CAECAY Maximizing Athletes, Entertainers, Celebrities and Influencers Brand Potential

Congress of Athletes Entertainers and Celebrities Creating Alternatives for Youths (CAECAY) Maximizing Athlete’s Brand Potential

In today’s evolving landscape of sports and entertainment, the ability for college student athletes to monetize their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) has opened up unprecedented opportunities. The Congress of Athletes Entertainers and Celebrities Creating Alternatives for Youths (CAECAY), in collaboration with the Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation (AMWF), Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, Superstarmanagement.com, Superstar Management, Ex-why AdVentures, ex-why.com, Nowtruth.org, and Nowtruth, aims to leverage their collective 50 years of experience to support athletes, entertainers, celebrities, and influencers in maximizing their earning potential through NIL initiatives. CAECAY and its affiliated platforms are established as industry leaders in assisting athletes, entertainers, celebrities, and influencers in monetizing their NIL. This marketing plan outlines strategies to effectively promote and harness the power of NIL for these individuals.

Julia Foxx

Objectives:

Educate and guide student athletes on the benefits, legalities, and best practices of NIL monetization.

Facilitate brand partnerships and endorsement opportunities for athletes and influencers.

Generate awareness and engagement through targeted marketing campaigns.

Drive revenue growth for individuals involved in the program.

Target Audience:

College student athletes looking to monetize their personal brand through NIL initiatives.

Brands and businesses seeking authentic partnerships with athletes and influencers.

Sports enthusiasts and fans interested in engaging with their favorite athletes on a more personal level.

Marketing Strategies:

a) Establish an Online Presence:

Develop a comprehensive website (e.g., CAECAY.org) as a central hub for information, resources, and success stories related to NIL monetization.

Optimize the website for search engines to enhance visibility and organic traffic.

Create engaging content, including articles, blog posts, and videos, highlighting the benefits and success stories of athletes who have monetized their NIL.

b) Educational Programs and Workshops:

Organize workshops, webinars, and seminars to educate student athletes on the nuances of NIL monetization, including legal considerations, branding strategies, and contract negotiations.

Collaborate with universities, sports organizations, and player associations to deliver comprehensive educational programs.

c) Athlete Representation and Management:

Offer professional representation and management services to athletes and influencers seeking to monetize their NIL.

Provide guidance in brand development, contract negotiations, and endorsement opportunities.

Foster relationships with industry experts, including lawyers, marketers, and financial advisors, to offer comprehensive support to clients.

d) Brand Partnerships and Endorsements:

Identify and connect athletes and influencers with suitable brand partnerships and endorsement opportunities.

Develop a database of brands interested in collaborating with athletes and influencers to promote their products or services.

Leverage AMWF’s online platform, amwftrust.org, to facilitate connections between athletes, influencers, and brands.

e) Social Media and Digital Campaigns:

Utilize social media platforms to amplify the reach and engagement of athletes and influencers.

Create compelling content showcasing athletes’ personal stories, training routines, and community involvement.

Implement targeted advertising campaigns to reach specific demographics and increase brand visibility.

Measurement and Evaluation:

Track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, social media engagement, brand partnerships secured, and revenue generated through NIL initiatives.

Conduct regular surveys and feedback sessions to gather insights from athletes, influencers, and brand partners.

Use analytics tools to monitor the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and make data-driven adjustments.

Budget Allocation:

Allocate a budget for website development and maintenance, content creation, social media advertising, event organization, and educational programs.

Regularly review and optimize the budget based on the effectiveness of each initiative.

With the recent changes allowing college student athletes to monetize their NIL, there is a significant opportunity for CAECAY, AMWF, Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, and their affiliated platforms to provide guidance and support to athletes, entertainers, celebrities, and influencers. By implementing a strategic marketing plan that focuses on establishing an online presence, delivering educational programs, facilitating brand partnerships, and leveraging digital campaigns, CAECAY can help maximize the earning potential of individuals in the NIL era. This approach will not only empower athletes and influencers but also create mutually beneficial relationships with brands and enhance fan engagement.

To enjoy these benefits, join CAECAY’s “ICONS CHARITY REGISTRAR”, go to“Matching Charitable Philanthropic Organizations with ICONS”:  https://caecay.org/matching-charitable-philanthropic-organizations-with-icons/ or “Matching ICONS with Charitable Philanthropic Organizations”:  https://caecay.org/matching-icons-with-charitable-philantropic-organizations/ Oaklanders Honored for Work In Haiti, Free Logo Design and Business Strategic Plan; YOUR Free Food Program; Entertainment Jobs Feb. 2012- March 2012
Abdul-Jalil and crew were nominated for an EMMY with “OUT. The Glenn Burke Story”, and although they did not win it, they have already won several major honors for it and expect more.
*****
1unknownname Dr. Kenya Numan and her organization “Stepping Together” as well as Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim and “The Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation” were recently honored in Miami, Florida and Port Au Prince, Haiti in July 2011 for the Relief Missions that they have sent to Haiti since the earthquake. The incomparable Dr. Numan has served in the Gulf War and was a top level surgeon on the front line addressing the needs on the U.S. soldiers where word of her superior talents spread throughout the region such that even the opposition sought her out when they were detained. She has served the needs of many around the world in Africa, South and Central America, and here in the U. S.
A very special “Thanks” to all that have supported our efforts over the years!
On August 25, 2010 Abdul-Jalil received the letter shown below of “Thanks” from Arch Bishop Joel Jeune of Grace Village in Haiti for the Relief Mission they received from the Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation with Stepping Together on behalf of The World Conference of Mayors (WCM- 18,000 Political Leaders and Dignitaries from around the world) and The National Conference of Black Mayors (NCBM). This is a tangible reality of SUCCESS in Haiti for ALL the members of the organizations world-wide rather than the many idle cocktail party rants and raves of projects that exist without any substance behind them. THEY DID IT! ALL the members of the World Conference of Mayors can celebrate their success and acknowledge their contribution.
They are now moving forward in a meaningful way to secure financial, subsistence, construction and medical aid and support for the next mission which will take place as soon as we can unite to raise the necessary items just mentioned. They can tap into the resources of the USAIDS and the National Medical Association to make great progress in securing bi-weekly missions to various needed areas around the World!
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m in a life threatening situation, trivialize, trombones, trombonists, trumpeters, trumpets, Turkuaz, turncoats, Twitter, two-time Grammy Award winning, Uncle Tom, under the threat of arrest, underbelly, underground, unique relationship between a little boy and his stuffed rabbit, uniquely tangible, United States Attorney General Eric Holder, unity, universal life force, universally celebrated, university, unrest, unsheathes, urban, urban radio, Usher, Van Ness Ave., Velveteen Rabbit, versatile, Verve, Verve Forecast, very successful session musician, veteran producer, Vibe, victim, video of al-Hakim, violence, vivid cast, vivid storytelling, voicemail, void, waiting for a meeting, Waking up late with you on my mind, Walking on Water, want-to-be-leaders, wants the injunction/curfews, was initially going to be a doctor, Washington, Watch the story with video and documents, Watch video of al-Hakim, We are ALL Oscar Grant, Website, wedding, well received from the start, well-worn, We’ve been used to, WGCI, what eventually became known as his own distinct, what you write to people, what’s going through my head, When I’m with you, Where Did We Go, which continued to infuriate the government, while al-Hakim, Who are they protecting and why, who attacked the commune where Fela lived, Will Bernard, Will Smith, Williams, Williams College, Williamsburg, Williamstown, without sacrificing, without sounding boring, Wiz Khalifa, woman’s desire, Women’s Big Band, won a MacArthur Genius Award, worked with, world, world-class ensemble, woven into the fabric of this country’s artistic legacy, writes, wrote the play book, Wyatt, XII album, xzwhy, YBCA, Yerba Buena, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, yet claim to bargain and speak for them, Yoshi’s, Yoshisjazz, you can watch, You don’t want to let your fans down, you know it’s a lie, You Mean that Much, you want to stay relevant, You won’t know it, young hip-hop duo, young player, Youth, Yvonne Line, Zion I, ZONGO, Zongo Junction

Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim Exemplifies Beauford Delaney’s Masterful Portraits

Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) “Portraitist of the Famous” “Perhaps I should say, flatly, what I believe–that he is a great painter, among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.” James Baldwin (1924-1987), writer, friend of artist Beauford …
Continue reading Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim Exemplifies Beauford Delaney’s Masterful Portraits

Harlem Renaissance Modernist Beauford Delaney, GREATEST Artist in African-American Art History

“In another religion they honor people who serve like you with Sainthood!”” – Economics Professor Adeel Malik,Oxford University, England and World Renowned News Expert Commentator, speaking about Abdul-Jalil and the Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation.

