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• Why I Believe in Social Entrepreneurship

  Jocelyn Ling 12:46 am on August 1, 2011 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: change (17), education, empowerment (7), impact investing (10), motivation (9), personal (9), world (12)

  Have you ever been asked a ques­tion that sim­ply stops you in your tracks…creating that lump in your throat that results in you awk­wardly star­ing at a per­son for what seems like eter­nity (but really was only per­haps 30s)? I have. It wasn’t that the ques­tion that was unex­pected. Only my response. I thought the answer would be at the tip of my tongue, ready to pro­vide that sweet ele­va­tor pitch… but my words splut­tered and died before I had a chance to arrange them into coher­ent thoughts.

  The ques­tion that caused this sur­pris­ing reac­tion was: why do you believe in social entrepreneurship?

  My brain raced through the rea­sons, each rea­son fol­lowed by what seemed like a giant red sign that screamed CLICHE.

  I believe in a human cen­tred mar­ket based solu­tion to poverty. Cliche.

  I believe in mak­ing the world a bet­ter place and leav­ing it bet­ter than when I’ve found it. Cliche.

  My back­ground and jour­ney has led me to believe in the power of entre­pre­neur­ship. Cliche.

  I come from a fam­ily whose lives have been changed through entre­pre­neur­ship. Cliche.

  I stum­bled into this field unknow­ingly. Cliche.

  Social entre­pre­neurs are the key in unlock­ing the levers of change. Cliche.

  Entre­pre­neurs have the abil­ity to cre­ate and imag­ine. With sup­port and direc­tion, they can be the change we wish to see in this world. Cliche.

  In my head, my emo­tions quickly churned from alarm to frus­tra­tion. Why was it that I couldn’t explain my Why? Was it because I didn’t under­stand my rea­sons, or per­haps was it because I couldn’t find the words to say? Why do these rea­sons seem cliche? Per­haps peo­ple have overused them and they have lost their meaning…and then the ques­tion becomes: how do you do then con­vey any one of those rea­sons with sin­cere belief? After all, how can you cap­ture pas­sion and belief in 30 sec­onds. In a para­graph even. It doesn’t seem to even do it justice.

  About a year ago, I wrote a post on the beauty of imag­i­na­tion. Although I still believe this rea­son to be true, I couldn’t quite get the rea­son of imag­i­na­tion to fit within the social enterprise/international devel­op­ment piece of my beliefs. It seemed to be miss­ing a piece.

  Truth be told, I was then sud­denly mes­mer­ized by the fact that per­haps, just per­haps my rea­son WAS the com­bi­na­tion of all those cliches. And more. After all, isn’t our under­stand­ing of the world a lim­i­ta­tion of what we have expe­ri­enced and inher­ited knowl­edge? Maybe my pas­sion is a com­bi­na­tion of a math­e­mat­i­cal sequence of expe­ri­ences (I like to think so!):

  1) I grew up painfully aware of poverty and socio-economic oppression

  2) My family’s story changed because of entrepreneurship

  3) Hard work and a stranger’s faith in see­ing my poten­tial allowed me to con­tinue my edu­ca­tion in Canada

  4) I unknow­ingly stum­bled into this field through a “less-than-perfect” vol­un­teer pro­gram through my university

  5) Tip­ping point: Work­ing with a women’s group in Lesotho ignited an under­stand­ing that iden­ti­fy­ing change levers in a com­mu­nity can change lives

  6) Through­out busi­ness school, I have devel­oped a nat­ural bias towards a mar­ket based solu­tion to solv­ing problems.

  There­fore: 7) Giv­ing peo­ple the oppor­tu­nity (just like it has been given to me) to cre­ate and imag­ine a bet­ter life is the key to cre­at­ing a bet­ter world. A human-centered mar­ket based solution.

  Social entre­pre­neur­ship shakes up our com­pla­cen­cies by chal­leng­ing how we place value on social and eco­nomic urgen­cies. It spins us round in two ways at once: it shows us the sights and social val­ues that we might ordi­nar­ily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us parts of cap­i­tal­ism that have grown rusty and need changing.

  So what is my answer you might ask? For now, I will have to set­tle for a com­bi­na­tion of cliche answers, my sequence of expe­ri­ences and that nag­ging voice at the of my head telling me that it is the right thing to believe in.

  I’ll be sure to check in with my answer again as my under­stand­ing of the world con­tin­ues to grow!

