have been touched in some way by recent rapid technologic and electronic advances. Simultaneously, consecutively, and consequently “the times they are a-changing,” and in a large part of the world, the way we are now all living our lives is way different from what it was even five or ten years ago. Along with these changes we see progress—economically, politically, and socially. But at the same time, rapid growth puts stress on other overlapping systems, and though progress does mitigate a myriad of social problems, it often exacerbates others. For sustainable, positive, self-perpetuating change to occur, it needs to be managed well, and it needs to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future. Change puts new demands on our creative problem-solving abilities, on the way we relate to others, on systems we have come to rely upon, on our abilities as a human race to adapt to everything that both nature and nurture bestow upon us.

As social and environmental problems keep pace with other rapid changes, the number of leading pattern-changing social entrepreneurs has been increasing as well, and as the geographic reach of their ideas has been expanding ever more rapidly, the rate of discovering new solutions to social problems has multiplied. These are the times in which social entrepreneurs thrive; they see lack of equity, access, and opportunity and help ensure that balance and equality are core principles upon which their innovative solutions are based.

As a result, all manner of people, small businesses, corporations, and investors become involved in and attracted to the new ideas, the novel perspectives, and the potential to advance system-changing innovations. They collectively decide to take the risk of striking out in a new direction while they engage, involve, and interact with each other in a new way, involving new actions that can indeed change the world. These are the people and organizations that Ashoka calls changemakers—those who tackle social problems directly, or do so indirectly by working closely with social entrepreneurs to make their ideas a reality and their programs successful. As the number of changemakers increases, momentum intensifies, social movements are created, and social systems are transformed. “In a historical perspective, major shifts of this magnitude have occurred with regularity, fueled by grievance and galvanized by one or a few visionaries, and benefitting from the intersection of crisis and opportunity.”1

This whole process is enormously contagious, and more and more local changemakers who have “caught the bug” are emerging. Some of these learn from and later go on to expand the pool of leading social entrepreneurs themselves. To the degree they succeed locally, they give wings to the entrepreneur whose idea they have taken up, they encourage neighbors to become changemakers, and they cumulatively build the institutions and attitudes that make local changemaking progressively easier and more respected. All of which eases the tasks facing the next generation of primary pattern-change social problem solvers. This virtuous cycle, catalyzed by leading social entrepreneurs and local changemakers, is the chief engine now moving the world toward what Ashoka terms an “everyone a changemaker” future—a world that will be fundamentally safer, more empathetic and equal; happier and more successful than the one we live in today. A world where the word tomorrow begins to infer a better day to come.

Backstory

Some people watch it happen.

Some people watch it happen.

Some people say, what happened?

Some people say, did something happen?

Some people didn't even notice that something happened.

Some people just make it happen.

—Anonymous

A number of years ago, I found out about Ashoka through a colleague of mine who applied for a job there. She called me to ask if I knew about the organization, and when I admitted I did not, she proceeded to tell me about it excitedly. Her desire to be offered the job even though it represented a foray out of the corporate sector, complete with a rather large pay cut, aroused my curiosity and triggered a recollection of something that I had heard a few years before:

If you want to do good, you have three choices:

• Become an activist or an advocate.
• Become a service provider—doctor, civil rights lawyer, teacher.
• Become a professor, researcher, or academic.

But now there seemed to be a fourth category: become a social entrepreneur.

I was intrigued by what seemed to be an interesting combination of words (social entrepreneur), and decided to find out more. I researched Ashoka and saw that though it presented itself as the largest association of social entrepreneurs in the world, it seemed to me that it was really a think tank for alternative solutions to intractable social problems. And by virtue of the collective impact of its work, Ashoka appeared to be functioning in a much larger arena—more as a hybrid organization that bridged the gap between a think tank for innovation and an action accelerator for an alternative future. I was now more than intrigued; I was hooked. I needed to know more about this new breed of social solutions innovator.

