
Social Entrepreneurship
Read an excerpt from Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know by David Bornstein and Susan Davis.
Social EntrepreneurshipAnita Brick: Hi, this is Anita Brick, and welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Susan Davis, who I would call a pioneer in social entrepreneurship. Susan is president and CEO of BRAC USA, and I know you've been involved with the Ford Foundation and as I said, really a pioneer in the field. So maybe to start with, I know this may seem like a really basic question, but what is social entrepreneurship? How would you define it and how did it become a separate business category?
Susan Davis: Well, it's not a silly question because there are so many different definitions of the term, which is often the case when a new idea is taking root in society. The way David Bornstein and myself have looked at it in our new book, Social Entrepreneurship, what everyone needs to know is that it's a process by which people build or transform institutions to advance solutions to the problems in our society in order to make life better for a lot of people.
So it's the kinds of problems that keep you up at night. Human rights abuses, poverty, ill health, illiteracy, all of those kinds of things that right now are causing the breakdown in our ecosystems and environment. The oil spill that's happening off the Gulf of Mexico, for example. So we define it—If you look at business entrepreneurship as being able to really improve society's productive capacity, then social entrepreneurs are doing the same thing to unleash our capacity to solve the problems that plague us, the big ones, through new combinations of people and resources, new ways of working together, new collaborations, and new ideas, often through the intersection of those ideas from different fields. And I think it has taken root in the business world because of some of the limits that are confronting major corporations and small businesses.
Anita Brick: Absolutely. And I think that's why there's really been a resurgence or maybe a resurgence of interest, not just in entrepreneurship, but in social entrepreneurship. One of the teams in our New Venture Challenge won third place a few weeks ago, and it was a bakery. But the bakery is a bakery in Tanzania and has a very strong social mission as part of what they're doing. It's really an interesting hybrid.
Typically, we know that in business, people often define the success of an organization based on whether they're meeting profitability and shareholder responsibilities on that front. When you think of the social entrepreneurs that you've interacted with and that you've done research on for the book—and it is an amazing book, by the way—how are social entrepreneurs typically defining success?
Susan Davis: Well, the main difference between social and business entrepreneurship has to do with purpose. What is the enterprise trying to maximize? For the social entrepreneurs, the bottom line is to maximize some form of social impact. Trying to address an urgent need, trying to respond to a market segment that's been overlooked or ignored, trying to generate profits to subsidize services in another area for people who can't afford to pay.
For the business entrepreneurs, usually their bottom line is to maximize profits or shareholder wealth. So it's not that business entrepreneurs aren't often providing something important for society. Certainly, the jobs are important, and often the business is providing an important product or service that has value to customers. But there's a difference between an entrepreneur who's bringing potato chips or Twinkies to the Chinese market—even if the firm is generating millions of jobs—and someone who's trying to solve the problem of environmental degradation in China.
Anita Brick: And so how do you measure that? I mean, one of the questions that came from an Exec MBA student was, what social impact metrics would you recommend to use to evaluate a venture?
Susan Davis: Well, I think the field of social performance has been rapidly growing over the last couple of decades. And while still not perfect, we've got great proxies on impact measurement that will become, I think, over time, as rigorous as the financial performance measurement and metrics that we have. It's pretty easy to be able to count widgets or [...]. So if you're looking at numbers of people served and products and services delivered, it's pretty easy.
Then if you're a social venture that's doing cataract operations, for example, like Arvind in India. And so the numbers of people that are able to be served is an inherent indication of both demand and the people who are getting access to free service because they have an inability to pay, and those who are paying marginal amounts are also an important indication of are you reaching your your target group—the fact that you're able to provide service to some people who can pay market rates or even above market rates, and cross-subsidize that care, means that you're providing a quality service that's respected, even by better-off people.
That's an example where it's pretty straightforward in terms of assessing both quality and quantity of care. Same kind of thing with microfinance. You're looking at proxy indicators about both demand and supply and the repayment of loans. To get deeper and to find what happens after loans, where you start seeing building of assets and the empowerment effects taking root, often for very, very poor women, that requires additional studies.
