I've been thinking about this for the last few days, and I'd love your contributions to this thought experiment. It seems to me, I've only come across 3 types of business models for serving low-income/impoverished people.

The social entrepreneurship movement is making clear gains. Social enterprise start-ups pop up regularly, and there’s been a noticeable injection of new vocabulary employed by both grantmakers and applicants – a good indicator of shifting priorities. From my own vantage point I’ve seen a drastic increase in the number of people – many of them under 30 - willing or aspiring to identify as social entrepreneurs.

There is a great deal of interest, instruction and debate around the how of social enterprise: how to start, how to manage, how to fund, etc. As I see it, this is partly to meet growing demand for practical knowledge, partly the process of deciphering what works and doesn’t in the huge experiment that is social enterprise, and partly our response to bolster its credibility as a new way forward.

Is anybody talking about the why?

This weekend is YSEC’s Re:Vision Conference and, in a separate event, we’re launching our pilot YSEC Fund event with the YSEC Pitch Competition. I wanted to say a few words about the Fund, the Pitch Competition, and the amazing young social entrepreneurs that are making this happen.

The Pitch Competition was an idea that started at the YSEC office at around 5AM, when a late strategic working session led to Assaf and I scribbling away on a piece of paper. We realized that we could offer a low-cost loan (for us and for them) to social entrepreneurs. The structure allowed us to connect young social entrepreneurs to each other, provide small loans, and also have the amount of funding increase incrementally each time the loan was given out. We were particularly excited about the fact that every loan recipient has a hand in choosing out another project that they think is worth funding: a mechanism in which “lessons learned” from previous loans can be passed on from former loan recipients to future ones.

I recently attended an event of the Toronto Entrepreneur Advisory Roundtable where a question emerged about how to time the transition from working on your idea as a side project to making the dive in head first. Good question. And probably without a formulaic enough answer to calm the asker’s nerves. 

When you peel back the onion, at the heart of the ask here is how to know whether an idea is good enough; whether it’s the kind of idea you bet a comfortable lifestyle on. You know you’re certain about it, but what about everybody else?

Beginning in 11th grade, my parents made several unsuccessful attempts to enrol me in classes on business fundamentals. It just wasn't my "thing" and I instinctively shied away from everything business because I thought it ran counter to my pursuit of social justice. Business fosters the kind of greed that has made carnage of retirement savings lately, whereas social engagement is about organizing grassroots movements. Or so an idealistic teen thought.