“GOD sent me an ANGEL!”” – Hammer, speaking about Abdul-Jalil.

“Jalil, YOU ARE A TZADIK (SAINT)!”– Barry Barkan, Live Oak Institute and

  Ashoka Fellow at Ashoka Foundation:Innovators for the Public
 

“I thank God for you and for bringing you into my life and for the ministry you have been given to help the people of God!”– Pastor L. J. Jennings, Kingdom Builders Christian Fellowship, speaking about Abdul-Jalil and AMWF

  
Jalil with 1 of his Rolls Royces

Beauford Delaney, Self-portrait, 1944. Photo: Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY Beauford Delaney was an American Harlem Renaissance painter known for his colorful Modernist compositions and distinctive approach to figuration. One of the most important African-American artists of the early 20th century, he often painted New York street scenes, lively scenes in jazz clubs, and portraits of prominent black figures like James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois. Can Fire in the Park (1946) is one of his most iconic images, movingly capturing a common occurrence in Depression-era New York life. In addition to his representational work, Delaney also painted abstractly, noting that “the abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than the rigidity of a form,” he explained. “A form if it breaths some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.” Born on December 30, 1901 in Knoxville, TN as one of 10 children, he worked as sign-post painter as a teenager before going on to study in Boston at the Massachusetts Normal School, the South Boston School of Art, and the Copley Society. After school, he moved to Harlem in New York, where he befriended fellow artists like
 Alfred Stieglitz 
and
 Stuart Davis 
, who introduced him to the work of Modernists like
 Paul Cézanne 
,
 Pablo Picasso 
,
 Henri Matisse 
, and others. He moved to Europe in 1953 but was unable to find the same success he had previously had in New York, and gradually succumbed to alcoholism and mental health problems before his death on March 26, 1979 in Paris, France. Today, Delaney’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Fame, at least lasting fame — the your-work-goes-down-in-history kind, often accompanied by fat royalty payments — is a club that thinks of itself as an unbiased meritocracy, blind to everything but aesthetic innovation and popular success. It’s never quite worked out that way. When we look at the past, we still see generations of great talents who never quite got their due critically or commercially, many of them left relatively unsung. In this ongoing series, our critics pick artists they feel remain underappreciated and tell their stories and sing their praises. “He is amazing … this Beauford,” the novelist Henry Miller wrote of his lifelong friend Beauford Delaney in a 1945 essay that helped make the painter (whom Miller called a “black monarch” capable of making “the great white world … grow smaller”) a legendary attraction in Greenwich Village. So much so that people often gathered outside Delaney’s building at 181 Greene Street, where he lived and worked on the top floor — a walk-up lit only by a wood-burning potbellied stove. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1901, Delaney migrated north to Boston in 1923 to study art, then moved to New York in November 1929, days after the onset of the Great Depression. That first day in New York, he slept on a Union Square bench, where someone stole his shoes. The next morning, he set out on foot, in newly bought shoes, to walk uptown to Harlem. When he reached Central Park, he stopped because of his severely blistered feet.

Abdul-Jalil Portrait by Beauford Delaney, in 1971. Portrait of Jean Genet in backgroud, top right, Kennedy right behind Jalil
Things had never been tougher for American artists — let alone black ones. Art schools didn’t take black artists, and independent-studio classes banned black artists from figure-drawing sessions with white models. Undaunted, Delaney began drawing at a midtown dance studio. Somehow, his career took off almost overnight. Four months after he arrived in New York, an article appeared in the New York Telegraph about portraits Delaney had done of dancers and society figures.
Beauford Delaney

Artist (1901–79) Currently, MoMA has 
 “Composition 16” 
(1954–56) on view, a glowing bioluminescent yellow abstraction kitty-corner across the gallery from that other (until recently) missing modernist, Hilma af Klint. Both are in the company of de Kooning, Kline, and the other giants of mid-century painting. He met and charmed everyone. A list of his friends and acquaintances includes Stuart Davis — his closest painter compatriot — W.E.B. Du Bois (whose portrait he did), Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Jacob Lawrence, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe (who did a portrait of him), Edward Steichen, Dorothy Norman, Anaïs Nin (who intimidated him), Jackson Pollock, and Jean Genet. His closest lifelong friend, however, was James Baldwin — who, while fleeing a strict father at 16, looked up Delaney in the Village. He later called the artist his “principal witness.” Delaney was a kind of surrogate nurturing father to the writer. Judging by his 1941 Dark Rapture (James Baldwin), a steamy nude portrait of the 16-year-old writer (as well as from subsequent Baldwin portraits over the decades), Delaney seems to have been in love with the lithe young man 22 years his junior. In October 1938, more than a decade before Pollock graced the same pages, Life magazine featured Delaney, picturing him beatifically smiling at the Washington Square Outdoor Art Exhibit. The caption read, “One of the most talented Negro painters.” Yet by the time he died in 1979, Delaney was alone, alcoholic, hallucinating, paranoid, and penniless in a Paris psychiatric hospital. What started as a great American story is now a near absence in the history of American art and an American Dream forestalled.

A 1941 portrait of James Baldwin by the artist Beauford Delaney. Photo: Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Dark Rapture (James Baldwin), 1941, oil on Masonite, 34” x 28”, signed; © Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY I love his work — especially his highly colored, optically intense, dense figurative paintings. He is almost an exact contemporary of, and the New York counterpart to, another great painter-portraitist, an artist who captured the power and magic of being poor stylishly, who lived on the margins but eventually came to be recognized as a visionary: Alice Neel. Delaney should be regarded as such as well. Through the 1930s and 1940s, while most American artists were either being fifth-rate Cubists, regionalists, or academics or desperately looking for ways around Picasso via Surrealism, Delaney made his own thoroughly contemporary way. In street and park scenes, still lifes, and portraits, he built upon the work of his good friend Davis, arriving at his own compact, flat fields of creamy, opaque color. His sense of visual, jigsawing geometry and strong, graphic distillation of structure is second only to Davis’s. Delaney’s work, however, has a much more human aura, atmosphere, and arc, almost to a mystical degree, seen only in Marsden Hartley. So why has Delaney been disappeared from collective memory? Partly, it is the racial bias of art history, which, among other things, meant that even while he was celebrated, it was less as a painterly equal to his contemporaries than as some kind of Negro seer or spiritual black Buddha. And in 1953, at the age of 51, Delaney left New York at perhaps the worst possible time. When other American artists, like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham, were meeting and staying up late together (many of them open and uncloseted in their sexuality), Delaney was in Paris, where Baldwin had told him he could escape the long American night of racism. Baldwin was right, but Delaney struggled with French and became even more isolated. Twombly, Baldwin, and Miller returned often to New York, while Delaney never did. So he never got to rejoin the conversation. By the 1960s, Delaney’s abstraction was more connected to the French Art Informel — a primarily European response to Abstract Expressionism — and his paintings, influenced as they were by Monet’s Water Lilies and Turner’s glowing color, had few of the ironic, systemic, direct qualities of Pop Art and minimalism. At a distance, Delaney’s work seemed passé — an artist painting in a void, outside the canon. *This article appears in the January 6, 2020, issue of New York Magazine. Beauford Delaney collection, Sc MG 59, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library Repository Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division Access to materials Some collections held by the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture are held off-site and must be requested in advance. Please check the collection records in
 the NYPL’s online catalog 
for detailed location information. To request access to materials in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, please visit:
 http://archives.nypl.org/divisions/scm/request_access 
 Request access to this collection. 