And it's great if you can afford to put in place randomized control studies, but not everybody can do that. Where we are right now with social performance metrics is to create the best set of proxy indicators that will give you a gauge of whether you're reaching the intended target group, whether there's effective demand, whether there's quality provision of services.
Anita Brick: I mean, it seems like quality measures are so very, very important, and yet they seem to be like the new kid on the block in a way.
Susan Davis: Well, it's often because it requires more expense to be able to measure it. And there's always a trade-off between putting in place the perfect measures, because the social return on investment will often be in the eye of the beholder or the collective assessment. You try to borrow a page from the market and do the simple things, but it's quite true, like Albert Einstein said once, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
And this is really true for the social sector, particularly when we're trying to change attitudes towards gay marriage, disability, global warming, all of this, it's very hard. So you're talking about a long-term process that creates a shift, and it can't usually be isolated just to your intervention or your institution.
And that's where I think it's really important to understand that social entrepreneurship involves social movements. It involves not only the rise of a few individuals who build institutions, but the collective process of organizing ways that we work together with public and private sectors and create a bigger shift in society. That's the kind of transformative change that happens. It's not going to be directly attributed just to you and your institution.
That's narrow bean counting. So if you look today at the consciousness around the planet on recycling and just littering, you know that there's been a huge shift in my lifetime. I remember in the US, we would drive along the highways. My parents would throw garbage out of the car window. No one would do that now, or very rarely. And there would be social sanctions. Somebody in the back of the car would say, hey, stop that.
Anita Brick: Good point. I know that we are not unique at Chicago Booth, but it seems like there are a lot of people, at least that I’ve talked to, who want to do a startup but want it to have a social purpose. They want it to fall into the definitions that you've laid out before. What are some key things to consider before either founding or joining a social enterprise versus a for-profit entity? And that was one of the questions from a weekend student.
Susan Davis: Each of us have to really decide what path is best for ourselves. I would suggest that person think about the depth of passion and commitment that they have to a particular idea. If there is not yet some idea that has really grabbed you, then explore. And that's a good reason to actually join other organizations, because often what you learn is what you're not interested in, and it helps to shape your own thinking.
What I've observed is that social entrepreneurship is a lifetime journey. It's not a particular project or even an enterprise. It's a different way of seeing the world and people get consumed with living in this mindset as a change maker, of constantly being able to see the problems that we've got and trying to figure out how do we solve them.
So deploying one's energy in the most effective way is different from saying, I'm just going to build a venture. The impact is what's going to drive you. I think one real caution is that as this concept has become more celebrated in the media and started to catch fire, there's been a proliferation of egos. The quest for one's, you know, moment in the sun is not the right reason to try to start a venture.
I would caution folks that there's an occasional celebrity and some fame that comes out of it, but generally you've got to get your thrills from the joy of the work, you know, whether people pay you well or not, or whether there's money or not. It comes from inside.
Anita Brick: I think you're absolutely right. Most of the people who are doing this kind of work, who are really making changes, are invisible for the most part. Their actions and the value they’re creating is behind the scenes. And even if it is felt more broadly, there was a question from an alum who said, is there a good preparatory step? Would it be volunteering, being on the board of either a nonprofit that matched your mission that you are involved in or passionate about? Is it joining in an advisory way to a social entrepreneurial venture?
Susan Davis: Those are all very good ideas, Anita. There isn't really one way for you to put your toe in the waters and explore social entrepreneurship. In the book, David and I brainstormed a list of 25 thoughts for change makers—some small, some a little larger—as a way to get people thinking about what it is that they might do just to explore.
And it's as simple as asking a question at a public forum. So finding the courage of your own voice. Certainly joining a board and volunteering is really good. Volunteering for political campaigns is great. Engaging with people that have opinions that are different from your own. Part of the mission in creating social change is to really understand why we're in the mess that we're in and the perspectives of all the different folks that are responsible both for creating the problem and in solving it.
