I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up...

I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up…

I aspire to be a social entrepreneur. For many years (in my relatively short life) people have asked what I want to, what my goals are, what field I want to pursue a career in, and the best I could do was answer… well my dream is to be in the Foreign Service. It was the closest career I could think of that involved politics, economic development, international relations and social work (of sorts).

I experienced a moment of truth during my Foreign Service interview back on January 25^th in Washington, D.C. The State Department asked me (during an eight hour oral assessment) why I wanted to be in the Foreign Service. I answered as best I could a question that was fuzzy in my own mind. “It sounds like you would rather work for U.S. AID or another development organization, not the Foreign Service. Right?” Maybe they were right. A quiet voice inside of me responded, “yes…”.

I am in the middle of a fantabulous (yes, I know that’s not a word, but I like to use it anyways … a fusion of fantastic and fabulous) book called How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, by David Bornstein. Rather an ambitious title, I know. However, if you look under the cover, you will discover amazing stories of men and women around the world who are changing the world, social entrepreneurs. They are people who have developed a passion to remedy a particular sore spot in their society. They find specific, practical ways to unravel the foundational issues and fix the problem. Many of them have affected (improved) the lives of millions of people, literally. For instance, one lady in India, named Jeroo Billimoria, created an organization (now a part of India’s government) named Childline. It is a toll-free hotline for street children. Children anywhere in the country who are suffering from abuse, need medical attention, or just need someone to talk with can call this number in any city (with over 1 million residents) and immediately be helped. Trained former street children answer calls, register a child in a national database and either connect the child with a local organization that can help them, communicate with problematic authorities or hospital staffs, or actually send out a team member (former street children) in uniform to recover the child and taxi them to the appropriate organization that can help. Childline brilliantly created teams out of city institutions including hospital staffs, counseling services, police commissioners, thousands of child service organizations and Non-Governmental Organization’s already in place all across the country. They created a database, so that any adult or child who needed to find a particular kind of help for a child, could look up the available (screened) institutions. In approximately five years, building minimal infrastructure, and operating on a minimal budget, Childline answered the calls of 2.7 million street children. All the stories are just as inspiring.

A social entrepreneur is someone with “powerful ideas to improve people’s lives”, ideas they have “implemented across cities, countries, and in some cases, the world.”¹ I may have no powerful ideas to implement across the world right now, but the idea of a social entrepreneur encompasses all intersecting avenues of my interests. The idea summons an eager confirmation from inside me. Social entrepreneurs operate in many formal sectors, but usually work across a broad range of conventional roles (i.e. Rosa, a man who brought cheap electricity to thousands of Brazilians and acted as an engineer, a technician, a government bureaucrat, a facilitator, an educator, and an Non-Governmental Organization/business president).

Whether I work for the U.S. State Department, US AID, an Non-Governmental Organization, another AID organization, go to law school and defend human rights around the world with the International Justice Missions (www.ijm.org), or assist in a project like Hernando De Soto’s, legalizing shanty towns in South America to bring the poor into the legal sector, I hope to occupy myself in work that could readily be identified as social entrepreneurship.

It's nice to know how to explain what I want to do with my random collection of interests before I find out what I actually plan to do... I'm doing something right now, eh?

^1: How to Change The World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, David Bornstein. Oxford University Press, 2004. Pg. 1