ASE09: Service and Social Entrepreneurship?

Published May 04, 2009 @ 07:32AM PT

There is a growing space between the conversation about "service" and the conversation about "social entrepreneurship."

Across demographics, there is a growing interest in local and global community service. This is especially true of students, who have seen a double digit increases in rates of volunteerism. Universities are scrambling to integrate service and experiential learning across the curriculum. This was accelerated but not caused by September 11th, and accelerated but not caused by the 2008 presidential campaign.

At the government level, the service conversation is growing as well. The Serve America Act increases support for Americorps, for example. Interestingly enough, one of the mandates of the new Office of Social Innovation appears to be promoting service.

There's a real question about the connection between service and social entrepreneurship. I do believe, strongly, that having the two conversations simultaneously is vital, but recognizing how they are and are not the same is important as well.

Two key points of overlap seems to me to be:

The aspirational power of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship at it's best provides an aspirational connection between small acts and changing the world as a whole.

The local, horizontal thinking of community organizations. Local organizations often do the best job identifying and harnessing the perhaps non-traditional assets of local people. They think in terms of democratic processes that I think are incredibly valuable for effectively scaling social innovation.

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Author

Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.