We often talk about starting your own organization. That's a heavy load to do, and I strongly encourage people to get involved in supporting and working with an organization whose cause you are passionate about, because there aren't enough institutions that work at scale. Back to my earlier point, social change is the result of large-scale social movements that often have been initiated and catalyzed by social entrepreneurs who devised strategies.
Included in that is building institutions. And of course, those institutions have to be able to, you know, cover their costs, and you have to find money. And that's why social enterprise, social business is an important subset of the whole field. But it's not necessarily the end in itself. Ultimately, what's driving, folks, is, you know, to be part of creating a more just and fair and sustainable world.
So for that, it almost doesn't matter where people start. It's the process of being involved and engaged that will cause your heart to sing; make you feel like it's great to get up every day and to be able to make a difference. And one of the things that David and I really write about in this book is how social entrepreneurship, in our understanding, has evolved over the last couple of decades that I've known about it, from an initial emphasis on the individual, the social entrepreneur as hero and the search for them.
I learned about social entrepreneurship from Ashoka, this global organization that finds these terrific people with innovative ideas who have the potential for achieving major impact. And then we noticed that social entrepreneurship 2.0 kind of shifted the field to focus more on organizational excellence. And that's where there were a lot of terrific contributions from business schools—your own, I'm sure, included. People focused on how do you actually build a sustained, high-impact enterprise or organization?
We've learned a lot from the business sector, but today, social entrepreneurship 3.0, what we argue is that this is going beyond the individual founders or even the individual ventures and institutions to trying to unleash the change-making potential of everybody and their interactions. This is a contagious process. Now, why you see it spreading is because we're having people awaken to their own power and potential. The way change is happening is not about the big man theory. It's from me, we, to all of us. And for that, you don't need a grand theory. You just need to get started. If you see the litter on the sidewalk, you bend over and you start picking it up.
And once the creative juices are going and we start talking with our friends and colleagues, we will figure out a solution to whatever's bothering us in that community that day. The real secret, you see, is that we're never going to run out of problems. Once we solve one thing, a new one pops up. That's just what poor President Obama faces: a steady stream of new problems. And the way to get out of it is not to say, oh, the big man, President Obama, or whoever your leader is, has to solve them.
No, the real solution is the dramatic proliferation of change makers, of problem-solvers, everywhere on the planet. We've got to have change makers in Singapore. We've got to have them in London. We've got to have them in Chicago. We've got to have them in Dakar. We've got to have them in every place. So if you're looking at the problems of slums in Nairobi, those people in those slums in Nairobi are change makers. That's the power that social entrepreneurship is unleashing.
Anita Brick: It seems like people certainly have a strong passion for solving problems and the cause. They also have a passion for creating an enterprise. So there may be still some of that “me hero” piece to it. How does someone start there and evolve into the change-making potential of everyone? I mean, how do you take that drive that may have some profit motive to it, even if it is a smaller profit motive, and actually evolve?
Susan Davis: The brilliance of microfinance often is attributed to Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, or … a son of the founder of BRAC and other institutions. What I argue is that their brilliance was in creating an institution that could help unlock the power and the genius and that sense of agency of millions of women and men who are able to then borrow money without collateral and figure out how to launch their own small venture, but earn enough to be able to support themselves and their family.
The idea that your venture, your idea, helps to create that chain reaction of bringing out the potential of others. That's one of the great secrets of the sauce. That's where the ideas that really catch on go viral. And you see that in the power of YouTube or eBay, and you see it in social change strategies that help people to stay in school and have, you know, high educational attainment or figure out ways to provide healthcare.
I think profit is a very important tool and byproduct of having the right strategy in being able to deliver real value to society, whether a product or service, and figuring out how you use the magic of the marketplace, which has so many really important contributions, with an understanding of market failures.
Anita Brick: What do you mean by that?
Susan Davis: There are lots of folks who just are not served by the market—who don't have access.
Anita Brick: Oh, I see what you mean.
