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Barack Obama and the American Spirit of Social Entrepreneurship
Published November 03, 2008 @ 08:21AM PST
In the late 19th century, Jane Addams saw Gilded Age America as plainly carved into two halves. On the one hand were “the favored, who express[ed] their sense of the social obligation by gifts of money,” and on the other, “the unfavored who express[ed] it by clamoring for a “share” – both of them actuated by a vague sense of justice.” Yet for the founder of Hull House – a social center providing the Chicago working classes with educational and political opportunity – this division rebelled against her very sense of American democracy. In 1893 she wrote: “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain…until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
As I have become more deeply involved with the social entrepreneurship movement, the ongoing presidential campaign has often given me cause to think of Addams. Perhaps more than any other social innovator of her day, Addams wrestled publicly with the relationship between our individual and collective moral action and its reflection on the state of our democracy. For her, America was not an ideal of equality to believe in, but a process of working towards social justice, in which everyone must take part.
A legacy of restorative social innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit in the pursuit of a more perfect union are at the core of Barack Obama’s appeal to the new class of change agents we’re calling “social entrepreneurs.” Indeed, while there are a bevy of policy reasons that social entrepreneurs should be committed to the campaign – a new focus on national service, a social investment fund for social enterprise, a major investment in the clean technology solutions so many entrepreneurs now pursue, even a nonprofit capacity building center with the words “Social Entrepreneurship” in the title – our community’s passion for the candidate comes far more from a sense that he understands the tradition of which we are a part: the American spirit of social entrepreneurship.
The spirit of social entrepreneurship is woven deep into the American story. Decades before the Declaration of Independence, American Quakers began the first sustained abolitionist movement against slavery in history, developing the techniques that future leaders would build upon to create an unstoppable global paradigm shift. Later, at the dawn of the Industrial Age of American commerce created wealth never before seen in the world, a new breed of “Progressive” social reformers including Jane Addams and photographer Jacob Riis changed the way we saw the urban poor and helped return their stories to the center of the American story.
In the period of turbulent upheaval in the 1950s and 1960s, social innovators helped the disenfranchised and dispossessed find new ways to speak truth to power. Despite Sarah Barracuda’s snarky cynicism, the traditions of community organizing were the testing grounds in which Obama came to believe that real change comes from the bottom up. And while movement politics and community organizing may seem far away from many of the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” market-based solutions so many social entrepreneurs pursue today, both strategies share the desire for those who were once treated as passive to become the lead actors in their own destiny.
The job of the entrepreneur is to move resources from an area of lower yield to an area of higher yield. For a social entrepreneur, this means disavowing the orthodoxy of social change in order to find the solution best suited to the problem. It means acting in the space between the world as it should be and the world as it is. The title of Obama’s landmark speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” reflected just how deeply routed in the American story this process can be.
Throughout this campaign, Obama has reminded us that the great task of American civic life is to build a 
country and a world that reflect the high ideals set forth in our founding documents but not yet achieved. He has painted a picture of the American people as imperfect vessels for a perfect dream, and has asserted America’s greatest asset is a vision of a better future in the hands of its citizens. This is the energy and spirit that cascades through the social entrepreneurship movement, from students working for a more equitable education system with Teach for America to Paul Farmer and his Partners in Health, who refuse to believe that the poor should be denied access to medicine because a global system has priced them out.
And it’s that energy the next president will have to harness as they face a set of challenges unlike anything in recent history. To solve the problems of the 21st century, they will have to enlist the help of social entrepreneurs already on the ground. But they will have to remind us that our work is not solely in the service of any individual’s particular mission, but part and parcel of building a more just society in which the “good” has been secured for all. That is the true “scale” we seek to achieve.
A new generation of change-makers is ready to inherit American spirit of social entrepreneurship, and Barack Obama is the man to lead us.
Comments
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Author
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Nathaniel Whittemore
- Evanston, IL
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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.
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Posted by Kelly Ward
Dec 11 @ 04:45PM PST
Hey Nathaniel -
You make an interesting point, and I've been thinking along similar lines over the past few days. I think that one of the worst parts of the Bush presidency is the decline of civic duty we've seen over the past eight years. Our country has been paralyzed by fear for nearly a decade, and the government has seemed to project a sentiment of "either you're in the military or you're with the terrorists." I think we are getting back to a point where being a patriot actually has meaning beyond getting a flag pin and a lobotomy. I hope to see renewed interest in public service all over America with this presidency.
Posted by Zach Lane on 11/03/2008 @ 12:12PM PST
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Great post Nathaniel!
Looking forward to seeing how the national service / social entrepreneurship platform is actualized in the Obama administration.
Readers may also be interested in this post over at Give and take: http://philanthropy.com/news/updates/6175/charities-urged-to-move-quickly-to-influence-next-president
Posted by anthony showalter on 11/05/2008 @ 11:16AM PST
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Nice post Nathaniel!
Well written and thought-provoking. Glad to see you are doing well.
Scott Beale
Posted by Scott Beale on 11/10/2008 @ 07:26PM PST
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Hello, All:
One way to achieve the "scale" we need is to help create a new generation of entrepreneurial leaders whose innovations and social enterprises address our world’s major unmet needs. The “social entrepreneurship attitude” can be taught, and it starts in the public school system. How do I know? I have created a program called SAGE-Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship-that provides high school and university students with a platform on which to create social enterprises (see http://sageglobal.org/). To see where Obama stands on this, I encourage to read the transcript from the recent ServiceNation Presidential Forum at Columbia University, where both candidates answered questions posed by Judy Woodruff. One of Woodruff's questions: “Young people who are interested in the Peace Corps, Teach for America, not all of them can afford, frankly, to come out of school and take a very low-paying job, no matter how much they want to serve. What would be the responsibility of the government and others to make it easier?”