   

• SOCAP Europe: An intersection. A conference. A movement.

  Jocelyn Ling 1:11 pm on May 10, 2011 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: collaboration (8), education, finance (3), foreign aid (3), Government (4), impact (17), impact investing (10), innovation (8), social finance (7)

  I’ve recently caught the writ­ing bug and real­ized how incred­i­bly enlight­en­ing writ­ing is to orga­nize and share my thoughts. I had the oppor­tu­nity to start writ­ing for socialearth.org, a fresh entre­pre­neur­ial and socially mind­ful weblog orig­i­nat­ing down in the states and below is my recent piece on SOCAP. You can view the orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tion here.

  ***

  

  Cap­i­tal­ism, as we know it, has evolved to focus on a one dimen­sional view of human nature – the pur­suit of profit and self preser­va­tion. The emer­gence of the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion cap­i­tal­ized on this one dimen­sional the­ory, where human­ity has been per­suaded that the best way to attain hap­pi­ness is to enthu­si­as­ti­cally embrace this the­ory and sub­se­quently trans­form our­selves into a profit dri­ven gen­er­a­tion. In the later part of the 20th cen­tury, a pow­er­ful move­ment called glob­al­iza­tion swept across the world and the evo­lu­tion of cap­i­tal­ism was solid­i­fied glob­ally. The world now trended towards a ‘global’ eco­nomic sys­tem which resulted in the widen­ing gap between the rich and poor and between devel­oped and devel­op­ing countries.

  Today, the major­ity of the world is so entranced with the suc­cess of cap­i­tal­ism and the wake of glob­al­iza­tion that we have for­got­ten the true line between what is real­ity and the­ory. We  have for­got­ten that at the end of the day, peo­ple are multi-dimensional beings and we are slowly com­ing to an awak­en­ing to what has been deeply inter­twined in human­ity all this time: the need for mean­ing. Thus, the emer­gence of the non-profit sec­tor. A sec­tion on the other end of the cap­i­tal­ist spec­trum to ful­fil humanity’s search for meaning.

  How­ever, this purely dou­ble ended spec­trum with purely char­i­ta­ble cap­i­tal at one end and for-profit cap­i­tal at the other is break­ing down. Instead, a con­tin­uum is slowly tak­ing its place. As SOCAP’s web­site states, “A new form of cap­i­tal­ism is aris­ing that rec­og­nizes our abil­ity to direct the power and effi­ciency of mar­ket sys­tems toward social impact.” We are mov­ing beyond the myopia of pure finan­cial returns with the under­stand­ing that not every busi­ness or mar­ket is bound to serve the sin­gle objec­tive of profit max­i­miza­tion and that not every non-profit is bound to serve the sin­gle objec­tive of service.

  On May 30th to June 1st, pro­gres­sive impact dri­ven investors, social entre­pre­neurs and inno­va­tors are gath­er­ing in Ams­ter­dam at the his­toric site of the first stock exchange, to dis­cover what it means to be at the inter­sec­tion of money and mean­ing. The con­fer­ence, Social Cap­i­tal Mar­kets Europe, is a col­lab­o­ra­tion of co-creation and vig­or­ous due dili­gence to pro­duce an out­put of over 70 pan­els and work­shops track­ing 7 key themes includ­ing: impact invest­ing, invest­ing in frag­ile states and the mid­dle east, infra­struc­ture and inno­va­tion, social fund­ing, sto­ries of social enter­prise and tech­nol­ogy for social change.

  SOCAP Europe aims to cre­ate a plat­form at which “investors gather to col­lab­o­rate and learn from oth­ers who are find­ing a way to invest their money for finan­cial return as well as for the ben­e­fit of peo­ple and the planet; where entre­pre­neurs come to find out who has made a break through and who their next part­ner or next investor could be” – Kevin Jones, Co-founder of SOCAP . Much of the dis­cus­sion at SOCAP Europe is expected to focus on the social-capital con­tin­uum and to dis­cover, for any given social goal, which sort of social cap­i­tal, or mix of dif­fer­ent sorts of it, is most likely to succeed.