Susan Davis: Some markets fail in this country, in the US, to provide healthcare for everybody or to be able to, you know, address our problems of access to credit, not to mention in poorer countries, we don't deal with the external realities created by pollution.
It's because of market failures that we've got a lot of our social problems. And that's where you're really looking for hybrids. If you can figure out how to pay for whatever your idea is—through either cross-subsidized tiered pricing mechanisms or by offering something that is really in great demand—for example, BRAC. We have over 85,000 very low-income women, village women, often not even literate, who are self-employed as community health promoters.
They volunteer; their friends push them to volunteer because they're a caring person. They've often helped to take care of people in their own families with HIV/AIDS or other things. They then get equipped not only with more training and information, but they also have a couple of dozen products that they can sell to their neighbors, and they go door to door and be able to, with a small markup, sell some health products, or they can sell reading glasses, they can do the test and provide those.
So it's a very important health service. Plus they earn something so that they're able to cover the opportunity cost of their time. And that's a business model, you see, that works at the base of the economic pyramid.
Anita Brick: And it also works as you move up the pyramid too.
Susan Davis: Absolutely. You see, I think we're really at the Kitty Hawk stage of social entrepreneurship and the power of enterprise coming in. Major, you know, Fortune 100 companies and all are just awakening to this concept. Quaker Foods had me come and speak with them. You have Kraft, PepsiCo, all of them, or they're all looking at health and well-being now and how to completely revamp their corporate strategies.
You look at Cisco, they've changed their mission to be about human networks and changing the way we live and work and share the planet. Once you have the power of corporations looking at this space—because they know that their employees and their shareholders have changed what they want from corporations in the world—you're going to start seeing major opportunities for social intrapreneurs to go inside these corporations and be part of it.
Huge impact. Imagine if you join and can help spearhead the transformation of business. Ultimately, you're not going to have such a big gulf between social and traditional business. We're going to have a transformation and a new hybrid where we will expect everything that a business, you know, does has some positive contribution for society beyond the employment impact. There won't be market demand for companies that do harm.
Anita Brick: Well, it's interesting. When you look at all the transparency because of the internet, and you see that a lot, I mean, one of the evening students asked about at some point in the future, being a social venture will actually be a competitive advantage. It sounds like it already is, and that larger enterprises are seeing that and creating, I mean, not a separate entity, but creating or recreating a culture that brings that forth more. And I know some of them are just advertising campaigns. But you look at Pepsi's campaign about funding these small projects to do good.
Susan Davis: I actually think your student is on to something: that the competitive advantage that can come from having right alignment and being ahead of the curve, or at least riding the wave, at the top of the wave, is really important. And if companies keep their head in the sand and don't get on top of this, they will be put out of business by the consumers and the investors that don't want to put up with it.
You see, if we liked our choices right now, you know, when we're happy with the status quo, we wouldn't see this incredible burst of innovation and enthusiasm. Students all around the world right now are completely determined to have it all. They want to be able to do something meaningful in the world today and make a living. You know, they don't want to do what their parents' generation did by working and killing themselves at some job they didn't believe in; helping some company, you know, they didn't think was doing something right in the world get rich, and then finally, when they're old and retired, give back—that model, that's been pushed out.
Anita Brick: Oh yeah. That's all gone. Yeah.
Susan Davis: That's why you just see people trying to figure out how, well, how do we do it? And we don't yet have perfect markets where, you know, you can get the resources you need. It's still tough. It's hard to find the information. But there are all kinds of new magazines, new websites, new services, everything is being invented. That's why it's a great time.
When people look at the field, you can actually spot so many opportunities right now along the whole value chain. Everything that exists for traditional business has to, in fact, be created and invented for the social business. We have to be able to be networked in ways that make us highly efficient and productive. Again, back to the collaboration. Ashoka is—and Bill Drayton, the founder of that, is talking a lot about now, this new era of figuring out how we collaborate and work together differently.
You see it with high-tech firms, where there's collaboration around operating standards and some basic things, and then there's competition—competing like hell for market share. So it's competition, and that may be what's happening in the social space.