Obama replied, “Well, first of all, I think Senator McCain is right, that income does not determine whether or not people serve. You can go into small rural towns and people are really scraping by, and yet they are helping each other in all sorts of ways. But what I agree is that the choices that we provide young people right now are too constrained. You know, when I graduated from Columbia, I had a choice. I could pursue a lucrative career on Wall Street or go immediately to law school, or I could follow through on the inspiration that I had drawn from the civil rights movement and from the Kennedy era, and try to work in the community. And I chose the latter, but it was tough. I made $12,000 a year plus car expenses in Chicago, working with churches, to set up job training programs for the unemployed and after-school programs for youth, trying to make the community better. It was the best education I ever had. But ironically, it was harder for me to find that job than it was for me to find a job on Wall Street. And I think there are a lot of young people out there who are interested in making that same choice, and we should be encouraging them. The government’s going to have a role. Look, young people can’t afford college right now. And one of my central platforms in this campaign is we’re going to provide a $4,000 tuition credit every student, every year, but in exchange for giving something back. And so, young people of modest means, who are interested in going to college, this gives them an opportunity to serve and at the same time, pay for their college education. I think there are a lot of creative ways where we can provide opportunities than exist right now.” One creative way is for every university student to give back to their alma mater high school, by helping the high school student TEAMS create, deliver and assess their social enterprises. At the end of the year, the teams must describe their stories to a panel of external judges from the business and civic communities. Also, maybe if we can INTEGRATE service into the curriculum, instead of waiting until after high school or college, we could help Obama create the kind of sweeping change in attitudes that he hopes for.
Posted by Curt DeBerg on 11/11/2008 @ 04:22PM PST
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Others here may be interested to read a paper, submitted to the Senate Foriegn Relations Committee 2 years ago advocating a microeconomic approach to international development,
At Davos this year, the East Europe Foundation was launched to meet the need described. The whole paper describes a mix of components in which business government and NGOs work together using the empowering nature of web technology and a bottom up approach, to address fundamental poverty and its consequences, particularly those of orphans. As such, it bears a great resemblance to the concept of creative capitalism, announced at the same convention.
http://www.p-ced.com/projects/ukraine/national/
Posted by Jeff Mowatt on 11/16/2008 @ 03:14AM PST
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As a social entrepreneur working to mainstream this concept in a community where the nexus between business and social action has formerly been restricted to the old way of thinking; philanthropic foundations building tax shelters for the uber-wealthy, NPO's ceding their strategic vision to grant funders, and "charities" tugging on the heart strings of the public to stay in business, I love the fact that we are finally seeing a recognition of social entrepreneurship as critical business acumen.
How ironic that a century after Booker T. Washington became the first African American invited to the White House and urged the African American community to focus on economic empowerment rather than political activism as the precursor to political recognition and civil freedoms, it has taken the historic election of a black president for this nation to finally realize that business needs a social consciousness to truly succeed with its intended purpose.
America desperately needs a new sense of what constitutes value and how it's returned on investment in ways that don't always fit on a spreadsheet or a stock market report. For the first time in a long time, I think we have a chance to recognize that the relationship between financial and social impact is something we can no longer safely ignore or segregate to do-gooders in the Peace Corp. In the best B-schools in the world, business is now being taught as something moving to a blended values model that appreciates both social and financial reward as not only relevant, but indespensible.
Social entrepreneurs are the tip of the spear in the new economy. With an expanding underclass, a dwindling share of the global economic pie and the retirement of the Baby Boomers from productive work, this is so timely and necessary. What a breath of fresh air Barack Obama is.
Mark Lewis
CEO
Strategic Business Intelligence Group
Dallas
Posted by Mark Lewis on 11/24/2008 @ 10:27PM PST
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Hi Mark,
I know we've exchanged conversation in the past on for-profit social entrepreneuship and I think you'll probably be interested in something that erupted spontaneously from the readership of Daily Kos last week as 2000 have now gathered to co-create opportunity. I'm sure your background would be a valuable asset there:
http://kossacksnetworking.ning.com
Regards,
Jeff
http://kossacksnetworking.ning.com/
Posted by Jeff Mowatt on 11/24/2008 @ 11:11PM PST
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Thanks Jeff...I'm always interested in new opportunities so I'll check it out. If you don't mind, log onto my site and email me your contact info please.
Posted by Mark Lewis on 11/24/2008 @ 11:25PM PST
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There is no question that we need change in this country (as well as most other countries around the world). There is no question that being socially aware and responsible is necessary.Cahnge is a double edged sword. We may have change for the better but it is quite possible that some changes will not be fore the better.Barrack Obama surely has his good points but he could be very dangerous as well. We are not a socialist/communist society, although some would wish it so. We are a country of individuals with our own individual rights. The more socialist/communist that we become as a society the more eroded our individual rights become.
Remember - communism is socialism in a hurry!
Posted by chris rider on 12/04/2008 @ 10:05AM PST
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I am especially interested in how Social Entrepreneurship might add Ethical considerations into the decisions to relocate factories into other countries. The revocations always seem to create citizen dislocation as a side effect.
President elect Obama has a broad international background, I would like him to show world leadership, not simply US Nationalism. Maybe this next 8 years are simply the launching pad toward an international leadership beyond the UN which is restricted by Nations that utilize veto power even when the en tire world would benefit from a more international focus.
Please forgive me if I divert from the topic of this forum.
Posted by Owen F Thomas on 01/03/2009 @ 05:01PM PST
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Chris, social entrepreneurship has nothing to do with socialism.
Posted by Mark Lewis on 01/04/2009 @ 08:47AM PST
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