Portrait de Jean Genet, Beauford Delaney, 1972
Beauford Delaney was a painter, specializing in portraits. The Beauford Delaney collection consists of correspondence with colleagues, friends, gallery owners, and family members, as well as printed material documenting Delaney’s life in Paris. BIOGRAPHICAL/HISTORICAL INFORMATION Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the third child of the Reverend Samuel Delaney and Delia Johnson Delaney. He attended the Knoxville Colored School and later studied art with an elderly Knoxville artist, who encouraged him to get further training. In 1924 Delaney went to Boston where he studied at the Massachusetts Normal School and the South Boston School of Art, and attended evening classes at the Copley Society. Delaney went to New York in 1929, settling at first in Harlem. He painted society women and professional dancers at Billy Pierce’s dancing school on West 46th Street, which gained him a reputation as a portraitist. His first one-man show, which consisted of five pastels and ten charcoal drawings, was at the 135th Street Branch Library of the New York Public Library in 1930. During the same year three of his portraits were included in a group show at the Whitney Studio Galleries, the predecessor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Delaney also taught part-time at a progressive school in Greenwich Village. By the late 1940s Beauford Delaney had become a significant figure on the art scene. He illustrated “Unsung Americans Sung” (1944), a book of black musical tributes edited by W.C. Handy; he had a series of one-man shows in New York and Washington, D.C.; and he exhibited in group shows in a number of other cities. In 1945 he showed his first series of portraits of writers Henry Miller and James Baldwin, who would become his lifelong friends. In 1949 he began an association with the Roko Gallery in New York, where he exhibited annually until 1953. In 1953 Delaney left New York with the intention of settling in Rome, but a visit to Paris turned into a permanent stay. He had two studios in Paris, the first in the suburbs of Clamart and the other in the Rue Vincingetorix. In Paris Delaney exhibited in one-man and group shows at the Gallerie Paul Fachetti (1960), the Centre Culturel Americain (1961 and 1972), the Galerie Lambert (1964), the Musee Galliera (1967) and the Galerie Darthea Speyer (1973), among other places. The latter was a major showing of a selection of his work from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s and the catalog contained tributes by James Jones, James Baldwin, and Georgia O’Keefe. Delaney also exhibited in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. The Paris years saw the creation of several masterpieces including portraits of singer Marian Anderson and writer Jean Genet. During this period he also created a series of interiors and studies in watercolor. After suffering two nervous breakdowns, Delaney was institutionalized, and died on March 26, 1979 at St. Ann’s Hospital in Paris. Delaney’s last one-man show in the United States was at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1978, inaugurating that museum’s Black Masters Series. Delaney’s work is in several private collections and in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Newark Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. SCOPE AND ARRANGEMENT The Beauford Delaney collection consists of correspondence with colleagues, friends, gallery owners, and family members, as well a printed material documenting Delaney’s life in Paris. Biographical information is provided in statements Delaney authored, articles prepared by others for catalogs, and his obituary. Among the many friends, colleagues and art collectors with whom he maintained an active correspondence is James Baldwin, who wrote an introduction to a catalog for an exhibition of Delaney’s art at Paris’ Galerie Lambert in 1964. Other correspondents include artists Charles Boggs, Al Hirschfeld, John Franklin Koenig, and Ellis Wilson, authors James Jones and Henry Miller (who was also a water colorist), art historian Richard A. Long, and his friend Lynn Stone. Additional artists, painters, writers, gallery owners and musicians who corresponded with Delaney include Lawrence Calcagno, Cab Calloway, Elaine DeKooning, Palmer C. Hayden, and Darthea Speyer. The letters discuss the style of painting of the correspondents, travels, purchase and exhibition of works, and personal matters. Numerous gallery announcements for art exhibits of Delaney’s and other artists’ works in Paris, New York and other cities demonstrate the extent of Delaney’s activities in the contemporary art world. The collection also contains a large number of picture postcards, some sent by friends, and gallery announcements. Family letters are from his brother and fellow artist, Joseph Delaney, and discuss his own work and impressions of Paris; his brother Emery (includes letters Delaney wrote to his brother, in addition to those received); and Delaney’s niece, Imogene.   Beauford Delaney

 Jazz Banb 1963 
 Michael Rosenfeld Gallery 

 All the Races, 1970 
 Michael Rosenfeld Gallery 
Price on Request

 Bernard Hassell, 1961 
 Michael Rosenfeld Gallery 
Price on Request
 Untitled: Abstract in Red, Blue, Yellow and…, 1956 

 Levis Fine Art 
Price on Request Beauford Delaney

 Untitled, 1956 
 Levis Fine Art 
Price on Request

 Mother’s Portrait (aka Portrait of Delia…, 1964 
 Michael Rosenfeld Gallery 
Price on Request Beauford Delaney

 Composition, 1963 
Sale Date: February 6, 2021 Auction Closed

 Self-portrait, 1964 
Sale Date: December 8, 2020 Auction Closed Beauford Delaney 

 Street Scene, 1968 
Sale Date: December 8, 2020 Auction Closed
 SANS TITRE 
Sale Date: July 9, 2020 Auction Closed Beauford Delaney 

 SANS TITRE – 1960, 1960 
Sale Date: July 9, 2020 Auction Closed

 Composition, 1962 
Sale Date: December 13, 2019 Auction Closed SOURCE OF ACQUISITION Donated by Daniel Richard in 1988. PROCESSING INFORMATION Compiled by Victor N. Smythe, 1998. Finding aid edited and adapted to digital form by Kay Menick in 2016. Paintings and art catalogs transferred to Art and Artifact Division. Photographs transferred to Photographs and Prints Division. KEY TERMS NAMES
 Baldwin, James, 1924-1987  (creator)
 Boggs, Charles  (creator)
 Calcagno, Lawrence, 1913-1993  (creator)
 Calloway, Cab, 1907-1994  (creator)
 De Kooning, Elaine  (creator)
 Delaney, Joseph, 1904-1991  (creator)
 Haden, Palmer  (creator)
 Hirschfeld, Al  (creator)
 Jones, James, 1921-1977  (creator)
 Koenig, John Franklin, 1924-1987  (creator)
 Long, Richard A., 1927-2013  (creator)
 Miller, Henry, 1891-1980  (creator)
 Speyer, Dathea  (creator)
 Stone, Lynn M.  (creator)
SUBJECTS
 African American artists 
 African American artists — France — Paris 
 African American painters 
 African American painters — France — Paris 
 Artists — United States 
 Expatriate painters 
 Expatriate painters — France — Paris 
 Painters — France — Paris 
 Painting — United States 
 Painting, American — 20th century — Exhibitions 
As President and CEO of Superstar Management since 1971, the first African-American in this field, Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim has a tremendous   wealth of experience in all aspects of business and personal management, contract drafting and negotiations, and performed all arbitrations of salary grievances and contract disputes for all professional sports and entertainment clients with unprecedented legal and historical results. He negotiates and drafts all agreements for all publishing, merchandising and licensing; commercial advertisements and product endorsements; corporate sponsorships and affiliations; motion picture, television, radio and personal appearances. He was the first “SUPER AGENT”, CREATED the Profession of Sports/Music/Entertainment Branding, Marketing and Promoting, the African-American in the field and has taught and lectured Entertainment Law for 35 years. Many of the agents and lawyers in the business where instructed, consulted, influenced or inspired by his work….