Anita Brick: It's interesting. Are there specific magazines or websites that you would recommend that people who are interested check out?
Susan Davis: Oh, there's so many we list in our book. In terms of magazines, you've got [...] a new social media site that David has just launched. All of these are sources of positive news about social innovation that's going on around the world. If you only read traditional media and you just hear about all the problems and nothing about the solutions, you'll be totally bummed out and depressed, and you won't have the energy to get up. If you look at the social enterprise sites, for example, Next Billion or Beyond Profit out of India, you'll get turned on and excited, and you'll be constantly fed with a stream of social business ideas, and that will spark your own imagination.
That's really important—keep feeding yourself with a steady stream of innovation, because that's how we connect the dots. And often it is in the intersection of different disciplines and different fields where the real breakthroughs will come.
Anita Brick: You've talked about how it's still hard to get funding out there. There were two questions that I thought were kind of interesting. One was very basic—like, how do I raise startup funds? And then the other one, which I think was sort of at the other end of the continuum, is what are key issues in taking a social enterprise public with regard to funding, as it is right now, whether you're in those super early stage, you know, the equivalent of the angel investing, are you ready to IPO? What are some things that you're seeing on the funding side along that continuum?
Susan Davis: The traditional sources for startup capital, whether you're social or traditional business, usually come from yourself and your family and friends. I don't see a lot of change in that. People need to often do a day job, work on their venture at night, or vice versa. Have their partner do a straight job, or they get to basically underwrite the startup of their venture idea. Parents and relatives and all of that often will believe in the person and give the initial startup support.
And the angel investor who comes in wants to see, you know, what we call skin in the game, right? You want to see the investment of that person in ... And maybe that's why the struggle, you know, does pay off. Because it's often if you do get going and not wait for something on a silver platter, often it can be rewarded then by the small but growing network of angel investors. There's not a lot of foundations and organized sources of support. The better-known ones, like the Echoing Green Foundation or Ashoka, that are providing stipends through an award process to social entrepreneurs, is often most welcome.
There are others that are growing, and we list a lot of them in the book. But when you get to growth capital, that's been one of the stumbling blocks. So there are some folks that are working on trying to borrow a page from the investment banking world. In fact, some folks from Goldman Sachs have created a group called SeaChange, and they're looking to raise growth capital for education ventures in the US … the New Profit Foundation, that's also tried to look at that.
And these are almost IPO-like capital raises in terms of impact investing. There's probably even a faster growth curve than just philanthropic capital, grant money. Free money is harder to find, always. Even though we've got thousands of foundations in the US and growing numbers in other countries, the place where you have the intersection between investors who will accept different rates of return, that field is called impact investing.
Now, it's understanding that somewhere between the double-digit returns of the traditional venture capital world and the 100 percent negative return of grants giving money away, there's a huge continuum. There's now a global association of impact investors so that they network themselves. There will be growing conferences and again, publications to help people understand the field.
But ultimately it means if you can figure out how to take either debt or equity or both and have some kind of payback with a reasonable rate of return, whether it's between [...], the 3 percent, 4 percent returns that are offered to ordinary folks for investing in microfinance to the high single-digit or low double-digit returns of some environmental ventures, you're starting to see a stronger appetite. BRAC raised a loan fund for our work in Africa in microfinance. We offered investors two classes of notes: an 8 percent return for 65 percent of the fund and a 5 percent return for 35 percent of the fund with a kicker if we didn't have to draw down on that.
It was a $62.6 million capital fund that took us about a year to raise. We pulled the capital from European and North American social investors. But there are institutions out there—microfinance has gotten very organized, has really grown up, so that there is a capital market and you even have pension funds, you know, that are looking to invest. You have major banks, Citibank, JP Morgan, that have business windows that operate in the space, and that's what's coming for the other sectors that make up social enterprise.
You've already got a few funds that are operating and looking at investments in healthcare and energy and water and education, even. This is the exciting part. And what's out there for your graduates and alums—they're going to invent, you know, the missing institutions. It may be that you have to invent the missing funds that provide the right kind of capital at the right time as part of it. I've seen so much change in the last 20 years. It's unbelievable.
