PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, SOCIAL INNOVATION, LAITY
Matt Overton: Why I started a social enterprise at my church
Matt Overton: Why I started a social enterprise at my church
Why I started a social enterprise at my church YOUTH PASTOR'S EXPERIENCE SAYS SOCIAL ENTERPRISE CAN RENEW A CONGREGATIONThe Columbia Future Forge, which trains and mentors students in faith, life and work, is one of the social enterprises created by the author. Photo courtesy of The Columbia Future Forge
Social enterprises might be a risky and unusual form of ministry, but a youth pastor argues that they can bring new life to the church.
Editor’s note: Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and Youth Ministry Innovators in Vancouver, Washington, are among the organizations recently honored with the Traditioned Innovation Award(link is external) from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. The following is the fourth in an occasional series of articles about the award winners.
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Many people who learn about the social enterprises at our church ask me why I started them.
The simple answer: I was tired.
Mostly, I was tired of doing ministry in the same old ways. I was tired of pretending that our programs were accomplishing what they claimed to when so many of them seemed hollow. (Any youth pastor who has ever come crashing down from the post-mission-trip high can attest to this.)
I was tired of reading books by experts that framed the problem but offered no solutions beyond theological generalities, slight adjustments to existing techniques or ideas feasible only for wealthy congregations.
I saw that social enterprise -- essentially, a business with a social good in mind -- represented a new kind of experiment that offered a truly new way forward in ministry. The church needs more of those.
Social enterprises might be a risky and unusual form of ministry, but a youth pastor argues that they can bring new life to the church.
Editor’s note: Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and Youth Ministry Innovators in Vancouver, Washington, are among the organizations recently honored with the Traditioned Innovation Award(link is external) from Leadership Education at Duke Divinity. The following is the fourth in an occasional series of articles about the award winners.
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Many people who learn about the social enterprises at our church ask me why I started them.
The simple answer: I was tired.
Mostly, I was tired of doing ministry in the same old ways. I was tired of pretending that our programs were accomplishing what they claimed to when so many of them seemed hollow. (Any youth pastor who has ever come crashing down from the post-mission-trip high can attest to this.)
I was tired of reading books by experts that framed the problem but offered no solutions beyond theological generalities, slight adjustments to existing techniques or ideas feasible only for wealthy congregations.
I saw that social enterprise -- essentially, a business with a social good in mind -- represented a new kind of experiment that offered a truly new way forward in ministry. The church needs more of those.
MOWTOWN TEEN LAWN CARE AMONG 2016 WINNERS(LINK IS EXTERNAL)Leadership Education at Duke Divinity recognizes institutions that act creatively in the face of challenges while remaining faithful to their mission and convictions. Winners receive $10,000 to continue their work.
My experiments focused on jobs training with enterprises called Mowtown Teen Lawn Care and The Columbia Future Forge,(link is external) as well as Youth Ministry Innovators,(link is external) a website and blog designed for writing about the church as a vehicle for social enterprise.
But a church could try any number of business models.
There’s more to it, of course.
When I arrived at my church seven years ago, I knew that the gospel was about risk. I knew that if the American church was ever going to be born again in the 21st century, it would need people willing to risk everything for kingdom ideas that were worth their very blood, sweat and tears. The church needed to start swinging for the fences.
So I started a social enterprise, first, because I wanted to attempt something great -- something risky -- for God.
The gospel is, at its core, a risky proposition by God in behalf of human beings. It promises no security, despite our best attempts to deify security and regularity in our worshipping communities.
I wanted to find a way to give myself more fully to the gospel and justice of Jesus Christ -- something more than doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result. I wanted something bolder than the staid mainline missions efforts I had grown up with.
Second, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of perpetuating disengaged faith. I wanted to help my congregation -- both youth and adults -- figure out what their Sunday faith has to do with their Monday life.
Social enterprise allows participants to engage a myriad of life gifts and professional gifts every time they show up. To be a part of a social enterprise-based ministry, participants must be fully engaged in whatever the enterprise is. They are essential to the success or failure of the mission.
Too often, our churches make people passive recipients of ministry and even of faith itself. When they don’t get a call from anyone at church when they haven’t been there in four months, they think the show simply goes on without them. They feel excluded or ancillary to the mission of God. They think their presence, passion, talents and dollars aren’t really needed. I wanted my congregation to discover the value of each member’s engagement.
