What is a Social Entrepreneur?

Social entrepreneurs recognize social problems and use entrepreneurial means of creating and managing a venture to make social change. Business entrepreneurs organize their ventures around tapping into untapped markets for profit. Social entrepreneurs tap into untapped markets to create social change.

What is a social enterprise?

A social enterprise is a socially mission driven organization that maintains a double-bottom line. While most businesses maintain a bottom line, which measures the fiscal health of their organization (their profit and loss throughout the year), a social enterprise measures their success through both the fiscal health of their organization and the social benefit their organization was able to provide.

Social enterprises are often started by social entrepreneurs who establish their organization with the goal of creating positive social change.

How does Be The Change 'teach' social entrepreneurship?

As you can see the definitions listed above are very general. Social entrepreneurs can be government officials working towards social change, business executives who use a portion of their annual profit to support a local soup kitchen, or non-profit leaders who measure their organization�s success by how many people they assist each year. Social entrepreneurs and the businesses they create are a wide and varied group.

We believe that our 'Be the Change' participants are all budding social entrepreneurs. 'Be the Change' participants are attracted to this course because they have identified a social ill and are playing with an idea about how to address that ill/create social change. Even if they do not have a specific idea, they are interested in learning more so they can eventually get out there and make the world a better place.

All they need is some more information, a few skills, access to resources and a little push to get them started. This is what 'Be the Change' provides.