Anita Brick: Wow. Are you seeing a lot of differences in social enterprises across the globe, whether it's in Asia or Europe or the US? Are you seeing differences or are there more similarities or more differences?
Susan Davis: Well, I think the creativity that's come out of Asia in particular has been just awe-inspiring. And I really see, because I had the chance to live in Bangladesh in the ’80s, to me, that was the birthplace of what we understand to be social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, and microfinance. If I hadn't maybe had the privilege to work with BRAC and Grameen and see what they were able to do with creating the first social venture capital funds and pioneering.
Each of them, more than a couple of dozen companies and enterprises, all creating profit that ultimately gets used back to do social good. Abed and Yunus didn't get rich. They helped low-income folks build their assets and get out of poverty. That's where I've seen enormous innovation. India now is just exploding with innovation in this space. In fact, there's been the first landscape review on what's happening in India by the Beyond Profit magazine, and it's on their website. In India, the business schools, public policy, and others have started offering courses over the last decade.
I think also in China, it's much less well known. But you've got real pockets of innovation and champions in this space too. I was just at a conference, where educators in entrepreneurship gather in the US, and there was a professor from one of the Chinese institutions trying to invite people to come to his conference.
More than 15 years ago, I had a Chinese woman sleeping on my couch.She was putting together the first social venture in environmental education, and she was going mainstream with television. But green TV, you know, was a really bold idea. And I think it was last year or the year before, she was recognized at the Clinton Global Initiative as one of the citizen pioneers. It made me weep.
Anita Brick: Wow. And you saw it way back when.
Susan Davis: I'm telling you, you know them when you see them. I have been so blessed to work all over the world. I can tell a social entrepreneur, you know, when I need them. The authenticity, the passion, the commitment, that laser intensity comes through. And, you know, people have real joy in doing this kind of work. And I think the reward comes from actually being in service by solving problems, by creating the smile that comes on that mothers face who, you know, can feed her kids that day. That's the payoff in my mind. We've got a lot to do. And every day …
Anita Brick: Yeah, really.
Susan Davis: Every day there seems to be more. Where I find great encouragement is every day there's so many more people who want to be part of this movement.
Anita Brick: And it sounds like you can't be a fake social entrepreneur and succeed. You can't pretend to hide behind a social enterprise. Whatever structure you decide to use when you know all along that's really not your motive. You're just jumping on the bandwagon.
Susan Davis: People are too smart and too cool and savvy these days. Greenwashing, blue washing, whatever B.S. stuff, just doesn't cut it eventually. We all know what's real and you can pull anything off for a short time. But for the long haul, it requires authenticity. And the creativity that is coming right now is very exciting, because I think there are a lot of examples of great social entrepreneurship that don't have a business model.
There are growing numbers of strategies that do find a business model. Even being able to talk about business models when you're talking about social change used to be an oxymoron. So now the application of our best talent around the world on how we do things differently, so that, yeah, we can pay the bills and keep the thing going and be of service. It's a paradigm shift.
Anita Brick: Yeah, you're right. And one of the alums had asked a question about, well, what's the right legal structure. It sounds like that's evolving too. It used to be that they were all, at least in the US, you know, 501(c)(3)s. And today there is limited profitability and all of those things. So even those things are evolving very rapidly.
Anita Brick: Right.
Susan Davis: The law is an area of great social innovation. There are lots of lawyers as well as doctors and entrepreneurs and farmers who become social entrepreneurs. It's really a meta profession. You don't have to go to business school to be a social entrepreneur. You can be in any school. You shift how you want to see that profession. You see the problems. They become opportunities for you to change it. Whether you're a doctor in Argentina that decides, I'm going to change the way people give birth, or you're a lawyer who decides, we've got to have a new way to understand social purpose organizations and deal with tax and other regulatory factors differently.
Anita Brick: Do you have time for one more question?