  “Tri­o­dos Bank, Doen Foun­da­tion, Vox­tra, Root Cap­i­tal, Unltd, Blue Orchard Finance, Kiva.org, and OPIC are among the pio­neer­ing orga­ni­za­tions that will be present at SOCAP/Europe. The gathering’s col­lab­o­ra­tive for­mat will include problem-solving dis­cus­sions, game-changing fund­ing model explo­ration, and oppor­tu­ni­ties to delve into world-class case stud­ies in entre­pre­neur­ial inno­va­tion” – SOCAP Europe

  The notion of social cap­i­tal mar­kets can seen ide­al­is­tic, because it is a dis­rup­tive idea to cap­i­tal­ism as we know it. There is a com­pelling case for explor­ing this con­tin­uum. I think there is also a com­pelling case in our self-interest to do so. We have already waited for far too long. The time to start this social cap­i­tal move­ment is now. Let the dis­cov­ery begin.

   

   

• These Borrowed Words

  Jocelyn Ling 2:14 pm on March 27, 2011 | 2 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: books, education, journalism (5), personal (9)

  There is one ele­ment that has always been a con­sis­tent theme in my life, wher­ever, when­ever: and that is books. I’ve had a read­ing obses­sion ever since the age of seven, which till to this day, I remem­ber the book that started it all — The Magic Paint­brush. I remem­ber hid­ing books in the drawer of my school desk back in Malaysia, and when­ever I thought the teacher was look­ing the other way, I would pull the book out and sneak a cou­ple pages of read­ing. It was easy, see, with 50 other kids packed in a class, elbow to elbow, to get away with it. I believe(d) that books would teach me things about life that a class­room never could. One that I still main­tain to this day. I devoured books from Enid Blyton’s entire col­lec­tion to the rem­i­nis­cent Sweet Val­ley days of teenage-hood. And then, my world of books changed when I dis­cov­ered the world of lit­er­a­ture and non-fiction. I’ve never looked back since.

  I recently stum­bled across this incred­i­ble list of books, that I am now deter­mined to get through in a year (I’ll let you know how it goes!). It’s a list by one of my fav orga­ni­za­tions: Acu­men Fund and it’s actu­ally the rec­om­mended read­ing list for their Fel­lows. I’ll try to share my thoughts on each book as I move through the list. But mean­while, here it is, below:

  *I’ve bolded the ones I’ve read.. it’s a start!

  

  GOOD SOCIETY READINGS
  Rights and Responsibilities

  “Cul­ture Is Des­tiny: A Con­ver­sa­tion with Lee Kuan Yew” by Fareed Zakaria (For­eign Affairs, March/April 1994)
  “Empow­er­ment for a Cul­ture of Peace and Devel­op­ment” by Aung San Suu Kyi (address to World Com­mis­sion on Cul­ture and Devel­op­ment, Novem­ber 21, 1994)
  “Let­ter from Birm­ing­ham Jail” by Mar­tin Luther King Jr. (April 16, 1963)
  The Uni­ver­sal Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights (Gen­eral Assem­bly of the United Nations, Decem­ber 10, 1948)

  Lib­erty and Social Order
  “The Con­trari­ness of the Mad Farmer” by Wen­dell Berry in Farm­ing: A Hand Book (Har­court, Brace, Jovanovich)
  “Democ­racy” by Langston Hughes
  Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
  “Mes­sage to the Con­gress of Angos­tura, 1819” by Simón Bolí­var
  The Prince by Nic­colò Machi­avelli
  “Two Con­cepts of Lib­erty” by Isa­iah Berlin (address before Uni­ver­sity of Oxford, Octo­ber 31, 1958)
  Equal­ity and the Quest for Social Jus­tice
  The Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
  Democ­racy in Amer­ica by Alexis de Toc­queville
  Long Walk to Free­dom: The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Nel­son Man­dela by Nel­son Man­dela (Lit­tle, Brown and Com­pany)
  “O Yes” by Tillie Olsen in Tell Me a Rid­dle (Ran­dom House)
  The Social Con­tract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Com­mu­nity and the Search for Human­ity
  The Book of Gen­e­sis
  The Four Noble Truths of Bud­dhism
  “How to Write about Africa” by Binya­vanga Wainaina (Granta 92, Win­ter 2005)
  On Iden­tity by Amin Maalouf (Harvill Pan­ther)
  Silent Spring by Rachel Car­son (Houghton Mif­flin)
  “Speech upon Receiv­ing the Philadel­phia Lib­erty Medal” by Václav Havel (July 4, 1994)
  Prop­erty and Pro­duc­tiv­ity
  Devel­op­ment as Free­dom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
  Equal­ity and Effi­ciency: The Big Trade­off by Arthur M. Okun (The Brook­ings Insti­tu­tion)
  The Muqad­dimah by Ibn Khaldūn (Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press)
  The Repub­lic by Plato