Made “Law Review” TWICE with UNPRECEDENTED cases establishing NEW LAW; Sports/Music/Entertainment Talk Show Founder, Producer and Host, CSA; Expert and Guest Political/Legal/Business/Sports/Music/Entertainment Analyst and Commentator; Business/Sports/Music/Entertainment Law Lecturor/Presentor; Sports Color Commentator; His “The Stars” show was the FIRST Cable Business/Sports/Music/Entertainment Talk Show in 1973; OpEd Columnist/Journalist; Sports, Music, Entertainment and Variety Film, TV, Concert and Special Events Content Creator/Producer/Developer/Runner/Promoter; Islamic Dawah Lecturor/Presentor; His Computer Intelligence Company First and Only Minority Certified IBM, Apple, Compact, Microsoft Computer Value Added Dealer (1982); Computer Technology Lecturor/Presentor; MWBE Specialist.

Social Entrepreneurship Merchants Are Merging Ecommerce with Philanthropy

Social Entrepreneurship Merchants Are Merging Ecommerce with Philanthropy

Social entrepreneurship is not a particularly new term, but its use and prestige have grown prodigiously in the last two decades. Combining aspects of standard business models with a backbone of charitable giving and social consciousness, this new form of doing business takes a self-sustaining approach to solving some of the world’s biggest problems.

These merchants are taking on aspects of social entrepreneurship by merging core aspects of their business model with nonprofit and not-for-profit charitable giving.

These merchants large and small are taking on aspects of social entrepreneurship by merging core aspects of their business model with nonprofit and not-for-profit charitable giving. This form of entrepreneurship loops in charitable preservation into its core key performance indicators. The bottom line isn’t just profits, but also the societal and sustainability impact of the project itself.

As if maintaining a pure return on investment month-over-month wasn’t difficult enough, imagine then turning up to 30% of your profits over to fund sustainability and public services. In the rest of this article we’re going to really open up how social entrepreneurship distinguishes itself from other types of charitable actions, ways in which these merchants are giving back to their communities and ways to get involved on the ground level.

Finding the balance between how their business can remain profitable — bringing in constant, sustainable revenue — with aiding a cause as much as possible is a challenging but rewarding practice.

Social entrepreneurship can be broadly defined as businesses that consider profit and societal impact (the net good accomplished) equally. This balance between how their business can remain profitable — bringing in constant, sustainable revenue — with aiding a cause as much as possible is a challenging but rewarding practice. This is how socially conscious businesses will separate themselves from standard nonprofit and not-for-profit operations.

While all of these phrases have more or less the same meaning — and ultimately have the same goals — they operate in their own unique and distinct ways. To silo these terms — for the sheer sake of drawing differences between them — nonprofits can operate with paid staff with a goal of raising surplus funds for their cause.

Surplus funds aren’t redistributed to shareholders, but serve as a happy bonus to move towards future goals. Not-for-profits are generally smaller scale, utilizing volunteer staff. Furthermore, due to their structure, not-for-profits don’t qualify for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status in the same way. Social entrepreneurship is on the right of both of these items, where by developing and creating a sustaining business model, higher profits can be turned into larger expansion and the ability to do more good.

Power in a purchase

With a mission at the core of their business, each social entrepreneur enables the consumer to put buying power behind their purchase. Because the charitable cause is at the center of each transaction, customers have more “buying” power behind their actions. While ecommerce behemoths offer  a paltry 0.5%  (despite record profits), SMBs are leading the charge in socially conscious giving, at times reinvesting 100% of their sales profits to charitable organizations ranging from the  Wounded Warrior Project  to  author associations .

SMBs are leading the charge in socially conscious giving, at times reinvesting 100% of their sales profits to charitable organizations.

By tapping into socially-conscious buying, businesses can leverage the higher expectations consumers are placing onto business. CGS, a business application service provider, found in their 2018 study of retail shoppers that  40% of responders  had an interested in the ethics of a product being produced.

The buy local, shop local approach for groceries and other renewables is going to filter back to online items as well.

This expectation goes further, where roughly that number of users are willing to pay more for sustainable products. However, this should come as no surprise. The buy local, shop local approach for groceries and other renewables is going to filter back to online items as well. If you’re giving your proceeds to charitable causes, or reinvesting in your community, let your potential shoppers know. Include navigation links to your mission statement, or mention in your header that a portion of proceeds go to good causes. It’s a simple value-add to your website, and may ultimately aid in a conversion.

How You Can Get Involved

A clear way to show your involvement in a community is to offer a price-flexible donation product. The process is like  creating any other product , with a necessary product title, description and image, however there are two big differences. The first is that the items weight should be 0 lbs. This is simply so the item does not trigger any of your shipping methods; no customer wants to pay for FedEx Home Delivery for an item that isn’t going to be sent to them. The second aspect is the most important: under the Advanced Info > Misctab you’ll find the checkbox option to “Allow Price Edit”. This feature allows kindhearted customers to edit their item price on the checkout page. Leaving a price of $0.00 on the page keeps the product page blank, or setting a product price can leave a recommend amount.

Once created, you can begin to modify the product with options. Some stores, like the  Ruffed Grouse Society , that allow customers to earmark and dedicate their giving to specific causes within the organization. Other social entrepreneurs, like  Somethin Special , create options featuring  a variety of different charitable organizations  for customers to choose whom their giving benefits.

Building a donation is just one way in which you can put your toe into the veritable social entrepreneurship waters. Standalone products, outreach, social media influence and more, there are so many ways in which you can engage with online communities for a net positive. However, the true benefit of integrating social entrepreneurship tendencies into your business is found outside your brick and mortar. It’s found by following through and aiding the community that needs your helping hand.

Does your business give back to the community? Let us know about what you do in the Contact Us below!

Why Social Entrepreneurship is attracting growing amounts of talent, money, and attention!

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

Social entrepreneurship is attracting growing amounts of talent, money, and attention, but along with its increasing popularity has come less certainty about what exactly a social entrepreneur is and does.

Essentials of Social Innovation

A  starter kit  for leaders of social change.

•  Collective Impact 

•  Social Entrepreneurship: The Case for Definition 

•  The Dawn of System Leadership 

•  Design Thinking for Social Innovation 

•  The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle 

•  Ten Nonprofit Funding Models 

•  The Science of What Makes People Care 

•  Stop Raising Awareness Already 

•  Rediscovering Social Innovation 

•  Innovation Is Not the Holy Grail 

The nascent field of  social entrepreneurship  is growing rapidly and attracting increased attention from many sectors. The term itself shows up frequently in the  media , is referenced by public officials, has become common on university campuses, and informs the strategy of several prominent social sector organizations, including  Ashoka  and the  Schwab  and  Skoll Foundation foundations.

The reasons behind the popularity of social entrepreneurship are many. On the most basic level, there’s something inherently interesting and appealing about entrepreneurs and the stories of why and how they do what they do. People are attracted to social entrepreneurs like last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus for many of the same reasons that they find  business entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs so compelling – these extraordinary people come up with brilliant ideas and against all the odds succeed at creating new products and services that dramatically improve people’s lives.

But interest in social entrepreneurship transcends the phenomenon of popularity and fascination with people. Social entrepreneurship signals the imperative to drive social change, and it is that potential payoff, with its lasting, transformational benefit to society, that sets the field and its practitioners apart.

Although the potential benefits offered by social entrepreneurship are clear to many of those promoting and funding these activities, the actual definition of what social entrepreneurs do to produce this order of magnitude return is less clear. In fact, we would argue that the definition of social entrepreneurship today is anything but clear. As a result, social entrepreneurship has become so inclusive that it now has an immense tent into which all manner of socially beneficial activities fit.

