"Social entrepreneurship” has taken the nonprofit and philanthropic world by storm.
The social sector has glorified the rugged individuality of social entrepreneurship: we’ve created powerful mythology about the lone pioneer with a grand vision of sparking transformational social change by igniting a movement or by eradicating a social problem. Fellowships, incubators, graduate school programs and more have all sprouted up to ride this wave of excitement around the promise of marrying business, innovation and social good.
And this has not been wasted energy and attention. Social entrepreneurs truly are changing the world every day. Causing many passionate young people to believe they can only advance their nonprofit career by becoming a social entrepreneur.
Be a social INTRApreneur!
But all this hoopla around social entrepreneurship generally misses the innovators within nonprofits and foundations: "social intrapreneurs." I’m worried that we’ve forgotten about the smart, committed, young nonprofit professionals that work tirelessly, day-in and day-out to make their organizations better, faster and stronger.
We hear the fantastic stories of these wild-eyed, tenacious, Lady-Luck-harnessing social entrepreneurs who have given up everything to follow their visions. And we don’t see ourselves. We are inspired. We are awed. But we feel distant… their reality does not seem like ours. We don’t have that voracious commitment to our own brand new idea. Instead, we have a commitment to a cause we know we care about. We are strengthening and refining programs in our communities through existing organizations. We are working hard to support our coworkers, our partners and our constituents.
That’s okay! We all can be social innovators -- and advance our nonprofit careers -- without having to start new organizations and/or having to pursue our own, amazingly unique and novel ideas. As social intrapreneurs, we can change the world by working within our current organizations. Existing organizations have incredible assets: relationships with funders, elected officials and community leaders; partnerships; financial reserves; an army of staff; thousands of members, constituents, etc. These, in fact, are the assets required to create large-scale, transformational social change.
And a special set of habits exist that can take these assets and turn them into sustained organizational and programmatic innovation. These habits are primed for being adopted and spread by young nonprofit professionals. My subsequent posts will explore these habits and the potential of young nonprofit professionals to advance their career by becoming social intrapreneurs.