Postscript: A few months later I applied for a position at Ashoka. The rest is history—I left a rather lucrative job in the profit sector and joined Ashoka as its vice president for global marketing.

What was it about Ashoka's social entrepreneurs that so motivated me? The first thing that struck me was that they seemed to accomplish things that I always imagined I would have liked to do throughout my life. They all seemed to start out as critics. They felt strongly or indignantly about something and they gave voice to their values by translating them into action instead of ignoring the problem or complaining about it. They took the next step and did something about it. They said yes to themselves.

I remembered that when I was a young girl, washing the dishes while listening to the radio, I heard how the United States launched its invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs (for which the attack became known in America), and how then–Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was prone to slamming his shoe on the table when angered, was doing just that. This was the height of the Cold War and tensions were running high between the two countries. As a small child listening to this, I was scared.

As I continued to wash the dishes, I began daydreaming about sending Premier Khrushchev a letter that would calm him down and create peace between our two countries. I had a secret dream of saving the world and was just about to be recognized as the American girl whose letter stopped a nuclear war when my mother came into the kitchen and interrupted my reverie. I thought about that letter a few times afterward, but never sent it, much less wrote it. I ended up doing what so many people with a good idea do—nothing. So when I started to delve into the work of social entrepreneurs, I became transfixed when I realized that they all seemed to recognize that the key to making change happen was not only to imagine and articulate a sense of possibility but to visualize its path and turn it into action.

From Breakdowns to Breakthroughs

Social entrepreneurs begin by having a clear picture of the end in mind—the end being the creation of an emerging social phenomenon that cannot be reversed. They do what I always hoped I could do—confront difficult issues and actively pursue a more just, secure, and sustainable world. As they refuse to accept things the way they are, they manage to break out of current paradigms to defy convention, think counterintuitively, and rethink solutions.

They excel at reframing old thinking. For example, they use their evolved consciousness and their unambiguous sense of empathy to see autism as a “positive distraction” instead of a handicap or view people with blindness as differently abled rather than disabled—as you will see in the stories of Thorkil Sonne and Andreas Heinecke. They decipher economic structures and grasp the possibilities of microfinance—like Greg Van Kirk or Pradip Sarmah—and turn them into new means of access to housing, commercial opportunities, and financial security. Like Mary Gordon or Abdelfattah Abusrour, they see well-trodden paths leading to violence and aggression and create space for a different reality to take their place.

They all have a great new idea and they quietly go about implementing it. Their why and their how meld together, generating a mysterious magnetic field that attracts others to them. They build virtuous cycles of sustainable mutuality by creating co-dependencies of purpose. They inspire people, they instigate others to make change, and then help them to do so as well. Humble, they are known more for what they achieve than who they are. But my big reveal was when it occurred to me that they do not sit and contemplate their actions in a “should I or shouldn't I?” way. Nor do they see their ideas as a risk. They just see something that needs to be changed and they go about doing it. It's as simple, as eloquent, as mind-blowing as that. They never seem to need to climb up to the high board; they just jump into the pool—heart first.

Despite the subtle differences in the various published definitions of social entrepreneur, there is more agreement and overlap than discrepancy around the notion that these people cause disruption while repositioning systems to better support equity and create significant social change. However, some nuances focus more on the what that is accomplished and its uniqueness and others combine the what with the who is accomplishing it.

In the end, most of the definitional disparities are evolving toward each other, and the slicing and dicing of what type of organization effects the change—be it a citizen-sector organization, a for-profit, or a social enterprise model—is diminishing. For me, the characteristics that determine the person and the motive behind the innovation become the foundation that needs to exist before any of the definitional nuances can be overlaid.

Many people tend to call anyone who starts an organization that does something for others a social entrepreneur. Though I do not necessarily consider that type of person a social entrepreneur in the “innovative, solutions-oriented, world-problem-solver” mode, I do consider all of them to be social changemakers or social-solutions innovators—that is, people who create, develop, or build an organization or a business based on a value proposition that delivers actions on behalf of others in exchange for huge self-satisfaction, with limited personal financial gain. Another genre of social changemakers and changemaking entities are those who work with social entrepreneurs and help them spread their innovations and impact to other places, people, and sectors. Be they individuals, corporations, or donors, they keep the work alive, vibrant, and meaningful. These are the people and the entities who step in to share the burden of shouldering the work involved in changing the lives of others.