In some respects this inclusiveness could be a good thing. If plenty of resources are pouring into the social sector, and if many causes that otherwise would not get sufficient funding now get support because they are regarded as social entrepreneurship, then it may be fine to have a loose definition. We are inclined to argue, however, that this is a flawed assumption and a precarious stance.

Social entrepreneurship is an appealing construct precisely because it holds such high promise. If that promise is not fulfilled because too many “nonentrepreneurial” efforts are included in the definition, then social entrepreneurship will fall into disrepute, and the kernel of true social entrepreneurship will be lost. Because of this danger, we believe that we need a much sharper definition of social entrepreneurship, one that enables us to determine the extent to which an activity is and is not “in the tent.” Our goal is not to make an invidious comparison between the contributions made by traditional social service organizations and the results of social entrepreneurship, but simply to highlight what differentiates them.

If we can achieve a rigorous definition, then those who support social entrepreneurship can focus their resources on building and strengthening a concrete and identifiable field. Absent that discipline, proponents of social entrepreneurship run the risk of giving the skeptics an ever-expanding target to shoot at, and the cynics even more reason to discount social innovation and those who drive it.

Starting With Entrepreneurship

Any definition of the term “social entrepreneurship” must start with the word “entrepreneurship.” The word “social” simply modifies entrepreneurship. If entrepreneurship doesn’t have a clear meaning, then modifying it with social won’t accomplish much, either.

The word entrepreneurship is a mixed blessing. On the positive side, it connotes a special, innate ability to sense and act on opportunity, combining out-of-the-box thinking with a unique brand of determination to create or bring about something new to the world. On the negative side, entrepreneurship is an ex post term, because entrepreneurial activities require a passage of time before their true impact is evident.

Interestingly, we don’t call someone who exhibits all of the personal characteristics of an entrepreneur – opportunity sensing, out-of-the-box thinking, and determination – yet who failed miserably in his or her venture an entrepreneur; we call him or her a business failure. Even someone like Bob Young, of Red Hat Software fame, is called a “serial entrepreneur” only after his first success; i.e., all of his prior failures are dubbed the work of a serial entrepreneur only after the occurrence of his first success. The problem with ex post definitions is that they tend to be ill defined. It’s simply harder to get your arms around what’s unproven. An entrepreneur can certainly claim to be one, but without at least one notch on the belt, the self-proclaimed will have a tough time persuading investors to place bets. Those investors, in turn, must be willing to assume greater risk as they assess the credibility of would-be entrepreneurs and the potential impact of formative ventures.

Even with these considerations, we believe that appropriating entrepreneurship for the term social entrepreneurship requires wrestling with what we actually mean by entrepreneurship. Is it simply alertness to opportunity? Creativity? Determination? Although these and other behavioral characteristics are part of the story and certainly provide important clues for prospective investors, they are not the whole story. Such descriptors are also used to describe inventors, artists, corporate executives, and other societal actors.

Like most students of entrepreneurship, we begin with French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, who in the early 19th century described the entrepreneur as one who “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield,” thereby expanding the literal translation from the French, “one who undertakes,” to encompass the concept of value creation.1

Writing a century later, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter built upon this basic concept of value creation, contributing what is arguably the most influential idea about entrepreneurship. Schumpeter identified in the entrepreneur the force required to drive economic progress, absent which economies would become static, structurally immobilized, and subject to decay. Enter the Unternehmer, Schumpeter’s entrepreneurial spirit, who identifies a commercial opportunity – whether a material, product, service, or business – and organizes a venture to implement it. Successful entrepreneurship, he argues, sets off a chain reaction, encouraging other entrepreneurs to iterate upon and ultimately propagate the innovation to the point of “creative destruction,” a state at which the new venture and all its related ventures effectively render existing products, services, and business models obsolete.2

Despite casting the dramatis personae in heroic terms, Schumpeter’s analysis grounds entrepreneurship within a system, ascribing to the entrepreneur’s role a paradoxical impact, both disruptive and generative. Schumpeter sees the entrepreneur as an agent of change within the larger economy. Peter Drucker, on the other hand, does not see entrepreneurs as necessarily agents of change themselves, but rather as canny and committed exploiters of change. According to Drucker, “the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity,”3 a premise picked up by Israel Kirzner, who identifies “alertness” as the entrepreneur’s most critical ability.4

Regardless of whether they cast the entrepreneur as a breakthrough innovator or an early exploiter, theorists universally associate entrepreneurship with opportunity. Entrepreneurs are believed to have an exceptional ability to see and seize upon new opportunities, the commitment and drive required to pursue them, and an unflinching willingness to bear the inherent risks.

Building from this theoretical base, we believe that entrepreneurship describes the combination of a context in which an opportunity is situated, a set of personal characteristics required to identify and pursue this opportunity, and the creation of a particular outcome.

To explore and illustrate our definition of entrepreneurship, we will take a close look at a few contemporary American entrepreneurs (or pairs thereof ): Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer, Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll of eBay, Ann and Mike Moore of Snugli, and Fred Smith of FedEx.

Entrepreneurial Context

The starting point for entrepreneurship is what we call an entrepreneurial context. For Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the entrepreneurial context was a computing system in which users were dependent on mainframe computers controlled by a central IT staff who guarded the mainframe like a shrine. Users got their computing tasks done, but only after waiting in line and using the software designed by the IT staff. If users wanted a software program to do something out of the ordinary, they were told to wait six months for the programming to be done.

From the users’ perspective, the experience was inefficient and unsatisfactory. But since the centralized computing model was the only one available, users put up with it and built the delays and inefficiencies into their workflow, resulting in an equilibrium, albeit an unsatisfactory one.

System dynamicists describe this kind of equilibrium as a “balanced feedback loop,” because there isn’t a strong force that has the likely effect of breaking the system out of its particular equilibrium. It is similar to a thermostat on an air conditioner: When the temperature rises, the air conditioner comes on and lowers the temperature, and the thermostat eventually turns the air conditioner off.

The centralized computing system that users had to endure was a particular kind of equilibrium: an unsatisfactory one. It is as if the thermostat were set five degrees too low so that everyone in the room was cold. Knowing they have a stable and predictable temperature, people simply wear extra sweaters, though of course they might wish that they didn’t have to.

Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll identified an unsatisfactory equilibrium in the inability of geographically based markets to optimize the interests of both buyers and sellers. Sellers typically didn’t know who the best buyer was and buyers typically didn’t know who the best (or any) seller was. As a result, the market was not optimal for buyers or sellers. People selling used household goods, for example, held garage sales that attracted physically proximate buyers, but probably not the optimal number or types of buyers. People trying to buy obscure goods had no recourse but to search through Yellow Page directories, phoning and phoning to try to track down what they really wanted, often settling for something less than perfect. Because buyers and sellers couldn’t conceive of a better answer, the stable, yet suboptimal, equilibrium prevailed.

Ann and Mike Moore took note of a subpar equilibrium in parents’ limited options for toting their infants. Parents wishing to keep their babies close while carrying on basic tasks had two options: They could learn to juggle offspring in one arm while managing chores with the other, or they could plop the child in a stroller, buggy, or other container and keep the child nearby. Either option was less than ideal. Everyone knows that newborns benefit from the bonding that takes place because of close physical contact with their mothers and fathers, but even the most attentive and devoted parents can’t hold their babies continuously. With no other options, parents limped along, learning to shift their child from one hip to the other and becoming adept at “one-armed paper hanging,” or attempting to get their tasks accomplished during naptime.

