Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the 
Running notes from the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, UK - Second day/2 (Website - SocialEdge)
Panel moderated by David Bornstein (author of the book "How to change the world").
Edward Skloot, president of the New York-based Surdna Foundation: social entrepreneurship "has less to do with making money and more with finding new ways of solving problems". "There is no necessary connection between social entreprises and social capital".
Jacqueline Novogratz of the Acumen Fund, invests in for-profit and non-profit companies that work on ways to accelerate delivery of water, healthcare etc in developing countries. "This field is hurtling itself forward towards the future of capitalism". "One of the risks of social entrepreneurship is that we idealize the social entrepreneur as a hero. And while they indeed are, no one can build their businesses without a team". "The first thing we do: find entrepreneurs that look at the poor as viable customers, and not as passive recipients of charity". "We then look for entrepreneurs who understand that there is a spectrum in capital. It doesn't make sense anymore to separate 'investment money' and 'philanthropic money': philanthropic money is a higher-level kind of risk capital". "There is a yearning in young people around the world to use their skill-set and find ways to bring business skills to bear in solving really though and complex social issues". "It makes me nervous that none of us comes from government, because at the end of the day we need to find ways to inflect policies". "The only way to design an effective product for poor people is to listen to them, and the best way to listen to them is to find out what price they would pay for it". (Watch Jacqueline's speech on TEDtalks)
JB Schramm, founder of the College Summit, who supports low-income high-school students and help schools build "college culture" among their students: "in the US, the most cost-effective way of breaking the cycle of poverty is to get a person who would be the first in his/her family to go to college to go through college" (see this article from FastCompany).
I have been researching on solutions to poverty and most of them suggest to take people from poverty by implementing "self-sustainable projects," some of which lie on helping the poor running their own business, taking them from poverty to formality. All these suggestions take for grant and assume that capitalism and the market system is the way that the poor must follow in order to get out from poverty. Is it the only way? Please kindly advise.
Juan from Colombia, South America
Posted by: Juan Calderon | October 13, 2008 at 07:14 AM