Ashoka delineates the social-entrepreneurial endeavor more completely as a process that must also be enormously contagious (in the non-health aspect of the word) and self-replicating, and therefore more likely to be successful. To make the completion of the virtuous cycle happen, it will be imperative to increase the proportion of humans who know that they can cause change. This will inevitably lead to a multiplier effect that will, in turn, nourish an ever-increasing supply of changemakers. It is those current and future changemakers and the social entrepreneurs they work with that this book explores.

When Dreams Defy Reality

Currently, social entrepreneurship is as much a field as it is a social movement. A whole new generation of ethical change agents—whether in business or academia or the media—is building a new sensibility about the way we live and interact. For many people, “social entrepreneurship is now a viable and desirable career path, where work is not just something that you do, but rather something that you are.”2

All of Ashoka's Fellows (the people Ashoka deems to be leading social entrepreneurs and elect into a lifelong Fellowship of like-minded people) ripple their innovations through society by influencing other social entrepreneurs, the policy development process, and the actions of the private sector. As I came to know the Fellows I interviewed for this book, I found that they all, at a minimum, possessed four inherent qualities:

• Purpose
• Passion
• Pattern
• Participation

These characteristics have become my favorite manner of determining if the person is starting out with the defining characteristics of what constitutes a social entrepreneur.

Purpose

I have never met an Ashoka Fellow who did not put society above personal interests and was not firmly focused on the fulfillment of their chosen role. Fellows may take many roads to get there, but the goal is sacrosanct—and they do not get sidetracked by the boulders strewn on the path. Their clarity of purpose is often the decisive factor that brings individual and organizational efforts together. This is because it defines why they are working toward something and why it is worth working on it collectively. Purpose becomes the invisible glue that connects different actions and actors while it bonds everyone with inspiration. It infuses boldness and calculated risk and it creates loyalties by helping people understand why their contribution is valuable and valued. Purpose mitigates fear and allows inspiration to replace fear with action. Purpose leads to a sense of possibility.

Passion

I am not sure if I can separate the passion from the purpose because I have come to believe that both are always present, tightly intertwined and inextricably linked together. Like strands of DNA (which passion and purpose may actually be part of) you cannot pull them apart. Passion connects to spirit and relates to strength—strength of character, of determination, of connection to others. It kindles and nourishes a “follow one's heart” courage of judgment. Ashoka Fellows have taught me that real strength lies not in the physical realm but in an indomitable spirit, intense passion, and determination aimed toward goals.

Pattern

The entrepreneurs in this book all decorate their own innovation in patterns. They base this on purpose, passion, and personality. But in a bigger sense, these patterns become models or guides for others to follow. The particulars of their patterns differ greatly, and in fact that individuality is the nature of an entrepreneur. They cultivate new ground and put together new combinations of solutions—or maybe they come up with just one that no one has ever configured in such a way. I'd like to say that they “build a better mousetrap”—but in essence, they eradicate the need for mousetraps altogether by figuring out a way to decrease the populations of mice!

Instead of just trying to alleviate the symptoms of problems, their organizations are trying to find the societal patterns that will unlock the clues to solving the underlying issues. To create significant and long-lasting changes, social entrepreneurs must understand and often alter the social system that creates and sustains the problems in the first place. This way of looking upstream toward solving the root cause of a problem is far more sustainable than looking downstream by trying to put a patch on the outcome. To borrow from public health parlance, “It is not enough to cure the symptom—for a cure to be sustainable, you must treat the underlying illness. If not, the cycle between cause, symptom and illness will continue to evolve causing a spiral of exacerbated and related problems.”3

Participation

The Fellows discussed in this book all exhibit leadership abilities. They are often unanticipated leaders, but whether they perceive themselves to be leaders or not, their ability to influence people and have them believe, follow, and join is an attribute that is completely natural and a necessary component for impact. It is that quality that attracts involvement and eventually morphs into civic engagement.