In the case of Fred Smith, the suboptimal equilibrium he saw was the long-distance courier service. Before FedEx came along, sending a package across country was anything but simple. Local courier services picked up the package and transported it to a common carrier, who flew the package to the remote destination city, at which point it was handed over to a third party for final delivery (or perhaps back to the local courier’s operation in that city if it was a national company). This system was logistically complex, it involved a number of handoffs, and the scheduling was dictated by the needs of the common carriers. Often something would go wrong, but no one would take responsibility for solving the problem. Users learned to live with a slow, unreliable, and unsatisfactory service – an unpleasant but stable situation because no user could change it.

Entrepreneurial Characteristics

The entrepreneur is attracted to this suboptimal equilibrium, seeing embedded in it an opportunity to provide a new solution, product, service, or process. The reason that the entrepreneur sees this condition as an opportunity to create something new, while so many others see it as an inconvenience to be tolerated, stems from the unique set of personal characteristics he or she brings to the situation – inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude. These characteristics are fundamental to the process of innovation.

The entrepreneur is inspired to alter the unpleasant equilibrium. Entrepreneurs might be motivated to do this because they are frustrated users or because they empathize with frustrated users. Sometimes entrepreneurs are so gripped by the opportunity to change things that they possess a burning desire to demolish the status quo. In the case of eBay, the frustrated user was Omidyar’s girlfriend, who collected Pez dispensers.

The entrepreneur thinks creatively and develops a new solution that dramatically breaks with the existing one. The entrepreneur doesn’t try to optimize the current system with minor adjustments, but instead finds a wholly new way of approaching the problem. Omidyar and Skoll didn’t develop a better way to promote garage sales. Jobs and Wozniak didn’t develop algorithms to speed custom software development. And Smith didn’t invent a way to make the handoffs between courier companies and common carriers more efficient and error-free. Each found a completely new and utterly creative solution to the problem at hand.

Once inspired by the opportunity and in possession of a creative solution, the entrepreneur takes direct action. Rather than waiting for someone else to intervene or trying to convince somebody else to solve the problem, the entrepreneur takes direct action by creating a new product or service and the venture to advance it. Jobs and Wozniak didn’t campaign against mainframes or encourage users to rise up and overthrow the IT department; they invented a personal computer that allowed users to free themselves from the mainframe. Moore didn’t publish a book telling mothers how to get more done in less time; she developed the Snugli, a frameless front- or backpack that enables parents to carry their babies and still have both hands free. Of course, entrepreneurs do have to influence others: first investors, even if just friends and family; then teammates and employees, to come work with them; and finally customers, to buy into their ideas and their innovations. The point is to differentiate the entrepreneur’s engagement in direct action from other indirect and supportive actions.

Entrepreneurs demonstrate courage throughout the process of innovation, bearing the burden of risk and staring failure squarely if not repeatedly in the face. This often requires entrepreneurs to take big risks and do things that others think are unwise, or even undoable. For example, Smith had to convince himself and the world that it made sense to acquire a fleet of jets and build a gigantic airport and sorting center in Memphis, in order to provide next-day delivery without the package ever leaving FedEx’s possession. He did this at a time when all of his entrenched competitors had only fleets of trucks for local pickup and delivery – they certainly didn’t run airports and maintain huge numbers of aircraft.

Finally, entrepreneurs possess the fortitude to drive their creative solutions through to fruition and market adoption. No entrepreneurial venture proceeds without setbacks or unexpected turns, and the entrepreneur needs to be able to find creative ways around the barriers and challenges that arise. Smith had to figure out how to keep investors confident that FedEx would eventually achieve the requisite scale to pay for the huge fixed infrastructure of trucks, planes, airport, and IT systems required for the new model he was creating. FedEx had to survive hundreds of millions of dollars of losses before it reached a cash-flow positive state, and without a committed entrepreneur at the helm, the company would have been liquidated well before that point.

Entrepreneurial Outcome

What happens when an entrepreneur successfully brings his or her personal characteristics to bear on a suboptimal equilibrium? He or she creates a new stable equilibrium, one that provides a meaningfully higher level of satisfaction for the participants in the system. To elaborate on Say’s original insight, the entrepreneur engineers a permanent shift from a lower-quality equilibrium to a higher-quality one. The new equilibrium is permanent because it first survives and then stabilizes, even though some aspects of the original equilibrium may persist (e.g., expensive and less-efficient courier systems, garage sales, and the like). Its survival and success ultimately move beyond the entrepreneur and the original entrepreneurial venture. It is through mass-market adoption, significant levels of imitation, and the creation of an ecosystem around and within the new equilibrium that it first stabilizes and then securely persists.

When Jobs and Wozniak created the personal computer they didn’t simply attenuate the users’ dependence on the mainframe – they shattered it, shifting control from the “glass house” to the desktop. Once the users saw the new equilibrium appearing before their eyes, they embraced not only Apple but also the many competitors who leaped into the fray. In relatively short order, the founders had created an entire ecosystem with numerous hardware, software, and peripheral suppliers; distribution channels and value-added resellers; PC magazines; trade shows; and so on.

Because of this new ecosystem, Apple could have exited from the market within a few years without destabilizing it. The new equilibrium, in other words, did not depend on the creation of a single venture, in this case Apple, but on the appropriation and replication of the model and the spawning of a host of other related businesses. In Schumpeterian terms, the combined effect firmly established a new computing order and rendered the old mainframe-based system obsolete.

In the case of Omidyar and Skoll, the creation of eBay provided a superior way for buyers and sellers to connect, creating a higher equilibrium. Entire new ways of doing business and new businesses sprang up to create a powerful ecosystem that simply couldn’t be disassembled. Similarly, Smith created a new world of package delivery that raised standards, changed business practices, spawned new competitors, and even created a new verb: “to FedEx.”

In each case, the delta between the quality of the old equilibrium and the new one was huge. The new equilibrium quickly became self-sustaining, and the initial entrepreneurial venture spawned numerous imitators. Together these outcomes ensured that everyone who benefited secured the higher ground.

Shift to Social Entrepreneurship

If these are the key components of entrepreneurship, what distinguishes social entrepreneurship from its for-profit cousin? First, we believe that the most useful and informative way to define social entrepreneurship is to establish its congruence with entrepreneurship, seeing social entrepreneurship as grounded in these same three elements. Anything else is confusing and unhelpful.

To understand what differentiates the two sets of entrepreneurs from one another, it is important to dispel the notion that the difference can be ascribed simply to motivation – with entrepreneurs spurred on by money and social entrepreneurs driven by altruism. The truth is that entrepreneurs are rarely motivated by the prospect of financial gain, because the odds of making lots of money are clearly stacked against them. Instead, both the entrepreneur and the social entrepreneur are strongly motivated by the opportunity they identify, pursuing that vision relentlessly, and deriving considerable psychic reward from the process of realizing their ideas. Regardless of whether they operate within a market or a not-for-profit context, most entrepreneurs are never fully compensated for the time, risk, effort, and capital that they pour into their venture.

We believe that the critical distinction between entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship lies in the value proposition itself. For the entrepreneur, the value proposition anticipates and is organized to serve markets that can comfortably afford the new product or service, and is thus designed to create financial profit. From the outset, the expectation is that the entrepreneur and his or her investors will derive some personal financial gain. Profit is sine qua non, essential to any venture’s  sustainability and the means to its ultimate end in the form of large-scale market adoption and ultimately a new equilibrium.