  LEADERSHIP READINGS
  “Because We Can, We Must” by Bono (com­mence­ment address at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, May 17, 2004)
  A Con­fes­sion by Leo Tol­stoy
  Death and the King’s Horse­man by Wole Soyinka (W.W. Nor­ton)
  “A Far Cry from Africa” by Derek Wal­cott in The Nor­ton Anthol­ogy of Poetry (W.W. Nor­ton)
  Good to Great: Why Some Com­pa­nies Make the Leap…and Oth­ers Don’t by Jim Collins (Harper­Collins)
  “Great Expec­ta­tions” by Bill Gates (com­mence­ment address at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, June 7, 2007)
  Lead­er­ship on the Line: Stay­ing Alive Through the Dan­gers of Lead­ing by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Lin­sky (Har­vard Busi­ness School Press)
  Lead­ing from Within: Poetry that Sus­tains the Courage to Lead by Sam M. Intra­tor and Megan Scrib­ner (Jossey-Bass)
  Let­ter to Daniel: Dis­patches from the Heart by Fer­gal Keane (Pen­guin Books)
  The Oppos­able Mind: How Suc­cess­ful Lead­ers Win Through Inte­gra­tive Think­ing by Roger L. Mar­tin (Har­vard Busi­ness School Press)
  “Rebel­lion” by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky in The Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov
  Self-Renewal: The Indi­vid­ual and the Inno­v­a­tive Soci­ety by John W. Gard­ner (Harper­Collins)
  Ser­vant Lead­er­ship: A Jour­ney into the Nature of Legit­i­mate Power and Great­ness by Robert K. Green­leaf (Paulist Press)

  FICTION
  Black Boy by Richard Wright (Harper­Peren­nial)
  A Fine Bal­ance by Rohin­ton Mis­try (Vin­tage Inter­na­tional)
  A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Heine­mann)
  Inde­pen­dent Peo­ple by Halldór Lax­ness (Vin­tage Inter­na­tional)
  Midnight’s Chil­dren by Salman Rushdie (Pen­guin Books)
  The Ones Who Walk Away From Ome­las by Ursula K. Le Guin (Cre­ative Edu­ca­tion)
  Pur­ple Hibis­cus by Chi­ma­manda Ngozi Adichie (Anchor)
  Sea­son of Migra­tion to the North by Tayeb Salih (NYRB Clas­sics)
  Shadow Lines by Ami­tav Ghosh (Mariner Books)
  Shoot­ing an Ele­phant by George Orwell (Pen­guin Books)
  The Tem­pest by William Shake­speare
  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Heine­mann)
  Train to Pak­istan by Khush­want Singh (Grove Press)

  BOOKS ON INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR POVERTY ALLEVIATION
  “A Behavioral-Economics View of Poverty” by Mar­i­anne Bertrand, Send­hil Mul­lainathan, and Eldar Shafir (Amer­i­can Eco­nomic Review 94, no. 2)
  The Bot­tom Bil­lion: Why the Poor­est Coun­tries are Fail­ing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Col­lier (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press)
  Cap­i­tal­ism as if the World Mat­ters by Jonathon Por­ritt and Amory B. Lovins (Earth­scan Pub­li­ca­tions)
  Devel­op­ment as Free­dom by Amartya Sen (Anchor)
  The End of Poverty: Eco­nomic Pos­si­bil­i­ties for Our Time by Jef­frey D. Sachs (Pen­guin Press)
  The For­tune at the Bot­tom of the Pyra­mid: Erad­i­cat­ing Poverty Through Prof­its by C.K. Pra­ha­lad (Whar­ton School Pub­lish­ing)
  Mak­ing Glob­al­iza­tion Work by Joseph E. Stiglitz (W.W. Nor­ton)
  Max­i­mum City: Bom­bay Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Knopf)
  The Mys­tery of Cap­i­tal: Why Cap­i­tal­ism Tri­umphs in the West and Fails Every­where Else by Her­nando de Soto (Basic Books)
  Patholo­gies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer (Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia Press)
  Phil­an­thro­cap­i­tal­ism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Blooms­bury Press)
  Plan B 2.0: Res­cu­ing a Planet Under Stress and a Civ­i­liza­tion in Trou­ble by Lester R. Brown (W.W. Nor­ton)
  Port­fo­lios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day by Daryl Collins, Jonathan Mor­duch, Stu­art Ruther­ford, and Orlanda Ruthven (Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Press)
  The White Man’s Bur­den: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Lit­tle Good by Williams Rus­sell East­erly (Pen­guin Books)
  Wiki­nomics: How Mass Col­lab­o­ra­tion Changes Every­thing by Don Tap­scott and Anthony D. Williams (Port­fo­lio Hard­cover)
  The World’s Banker: A Story of Failed States, Finan­cial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Sebas­t­ian Mal­laby (Pen­guin Press)