Certainly our 2011 current events lesson on the strength and accomplishment of civic participation in Egypt should make it obvious why this last characteristic plays such a huge part in an Ashoka Fellows program. As an old but true adage goes, “There is no strength like strength in numbers.” The role of the citizen, of the parent, of the child, of the street vendor, of the teacher, of the government official, of the person who is differently abled or who has positive distractions in changing an entrenched cultural pattern are all of significant consequence. It is as much the number of participants as the quality of the participation that is essential for supported and sustained social change to take place. To think boldly, act locally, and scale globally, innovators need more than their efforts as individuals; they need to get multitudes of people involved in seeing their vision, believing in the possibility, actively supporting it, and participating in creating change themselves. Leading social entrepreneurs know that if they are going to make a scratch on history, they can't do it alone. There is a point when they all know they must step back and let go of any ego-limiting ownership of the idea if they are to involve and instigate the rise of changemakers who can help spread the seeds of change and grow them into a movement.

The ability of social entrepreneurs to scale their programs depends on the strength of people's participation and their capacity to create movements that are strong enough to shake the foundations of poverty and inequality the world over. But what really makes social entrepreneurs unique? Where do they get their inspiration and passion? How do they convert that inspiration into purpose and who empowers them to think in such new ways? How do we clone these people so that we end up with a better world for all?

The Rise of Unanticipated Leaders

The magic starts when the life cycle of an idea and an entrepreneur intersect. Some would call it the aha! moment or the turning point. All of the social entrepreneurs introduced here started out on a totally different path in life—and upon turning a corner came face to face with their life's passion and purpose. They did not foresee this, predict it, or expect it, nor for the most part did they understand it—at first. Isaac Durojaiye (DMT Mobile Toilets, Chapter Three) was a Nigerian security guard, and Ursula Sladek (EWS, Chapter One) was “just a German housewife” on the mend from a broken thighbone when their purpose struck. But somehow, the switch relating to external compassion paired with the sensory receptor for internal passion flipped on, and it just seemed that setting out to refute conventional wisdom and logic to tackle an entrenched social problem was a natural path to take. So too becomes the path of many who either work with social entrepreneurs or have had their lives changed by them.

The past few years have seen a surge of good books and articles on the work of social entrepreneurs around the world—including the most popular among them, David Bornstein's How to Change the World and his current Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, co-authored with Susan S. Davis. And in between, John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan wrote The Power of Unreasonable People, which focuses on “the phenomenon” of social entrepreneurship mixed with market-based solutions to social problems.4 Each book talks about different facets of social change—from defining what a social entrepreneur is and how to think about becoming one to how the movement is generating new transactional models that are changing the face of business around the world.

Rippling takes you in yet another direction and explores the five strategic ways that social entrepreneurs change social systems—inclusive of both social business and citizen sector models. Its focus is on the virtuous cycles of change that make each of these ways stable and sustainable. It examines the cutting-edge thinking that accompanies an ability to turn the status quo and conventional wisdom on their heads and re-imagine a new paradigm for the way things should be. Part One: Restructuring Institutional Norms, shows how old patterns interact, interrelate, and evolve into new standards of socially beneficial practice; Part Two: Changing Market Dynamics explores the synergistic opportunities created when business success and social values creatively combine; Part Three: Using Marketing Forces to Create Social Value, and Part Four: Advancing Full Citizenship reviews the large-scale changes that arise as a result of expanding choices, options, and empowerment for people to whom these have not been traditionally and culturally bestowed. Lastly Part Five: Cultivating Empathy considers in a myriad of unusual settings, how creatively exposing youth to encounters with individuals unlike themselves and helping them replace anger and aggression with more balanced emotions are severely diminishing and even reversing their tendency to judge people as “others.” Rippling emphasizes how these approaches literally turn “what is” and “what if” into “what can be.”