The social entrepreneur, however, neither anticipates nor organizes to create substantial financial profit for his or her investors – philanthropic and  government organizations  for the most part – or for himself or herself. Instead, the social entrepreneur aims for value in the form of large-scale, transformational benefit that accrues either to a significant segment of society or to society at large. Unlike the entrepreneurial value proposition that assumes a market that can pay for the innovation, and may even provide substantial upside for investors, the social entrepreneur’s value proposition targets an underserved, neglected, or highly disadvantaged population that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve the transformative benefit on its own. This does not mean that social entrepreneurs as a hard-and-fast rule shun profitmaking value propositions. Ventures created by social entrepreneurs can certainly generate income, and they can be organized as either not-for- profits or for-profits. What distinguishes social entrepreneurship is the primacy of social benefit, what Duke University professor Greg Dees in his seminal work on the field characterizes as the pursuit of “mission-related impact.”5

We define social entrepreneurship as having the following three components: (1) identifying a stable but inherently unjust equilibrium that causes the exclusion, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity that lacks the financial means or political clout to achieve any transformative benefit on its own; (2) identifying an opportunity in this unjust equilibrium, developing a social value proposition, and bringing to bear inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude, thereby challenging the stable state’s hegemony; and (3) forging a new, stable equilibrium that releases trapped potential or alleviates the suffering of the targeted group, and through imitation and the creation of a stable ecosystem around the new equilibrium ensuring a better future for the targeted group and even society at large.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the  Grameen Bank  and father of microcredit, provides a classic example of social entrepreneurship. The stable but unfortunate equilibrium he identified consisted of poor Bangladeshis’ limited options for securing even the tiniest amounts of credit. Unable to qualify for loans through the formal banking system, they could borrow only by accepting exorbitant interest rates from local moneylenders. More commonly, they simply succumbed to begging on the streets. Here was a stable equilibrium of the most unfortunate sort, one that perpetuated and even exacerbated Bangladesh’s endemic  poverty  and the misery arising from it.

Yunus confronted the system, proving that the poor were extremely good credit risks by lending the now famous sum of $27 from his own pocket to 42 women from the village of Jobra. The women repaid all of the loan. Yunus found that with even tiny amounts of capital, women invested in their own capacity for generating income. With a sewing machine, for example, women could tailor garments, earning enough to pay back the loan, buy food, educate their children, and lift themselves up from poverty. Grameen Bank sustained itself by charging interest on its loans and then recycling the capital to help other women. Yunus brought inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude to his venture, proved its viability, and over two decades spawned a global network of other organizations that replicated or adapted his model to other countries and cultures, firmly establishing microcredit as a worldwide industry.

The well-known actor, director, and producer Robert Redford offers a less familiar but also illustrative case of social entrepreneurship. In the early 1980s, Redford stepped back from his successful career to reclaim space in the film industry for artists. Redford was struck by a set of opposing forces in play. He identified an inherently oppressive but stable equilibrium in the way Hollywood worked, with its business model increasingly driven by financial interests, its productions gravitating to flashy, frequently violent blockbusters, and its studio-dominated system becoming more and more centralized in controlling the way films were financed, produced, and distributed. At the same time, he noted that new technology was emerging – less cumbersome and less expensive video and digital editing equipment – that gave filmmakers the tools they needed to exert more control over their work.

Seeing opportunity, Redford seized the chance to nurture this new breed of artist. First, he created the Sundance Institute to take “money out of the picture” and provide young filmmakers with space and support for developing their ideas. Next, he created the Sundance Film Festival to showcase independent filmmakers’ work. From the beginning, Redford’s value proposition focused on the emerging independent filmmaker whose talents were neither recognized nor served by the market stranglehold of the Hollywood studio system.

Redford structured Sundance Institute as a  nonprofit  corporation, tapping his network of directors, actors, writers, and others to contribute their experience as volunteer mentors to fledgling filmmakers. He priced the Sundance Film Festival so that it appealed and was accessible to a broad audience. Twenty-five years later, Sundance is credited with ushering in the independent film movement, which today ensures that “indie” filmmakers can get their work produced and distributed, and that filmgoers have access to a whole host of options – from thought-provoking documentaries to edgy international work and playful animations. A new equilibrium, which even a decade ago felt tenuous, is now firmly established.

Victoria Hale is an example of a social entrepreneur whose venture is still in its early stages and for whom our criteria apply ex ante. Hale is a pharmaceutical scientist who became increasingly frustrated by the market forces dominating her industry. Although big pharmaceutical companies held patents for drugs capable of curing any number of infectious diseases, the drugs went undeveloped for a simple reason: The populations most in need of the drugs were unable to afford them. Driven by the exigency of generating financial profits for its shareholders, the pharmaceutical industry was focusing on creating and  marketing  drugs for diseases afflicting the well-off, living mostly in developed world markets, who could pay for them.

Hale became determined to challenge this stable equilibrium, which she saw as unjust and intolerable. She created the Institute for  OneWorld Health , the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company whose mission is to ensure that drugs targeting infectious diseases in the developing world get to the people who need them, regardless of their ability to pay for the drugs. Hale’s venture has now moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. It successfully developed, tested, and secured Indian government regulatory approval for its first drug, paromomycin, which provides a cost-effective cure for visceral leishmaniasis, a disease that kills more than 200,000 people each year.

Although it is too early to tell whether Hale will succeed in creating a new equilibrium that assures more equitable treatment of diseases afflicting the poor, she clearly meets the criteria of a social entrepreneur. First, Hale has identified a stable but unjust equilibrium in the pharmaceutical industry; second, she has seen and seized the opportunity to intervene, applying inspiration, creativity, direct action, and courage in launching a new venture to provide options for a disadvantaged population; and third, she is demonstrating fortitude in proving the potential of her model with an early success.

Time will tell whether Hale’s innovation inspires others to replicate her efforts, or whether the Institute for OneWorld Health itself achieves the scale necessary to bring about that permanent equilibrium shift. But the signs are promising. Looking ahead a decade or more, her investors – the Skoll Foundation is one – can imagine the day when Hale’s Institute for OneWorld Health will have created a new pharmaceutical paradigm, one with the same enduring social benefits apparent in the now firmly established microcredit and independent film industries.

Boundaries of Social Entrepreneurship

In defining social entrepreneurship, it is also important to establish boundaries and provide examples of activities that may be highly meritorious but do not fit our definition. Failing to identify boundaries would leave the term social entrepreneurship so wide open as to be essentially meaningless.

There are two primary forms of socially valuable activity that we believe need to be distinguished from social entrepreneurship. The first type of social venture is social service provision. In this case, a courageous and committed individual identifies an unfortunate stable equilibrium – AIDS orphans in Africa, for example – and sets up a program to address it – for example, a school for the children to ensure that they are cared for and educated. The new school would certainly help the children it serves and may very well enable some of them to break free from poverty and transform their lives. But unless it is designed to achieve large scale or is so compelling as to launch legions of imitators and replicators, it is not likely to lead to a new superior equilibrium.

These types of social service ventures never break out of their limited frame: Their impact remains constrained, their service area stays confined to a local population, and their scope is determined by whatever resources they are able to attract. These ventures are inherently vulnerable, which may mean disruption or loss of service to the populations they serve. Millions of such organizations exist around the world – well intended, noble in purpose, and frequently exemplary in execution – but they should not be confused with social entrepreneurship.

It would be possible to reformulate a school for AIDS orphans as social entrepreneurship. But that would require a plan by which the school itself would spawn an entire network of schools and secure the basis for its ongoing support. The outcome would be a stable new equilibrium whereby even if one school closed, there would be a robust system in place through which AIDS orphans would routinely receive an education.

The difference between the two types of ventures – one social entrepreneurship and the other social service – isn’t in the initial entrepreneurial contexts or in many of the personal characteristics of the founders, but rather in the outcomes. Imagine that Andrew Carnegie had built only one library rather than conceiving the public library system that today serves untold millions of American citizens. Carnegie’s single library would have clearly benefited the community it served. But it was his vision of an entire system of libraries creating a permanent new equilibrium – one ensuring access to information and knowledge for all the nation’s citizens – that anchors his reputation as a social entrepreneur.