   

• Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

  Jocelyn Ling 8:44 pm on October 11, 2010 | 2 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Africa (5), change (17), education, empowerment (7), inspiration (12), peace (4), women (5), world (12)

  Women hold up half the sky — Chi­nese Proverb

  Real­ity is hard. It is a star­tling rev­e­la­tion at times often because we choose to sur­round our­selves with our view and expe­ri­ence of the world. This Thanks­giv­ing, I am reminded of real­ity when I sat down to read Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. In Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn throw an inter­est­ing twist into the con­ven­tional view of plights of women around the world: by telling their sto­ries. From Cam­bo­dia to South Africa. From sex slaves to mater­nal health. By putting a name, emo­tion and pas­sion into the sto­ries. This ten­ta­tive foray into the realm of story-telling melds sur­pris­ing well with what is, essen­tially, a pas­sion­ate call to action against our generation’s most per­va­sive human rights vio­la­tion: the oppres­sion of women and girls worldwide.

  The open­ing of the book fol­lows the story of Srey Rath, a young Cam­bo­dian teenager, who was sold as a sex salve across the bor­ders, end­ing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where she endured rou­tine bru­tal­ity and con­stant humil­i­a­tion. It was a huge shock to my sys­tem, as Malaysia is some­place I call my home town…  to read in such vivid detail the human rights vio­la­tion done to Srey Rath was stun­ning in every sense.

  These sto­ries of human per­se­ver­ance, injus­tice and ulti­mately hope, just like Srey Rath, are woven into three main issues: sex traf­fick­ing and forced pros­ti­tu­tion; gender-based vio­lence e.g. honor killings and mass rape and mater­nal mor­tail­ity. Sub issues include edu­ca­tion, micro­cre­dit and reli­gion. The sto­ries in the book are shock­ing, but ulti­mately this is the cen­tral truth of the book: Women aren’t the prob­lem but the solu­tion. The plight of girls is no more a tragedy than an opportunity.

  “It appears that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, pre­cisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all bat­tles of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. More girls are killed in this rou­tine “gen­der­cide” in any one decade than peo­ple were slaugh­tered in all the geno­cides of the twen­ti­eth century.

  In the nine­teenth cen­tury, the cen­tral moral chal­lenge was slav­ery. In the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, it was the bat­tle against total­i­tar­i­an­ism. We believe that in this cen­tury, the para­mount moral chal­lenge will be the strug­gle for gen­der equal­ity around the world. ”

  Through sto­ries, Kristof and WuDunn demon­strate how the key to eco­nomic progress lies in the fact that as a soci­ety, we need to stop ignor­ing women who hold up half the sky. Unleash­ing this incred­i­ble human poten­tial is not only the right thing to do in terms of our own shared human­ity, but also the best way to tackle poverty. They show how in vastly dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances, the endurance of the human spirit and how a lit­tle help can go a long way e.g. the sim­ple act of iodiz­ing salt to improve a baby’s IQ.

  I won’t go into the details of the book because my sum­mary will not do these incred­i­ble sto­ries jus­tice. How­ever, on a per­sonal level, this book’s mes­sage has imprinted itself deeply within my beliefs in inter­na­tional devel­op­ment. After all, how many books make such a  state­ment about a mat­ter than con­cerns every­one because of our shared human­ity? The sto­ries of these women show me the resilience and amount of hope they have within them­selves who have every rea­son to give up but con­tinue on. It’s so mov­ing and inspi­ra­tional that I just want to shout it out loud and tell every­one about the issues Kristof and WuDunn have writ­ten about. If there is one thing that this book is about, it is the story of transformation.

  Rat­ing: 10/10

  “If you think edu­ca­tion is expen­sive, try igno­rance.” — Derek Bok