There Are Many Seeds in an Apple … But How Many Apples Are in Those Seeds?

Poverty is messy, and social problems are often the underlying cause of social unrest. They foment dissension, discontentment, and agitation. As the chasms between countries, societies, and socioeconomic classes expand and become more widespread, it is now more imperative than ever for us to challenge a larger percentage of the population to address them straight on. In support, Ashoka has argued that while the early stages of the social entrepreneurship field focused on finding and supporting leaders of social innovation, the new goal of the movement is to create an “everyone a changemaker” society where people everywhere feel empowered to create change.

The five sections of this book represent five ripples in the pond of poverty, inequity, and inadequate access to opportunity. For each system-changing example, the inspiration, the innovation, the local and global impact, and the voice of the changemakers are clearly articulated. This particular confluence of elements creates virtuous cycles of social benefit that begin when people become agents of change themselves and then influence others to do the same. They set off self-perpetuating waves of motion that convey transformation both vertically and horizontally, now and into the future. In Isaac Durojaiye's case, one of his franchisees—a single-woman head-of-household leasing fourteen toilet franchises—was able to put all her four children in school as a result of the money she has made as a franchisee, and two of them are going to the university. A fabulous accomplishment in itself—but the rippling truly starts when her oldest son, who is about to graduate from the university, comes to Isaac to ask his help in applying the franchised-toilet model to a public street-cleaning program he wants to develop with the shopkeepers in the Lagos marketplace. Public street-cleaning in Lagos? How many children brought up in adverse conditions would have thought of such a huge, culture-shifting idea? Probably none who had not been influenced by or involved in a social entrepreneur's world. The changemakers and the people they have the capacity to affect in their own daily circles will now expand Isaac's idea and use it to spread ripples in Africa's social and cultural pond.

Beyond the social entrepreneurs profiled in this book, the unseen and next-generation changemakers are in many ways the champions of this movement. The corporations who embrace a new and more sustainable way of doing business. The donors who want their money to effectively and ethically impact people's lives. The everyday people, who—no matter what culture they live in, no matter what socioeconomic group they find themselves a part of, no matter how little they possess—are trying to make a better life for themselves, their families, their neighbors, and their communities. They may live in and with poverty, but they do not possess a poverty of imagination. They have hope, and they believe that a better world is possible. Most important, they eventually end up taking action, either by themselves or with the help of social entrepreneurs. Along with entrepreneurial leadership, these are the people who form the new infrastructure that leads to the establishment of the innovation and transforms it into a social institution. The pride, empowerment, and value that changemakers feel about themselves ripple outwards and create a cycle of influence that becomes far greater than anything they could accomplish alone.

And just how does social system change happen? How does the quest for fair wages for Nicaraguan coffee farmers grow into the “Fair Trade” movement in the United States? (Paul Rice, Chapter Five.) How does a Buenos Aires psychologist's concern about recidivism rates in a mental hospital result in a Saturday afternoon radio program run by mental patients that has over 3 million listeners in the Buenos Aires area alone and now is becoming acknowledged and copied all over Latin America as a way of reconnecting and integrating the mentally ill with society in a significant and sustainable way? (Alfredo Olivera, Chapter Fifteen.) How does a Canadian social worker who is deeply disturbed by the increase in bullying in schools develop a world movement around the pedagogic inclusion of empathy as an effective reducer of childhood aggression, predicated on bringing tiny babies into the classroom? (Mary Gordon, Chapter Sixteen.)

Throughout all these programs and others discussed in the book, the five distinct approaches to system change fuse with the substantial contribution of changemakers to create a force field that helps transform a solution for a geographically relevant need into part of a panacea that works for the world.

The events of 9/11 changed the world—it is now up to us all to change it for the better. If this book speeds you along your journey to become a changemaker or encourages you to be more of one, please let me know and share your change at www.changemakers.com/Rippling.