A second class of social venture is social  activism . In this case, the motivator of the activity is the same – an unfortunate and stable equilibrium. And several aspects of the actor’s characteristics are the same – inspiration, creativity, courage, and fortitude. What is different is the nature of the actor’s action orientation. Instead of taking direct action, as the social entrepreneur would, the social activist attempts to create change through indirect action, by influencing others – governments, NGOs, consumers, workers, etc. – to take action. Social activists may or may not create ventures or organizations to advance the changes they seek. Successful activism can yield substantial improvements to existing systems and even result in a new equilibrium, but the strategic nature of the action is distinct in its emphasis on influence rather than on direct action.

Why not call these people social entrepreneurs? It wouldn’t be a tragedy. But such people have long had a name and an exalted tradition: the tradition of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vaclav Havel. They are social activists. Calling them something entirely new – i.e., social entrepreneurs – and thereby confusing the general public, who already know what a social activist is, would not be helpful to the cause of either social activists or social entrepreneurs.

Shades of Gray

Having created a definition of social entrepreneurship and distinguished it from social service provision and social activism, we should recognize that in practice, many social actors incorporate strategies associated with these pure forms or create  hybrid  models. The three definitions can be seen in their pure forms in the diagram to the right.

In the pure form, the successful social entrepreneur takes direct action and generates a new and sustained equilibrium; the social activist influences others to generate a new and sustained equilibrium; and the social service provider takes direct action to improve the outcomes of the current equilibrium.

It is important to distinguish between these types of social ventures in their pure forms, but in the real world there are probably more hybrid models than pure forms. It is arguable that Yunus, for example, used social activism to accelerate and amplify the impact of Grameen Bank, a classic example of social entrepreneurship. By using a sequential hybrid – social entrepreneurship followed by social activism – Yunus turned microcredit into a global force for change.

Other organizations are hybrids using both social entrepreneurship and social activism at the same time. Standards-setting or certification organizations are an example of this. Although the actions of the standards-setting organization itself do not create societal change – those who are encouraged or forced to abide by the standards take the actions that produce the actual societal change – the organization can demonstrate social entrepreneurship in creating a compelling approach to standards-setting and in marketing the standards to regulators and market participants. Fair-trade product certification and marketing is a familiar example of this, with organizations like Cafédirect in the United Kingdom and TransFair USA in the U.S. creating growing niche markets for coffee and other commodities sold at a premium price that guarantees more equitable remuneration for small-scale producers.

Kailash Satyarthi’s  RugMark  campaign provides a particularly striking example of a hybrid model. Recognizing the inherent limitations of his work to rescue children enslaved in India’s rug-weaving trade, Satyarthi set his sights on the carpet- weaving industry. By creating the RugMark certification program and a public relations campaign designed to educate consumers who unwittingly perpetuate an unjust equilibrium, Satyarthi leveraged his effectiveness as a service provider by embracing the indirect strategy of the activist. Purchasing a carpet that has the RugMark label assures buyers that their carpet has been created without child slavery and under fair labor conditions. Educate enough of those prospective buyers, he reasoned, and one has a shot at transforming the entire carpet-weaving industry.

Satyarthi’s action in creating RugMark lies at the crossroads of entrepreneurship and activism: In itself, the RugMark label represented a creative solution and required direct action, but it is a device meant to educate and influence others, with the ultimate goal of establishing and securing a new and far more satisfactory market-production equilibrium.

Social service provision combined with social activism at a more tactical level can also produce an outcome equivalent to that of social entrepreneurship. Take, for example, a social service provider running a single school for an underprivileged group that creates great outcomes for that small group of students. If the organization uses those outcomes to create a social activist movement that campaigns for broad government support for the wide adoption of similar programs, then the social service provider can produce an overall equilibrium change and have the same effect as a social entrepreneur.

 Bill Strickland’s Manchester Bidwell Corporation , a nationally renowned inner-city arts education and job-training program, has launched the National Center for Arts & Technology to advance systematically the replication of his Pittsburgh-based model in other cities. Strickland is spearheading an  advocacy  campaign designed to leverage federal support to scale up his model. So far, four new centers are operating across the U.S. and several more are in the pipeline. With a sustainable system of centers in cities across the country, Strickland will have succeeded in establishing a new equilibrium. It is because of that campaign that the Skoll Foundation and others are investing in Strickland’s efforts.

Why bother to tease out these distinctions between various pure and hybrid models? Because with such definitions in hand we are all better equipped to assess distinctive types of social activity. Understanding the means by which an endeavor produces its social benefit and the nature of the social benefit it is targeting enables supporters – among whom we count the Skoll Foundation – to predict the sustainability and extent of those benefits, to anticipate how an organization may need to adapt over time, and to make a more reasoned projection of the potential for an entrepreneurial outcome.

Why Should We Care?

Long shunned by economists, whose interests have gravitated toward market-based, price-driven models that submit more readily to data-driven interpretation, entrepreneurship has experienced something of a renaissance of interest in recent years. Building on the foundation laid by Schumpeter, William Baumol and a handful of other scholars have sought to restore the entrepreneur’s rightful place in “production and distribution” theory, demonstrating in that process the seminal role of entrepreneurship.6 According to Carl Schramm, CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, entrepreneurs, “despite being overlooked or explicitly written out of our economic drama,”7 are the free enterprise system’s essential ingredient and absolutely indispensable to market economies.

We are concerned that serious thinkers will also overlook social entrepreneurship, and we fear that the indiscriminate use of the term may undermine its significance and potential importance to those seeking to understand how societies change and progress. Social entrepreneurship, we believe, is as vital to the progress of societies as is entrepreneurship to the progress of economies, and it merits more rigorous, serious attention than it has attracted so far.

Clearly, there is much to be learned and understood about social entrepreneurship, including why its study may not be taken seriously. Our view is that a clearer definition of social entrepreneurship will aid the development of the field. The social entrepreneur should be understood as someone who targets an unfortunate but stable equilibrium that causes the neglect, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity; who brings to bear on this situation his or her inspiration, direct action, creativity, courage, and fortitude; and who aims for and ultimately affects the establishment of a new stable equilibrium that secures permanent benefit for the targeted group and society at large.

This definition helps distinguish social entrepreneurship from social service provision and social activism. That social service providers, social activists, and social entrepreneurs will often adapt one another’s strategies and develop hybrid models is, to our minds, less inherently confusing and more respectful than indiscriminate use of these terms. It’s our hope that our categorization will help clarify the distinctive value each approach brings to society and lead ultimately to a better understanding and more informed decision making among those committed to advancing positive social change.

The authors would like to thank their Skoll Foundation colleagues Richard Fahey, chief operating officer, and Ruth Norris, senior program officer, who read prior drafts of this essay and contributed important ideas to its evolution.

 
 
Notes

1 Jean-Baptiste Say, quoted in J. Gregory Dees, “ The Meaning of ‘Social Entrepreneurship ,’” reformatted and revised, May 30, 2001.
2 Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1975): 82-85.
3 Peter F. Drucker, Innovation & Entrepreneurship (New York: Harper Business, 1995): 28.
4 Israel Kirzner, quoted in William J. Baumol, “ Return of the Invisible Men: The Microeconomic Value Theory of Inventors and Entrepreneurs .”
5 Dees, 2.
6 Baumol, 1.
7 Carl J. Schramm, “ Entrepreneurial Capitalism and the End of Bureaucracy: Reforming the Mutual Dialog of Risk Aversion ,”  2.

The Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation and ¿eX-whY AdVentures? Presents: “Entourage” in Trader Joe’s “Tribute to Legends of Jazz” Show!

The Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation and ¿eX-whY AdVentures? Presents: “Entourage” in Trader Joe’s “Tribute to Legends of Jazz” Show!
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