Susan Davis: Sure.
Anita Brick: OK, great. It sounds like the first step is really to look at their current profession a little bit differently. But what are two or three things that someone can begin doing right now and action that they can take to move toward social entrepreneurship, either starting an organization or joining one?
Susan Davis: Well, we were talking a little bit about this before in terms of volunteering and joining a board. I guess the simplest thing is to ask yourself, what inspires me? If you can find sources of inspiration, start using them. If you have an idea, step forward with that. Claim it, own it, then step back and learn the history. Why are we in the state that we're in? What has been tried before? What is that problem? Why do you think that idea would really work?
Then I would say after you step forward with the idea and look back with reflection on the history, go to the right, take a look at the market, understand how the market sees it, what the market opportunities and forces are. Then go to the left, take a look at the role of the state and government and where social justice issues come in. Shake it up and then jump.
You're going to find, through a process of investigation and reflection, looking at role models, people who’ve tried and worked on things in the past. You're going to find the best path for you. There are lots of resources out there, but if you try to do what you do best and you begin with some end in mind, you're going to love the journey.
Anita Brick: Great! That was awesome. Thank you so much. You are obviously very knowledgeable and very wise, so thank you for making the time. I know ….
Susan Davis: I'm just lucky.
Anita Brick: Well, there you go. You know, actually I think that's part of it too, because when you see people who feel grateful for the journey and appreciative, they seem to get more opportunity somehow, I'm glad that you feel that way. And again, thank you for the work that you're doing.
Susan Davis: Thank you.
Anita Brick: Susan has mentioned BRAC a few times, and BRAC, which Susan is the CEO of, is at BRACusa.org. And again Susan's book is Social Entrepreneurship. Great book. Thank you so much for your time. It's been incredibly enlightening. And thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast. Keep advancing.
“How can I make a positive difference in the world and be profitable?” This is a question more and more Chicago Booth students and alumni are asking themselves, and they’re finding the answer in social-entrepreneurial ventures. In this CareerCast, Susan Davis, president & CEO of BRAC USA, shares her unique historical perspective on opportunities, challenges, and trends in social entrepreneurship from her diverse work at the Ford Foundation, as a senior advisor to New York University’s Reynolds Program on Social Entrepreneurship, and as the coauthor of Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.
Susan Davis is a thought leader in international development and civil society innovation. She is a founder and current president & CEO of BRAC USA, a newly created organization to support BRAC’s global expansion to Africa and other countries in Asia. In addition, she was a founding board member and chair of the Grameen Foundation and current board member. She serves on Ashoka’s international board committee that selects Ashoka Fellows. She is also senior advisor to New York University’s Reynolds Program on Social Entrepreneurship. Previously she led Ashoka’s Global Academy for Social Entrepreneurship, cofounded the University Network for Social Entrepreneurship, and oversaw Ashoka’s expansion to the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.
In addition, she served as a senior advisor to the director general of the International Labor Organization. Prior to that, she led the global advocacy group Women's Environment & Development Organization. She has extensive microcredit experience from her years with the Ford Foundation in Bangladesh and from her work with Women’s World Banking. She also served as a funder and volunteer representative to start Ashoka Bangladesh. Earlier, she was the assistant director of the export trading company of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey. She serves on numerous other boards, including Project Enterprise, Sirleaf Market Women’s Fund, and African Women’s Development Fund USA. She is on Mary Robinson’s Advisory Council of Realizing Rights: the Ethical Globalization Initiative and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was educated at Georgetown, Harvard, and Oxford Universities.
Building Social Business: The New Kind of Capitalism That Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs by Muhammad Yunus (2010)
Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know by David Bornstein and Susan Davis (2010)
Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise by Kevin Lynch and Julius Walls (2009)
The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World by John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan (2008)
Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change edited by Alex Nicholls (2008)
Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World by Wilford Welch (2008)
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein (2007)
Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs: Enhancing the Performance of Your Enterprising Nonprofit by J. Gregory Dees, Jed Emerson, and Peter Economy (2002)