Third, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of our acts of charity and mission taking away people’s dignity. So many of our charitable works place us in positions of power and influence over those we serve.
I had been offering the typical camperships and canned-food drives to the low-income youth in my group so they could be part of our middle-class model -- only to see those students drift away, weary or embarrassed of being the focus of our love and charity. I wanted them to be a part of a ministry where they were full, vital participants.
People hear the Jesus story and want to be involved. They don’t want simply to be helped.
We need ministries that actually enable people to move forward with their lives. Social enterprise allows us to do that in creative ways.
At our church, we offer job skills, training and experience. We talk about faith and about people coming fully alive (John 10:10), but we don’t give our participants much of anything. Their dignity remains intact, and they are given a chance to move forward.
Finally, I started a social enterprise because I was tired of losing our middle- and upper-class youth and families to outside activities.
I didn’t blame them. In the current culture, parents are afraid for their children’s economic future and feel pressured to enroll them in activities they believe will enhance that future.
It’s hard for a low-accountability and low-participation youth ministry model to compete with a state robotics tournament or a soccer club in which a family has invested thousands of dollars and hours.
But I was convinced that the church could compete. What we needed was something that the kids wanted to be a part of. Something that would engage their passions and invigorate their faith.
I figured that if we used employment as our model, kids from a variety of backgrounds might actually show up. I was right.
In addition, this model required heavy adult commitment and involvement. Social enterprise gave my adults an essential role in our youth ministry. They weren’t consuming church. Kingdom work began to consume them. It was enlivening dry bones and scratching itches they didn’t know they had.
We have adults investing unbelievable amounts of time and energy and their personal gifts. We think it might be the zephyr of God, and I am gobsmacked with emotion every time I think about what I am seeing.
Social enterprises have to compete in the agora at marketplace speed. They demand risk taking, commitment, empowerment and passion. People want something to lay down their lives for. If we want to compete for people’s precious time, we are going to need to give them that.
That’s why I started a social enterprise.
Read more from Matt Overton »
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIPFaith & Leadership
VOCATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, INSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP
Becca Stevens: The journey of social enterprise
IDEAS THAT IMPACT: SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIPFaith & Leadership
VOCATION, CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP, INSTITUTIONAL LEADERSHIP
Becca Stevens: The journey of social enterprise
The journey of social enterprise
Being a leader sometimes means feeling unsure of the path, says the leader of Thistle Farms and the Magdalene community, two Christian institutions that are helping women recover from prostitution.
When I was young, I learned to pray, “Jesus, Lord, my friend and guide, please be always at my side.” It was comforting to imagine Jesus holding my hand and guiding me on my way so I would never get lost.
As I grew up, the road felt more precarious. I didn’t seem to be able to find a clear guide; there was not a simple fork in the road where I got to choose a sweet, snow-covered lane.
In fact, like many people led to start new ministries, I felt compelled to forge a new path. It began in 1997, when I (and others) took the first steps to found the not-for-profit Magdalene community in Nashville, Tenn., to serve women who have survived lives of addiction, prostitution and trafficking.
We opened up a single home and invited five women to come and live in community at no cost for two years. We didn’t take any public funding and avowed that we wanted to be a witness to the truth that love is the most powerful source of change in the world.
One important part of the early journey was to be clear about the mission. Our model was simple, influenced by the sixth-century Benedictine Rule, grounded in hospitality, reverence and love. As a community, we created 24 spiritual principles for living together and published them in a collaboratively written book, “Find Your Way Home.”
But though the mission felt clear, the path of leading this community felt uniquely narrow and unsure at times.
There have been times I barely navigated the confusion that settled in on me like a thick mountain fog. One of the first residents, Julia, relapsed about 18 months after we opened the program. She fought against the pain and abuse she had suffered, but less than two months after her relapse, she was tortured and murdered by a john in the cab of a semi truck.
It was heartbreaking, and made me question my ability to lead this community. And it wasn’t just Julia’s story that was painful. All the women served by Magdalene had traveled down roads more perilous and broken than I could imagine. On average, the women were first raped between the ages of 7 and 11. They had seen the undersides of bridges, the short side of justice and the backhand of anger long before they saw the inside of prison walls.
