In the late 19th century, Jane Addams saw Gilded Age America as plainly carved into two halves. On the one hand were “the favored, who express
their sense of the social obligation by gifts of money,” and on the other, “the unfavored who express it by clamoring for a “share” – both of them actuated by a vague sense of justice.” Yet for the founder of Hull House – a social center providing the Chicago working classes with educational and political opportunity – this division rebelled against her very sense of American democracy. In 1893 she wrote: “the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain…until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”
As I have become more deeply involved with the social entrepreneurship movement, the ongoing presidential campaign has often given me cause to think of Addams. Perhaps more than any other social innovator of her day, Addams wrestled publicly with the relationship between our individual and collective moral action and its reflection on the state of our democracy. For her, America was not an ideal of equality to believe in, but a process of working towards social justice, in which everyone must take part.
A legacy of restorative social innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit in the pursuit of a more perfect union are at the core of Barack Obama’s appeal to the new class of change agents we’re calling “social entrepreneurs.” Indeed, while there are a bevy of policy reasons that social entrepreneurs should be committed to the campaign – a new focus on national service, a social investment fund for social enterprise, a major investment in the clean technology solutions so many entrepreneurs now pursue, even a nonprofit capacity building center with the words “Social Entrepreneurship” in the title – our community’s passion for the candidate comes far more from a sense that he understands the tradition of which we are a part: the American spirit of social entrepreneurship.
The spirit of social entrepreneurship is woven deep into the American story. Decades before the Declaration of Independence, American Quakers began the first sustained abolitionist movement against slavery in history, developing the techniques that future leaders would build upon to create an unstoppable global paradigm shift. Later, at the dawn of the Industrial Age of American commerce created wealth never before seen in the world, a new breed of “Progressive” social reformers including Jane Addams and photographer Jacob Riis changed the way we saw the urban poor and helped return their stories to the center of the American story.
In the period of turbulent upheaval in the 1950s and 1960s, social innovators helped the disenfranchised and dispossessed find new ways to speak truth to power. Despite Sarah Barracuda’s snarky cynicism, the traditions of community organizing were the testing grounds in which Obama came to believe that real change comes from the bottom up. And while movement politics and community organizing may seem far away from many of the “bottom-of-the-pyramid” market-based solutions so many social entrepreneurs pursue today, both strategies share the desire for those who were once treated as passive to become the lead actors in their own destiny.
The job of the entrepreneur is to move resources from an area of lower yield to an area of higher yield. For a social entrepreneur, this means disavowing the orthodoxy of social change in order to find the solution best suited to the problem. It means acting in the space between the world as it should be and the world as it is. The title of Obama’s landmark speech on race, “A More Perfect Union,” reflected just how deeply routed in the American story this process can be.
Throughout this campaign, Obama has reminded us that the great task of American civic life is to build a country and a world that reflect the high ideals set forth in our founding documents but not yet achieved. He has painted a picture of the American people as imperfect vessels for a perfect dream, and has asserted America’s greatest asset is a vision of a better future in the hands of its citizens. This is the energy and spirit that cascades through the social entrepreneurship movement, from students working for a more equitable education system with Teach for America to Paul Farmer and his Partners in Health, who refuse to believe that the poor should be denied access to medicine because a global system has priced them out.
And it’s that energy the next president will have to harness as they face a set of challenges unlike anything in recent history. To solve the problems of the 21st century, they will have to enlist the help of social entrepreneurs already on the ground. But they will have to remind us that our work is not solely in the service of any individual’s particular mission, but part and parcel of building a more just society in which the “good” has been secured for all. That is the true “scale” we seek to achieve.
A new generation of change-makers is ready to inherit American spirit of social entrepreneurship, and Barack Obama is the man to lead us.
http://socialentrepreneurship.change.org/blog/view/barack_obama_and_the_american_spirit_of_social_entrepreneurship
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