It's a good thing to start with what I understand as entrepreneur. 'An entrepreneur is one who creates a new business in the face of risk and uncertainty for the purpose of achieving profit and growth to capitalize on them. Although many people come up with great business ideas, most of them never act on their ideas. Entrepreneurs do.' (Zimmerer, T. and Scarborough, N.)
I will not dabble in the dozen meanings of social entrepreneurship that I have found online and for now, I will stick to the definition from my preferred source...Wikipedia.
'Social entrepreneurship is the work of social entrepreneurs. A social entrepreneur recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a venture to achieve social change (a social venture). While a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur focuses on creating social capital. Thus, the main aim of social entrepreneurship is to further social and environmental goals. Social entrepreneurs are most commonly associated with the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors, but this need not preclude making a profit'.
The second question is why am I doing this ? Are we not all already suffering from a global overdose of blogs?
In no special order here are the reasons:
1- I am really too lazy and uninspired to fulfill my life long fantasy of becoming a novelist (even a very bad one) but cannot put a lid on all the words waiting to pop out of my head.
2- I keep hearing the voice of a social media consultant I used to work with. This voice say that there should be as many blogs as there are voices that need expressing. At 35 years old and after working with many communities to strengthen their voices I finally perhaps have actually something to say on my own.
3- After many failures to create successful businesses or social enterprises (more on this later) I decided to get back on the horse and give another shot at entrepreneurship. But this time I will document my journey through this blog in the hope that it will help articulate what the hell I am trying to do, get some kind of scrutiny (if there is any bloggers following my rambling...) and of course connect with other social entrepreneurs. In other words, I am ready to go 'public' with my journey as serial social entrepreneur.
4- No Julie and Julia the movie has not been the trigger...Instead my nanny turned to me to bounce back ideas about a potential African restaurant business that would bridge between different communities. That is when I thought that I should really test out all the advice I am giving her.
5- I have been living in NYC for 2 years now and it is bloody time to live the motto 'if I can make it here...'
So here we are then.
Soumountha
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