The dedication and determination needed to travel this path meant that I had much to learn. I needed to learn to ask for financial and professional help. I needed to work on healing my own woundedness from being sexually abused as a child. I needed to commit more of my life to this calling.
About five years into the work, it was clear that it was time to create another new path. We were growing more concerned about the economic well-being of the women in Magdalene. So we began a social enterprise. Thistle Farms(link is external) -- named for the tough weed with a beautiful purple flower that the women use to make paper -- produces all-natural bath and body care products to promote healing and offer steady employment.
Starting a business meant that I was on a steep learning curve again. Running a bath-and-body-care company wasn’t what I prepared for in divinity school, and I had to learn about branding, marketing, sustainability and management.
When we first began, for example, I didn’t know that having employee manuals and strict manufacturing procedures would reduce stress in the workplace. I didn’t know how to talk about love and still be seen as relevant in the marketplace.
I now have a clearer lens through which to read the Gospels -- I can read stories like the Good Samaritan and see myself as the guy in the ditch who has been rescued by many good people. The work has also helped me see that the imperative moral issue facing the church is the suffering of others. I can see the stranger as God and feel the transformational power of love.
Learning how to lead a social enterprise and a residential community has been the greatest gift I could have asked for as a pastor, and I didn’t even know I needed to ask for it. I didn’t know that without this work, I would have been lost in my vocation.
The work is not just transforming me and the women I am serving. It is also transforming the wider community. Both the products and the women who sell them are educating others on the myths of prostitution; they are teaching that women do recover, that longer prison sentences and more prisons are not the answer, and that there is a crucial need for more residential communities.
No one does this kind of work alone. To forge new paths in ministry is truly a community endeavor. Throughout the past 15 years, volunteers and staff with needed expertise have repeatedly come along -- often just in time. Right when we needed to expand our line of products, a chemist walked through the door. Just when we sought to gain access to a national chain, I ran into a friend who knew the president of the board!
Residents and graduates of Magdalene help lead the company, as well as learning skills in manufacturing, packaging, marketing, sales and administration. Thistle Farms now has products in 220 retail outlets and serves as a best-practice model in the United States, reminding ministries they can hold tightly to their core values and still be successful as businesses.
We now are hoping to share our expertise to help even more women. This year we have welcomed more than 700 people from around the world into our immersion day programs to show other communities how to replicate our model. We have formal partnerships with four other women’s social enterprises. In the past year, the women stood before audiences at more than 300 events, articulating our mission and courageously sharing their personal stories.
If you visit the 11,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and studio, you will see a communal vision that is still forming. We are only partway down the path, and we pray every day together for the grace to keep walking in community.
I have never found that simple fork in the road that I imagined as a child -- thank God. It has been all the twists and turns that have helped me find the place that feels just right to me. The view from here is breathtaking and fills me with gratitude.
Read more from Becca Stevens »
Faith & Leadership
ARTS & CULTURE, MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
David Bornstein: Unleash the change-making power
Being a leader sometimes means feeling unsure of the path, says the leader of Thistle Farms and the Magdalene community, two Christian institutions that are helping women recover from prostitution.
When I was young, I learned to pray, “Jesus, Lord, my friend and guide, please be always at my side.” It was comforting to imagine Jesus holding my hand and guiding me on my way so I would never get lost.
As I grew up, the road felt more precarious. I didn’t seem to be able to find a clear guide; there was not a simple fork in the road where I got to choose a sweet, snow-covered lane.
In fact, like many people led to start new ministries, I felt compelled to forge a new path. It began in 1997, when I (and others) took the first steps to found the not-for-profit Magdalene community in Nashville, Tenn., to serve women who have survived lives of addiction, prostitution and trafficking.
We opened up a single home and invited five women to come and live in community at no cost for two years. We didn’t take any public funding and avowed that we wanted to be a witness to the truth that love is the most powerful source of change in the world.
One important part of the early journey was to be clear about the mission. Our model was simple, influenced by the sixth-century Benedictine Rule, grounded in hospitality, reverence and love. As a community, we created 24 spiritual principles for living together and published them in a collaboratively written book, “Find Your Way Home.”
But though the mission felt clear, the path of leading this community felt uniquely narrow and unsure at times.
There have been times I barely navigated the confusion that settled in on me like a thick mountain fog. One of the first residents, Julia, relapsed about 18 months after we opened the program. She fought against the pain and abuse she had suffered, but less than two months after her relapse, she was tortured and murdered by a john in the cab of a semi truck.
It was heartbreaking, and made me question my ability to lead this community. And it wasn’t just Julia’s story that was painful. All the women served by Magdalene had traveled down roads more perilous and broken than I could imagine. On average, the women were first raped between the ages of 7 and 11. They had seen the undersides of bridges, the short side of justice and the backhand of anger long before they saw the inside of prison walls.
The dedication and determination needed to travel this path meant that I had much to learn. I needed to learn to ask for financial and professional help. I needed to work on healing my own woundedness from being sexually abused as a child. I needed to commit more of my life to this calling.
About five years into the work, it was clear that it was time to create another new path. We were growing more concerned about the economic well-being of the women in Magdalene. So we began a social enterprise. Thistle Farms(link is external) -- named for the tough weed with a beautiful purple flower that the women use to make paper -- produces all-natural bath and body care products to promote healing and offer steady employment.
Starting a business meant that I was on a steep learning curve again. Running a bath-and-body-care company wasn’t what I prepared for in divinity school, and I had to learn about branding, marketing, sustainability and management.
When we first began, for example, I didn’t know that having employee manuals and strict manufacturing procedures would reduce stress in the workplace. I didn’t know how to talk about love and still be seen as relevant in the marketplace.
I now have a clearer lens through which to read the Gospels -- I can read stories like the Good Samaritan and see myself as the guy in the ditch who has been rescued by many good people. The work has also helped me see that the imperative moral issue facing the church is the suffering of others. I can see the stranger as God and feel the transformational power of love.
Learning how to lead a social enterprise and a residential community has been the greatest gift I could have asked for as a pastor, and I didn’t even know I needed to ask for it. I didn’t know that without this work, I would have been lost in my vocation.
The work is not just transforming me and the women I am serving. It is also transforming the wider community. Both the products and the women who sell them are educating others on the myths of prostitution; they are teaching that women do recover, that longer prison sentences and more prisons are not the answer, and that there is a crucial need for more residential communities.
No one does this kind of work alone. To forge new paths in ministry is truly a community endeavor. Throughout the past 15 years, volunteers and staff with needed expertise have repeatedly come along -- often just in time. Right when we needed to expand our line of products, a chemist walked through the door. Just when we sought to gain access to a national chain, I ran into a friend who knew the president of the board!
Residents and graduates of Magdalene help lead the company, as well as learning skills in manufacturing, packaging, marketing, sales and administration. Thistle Farms now has products in 220 retail outlets and serves as a best-practice model in the United States, reminding ministries they can hold tightly to their core values and still be successful as businesses.
We now are hoping to share our expertise to help even more women. This year we have welcomed more than 700 people from around the world into our immersion day programs to show other communities how to replicate our model. We have formal partnerships with four other women’s social enterprises. In the past year, the women stood before audiences at more than 300 events, articulating our mission and courageously sharing their personal stories.
If you visit the 11,000-square-foot manufacturing facility and studio, you will see a communal vision that is still forming. We are only partway down the path, and we pray every day together for the grace to keep walking in community.
I have never found that simple fork in the road that I imagined as a child -- thank God. It has been all the twists and turns that have helped me find the place that feels just right to me. The view from here is breathtaking and fills me with gratitude.
Read more from Becca Stevens »
Faith & Leadership
ARTS & CULTURE, MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
David Bornstein: Unleash the change-making power
Unleash the change-making power
Institutional leaders today all face the same challenge, says author and journalist David Bornstein: How do I unleash the creative capacity of every person in our institution?
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, every institution is either busy dying or busy being born, said David Bornstein, a frequent writer on social innovation. There is no such thing as sustainability -- only continuous renewal.
Given the inevitability of change, leaders need to behave like social entrepreneurs, or intrapreneurs, turning everyone in their organizations into creative thinkers bold enough to remake their institutions every day, he said.
Bornstein, whose books have been translated into 20 languages, is the author, with Susan Davis, of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.”(link is external) He also wrote “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.” His first book, “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” chronicled the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank and the global emergence of microfinance as an anti-poverty strategy. He received the 2008 Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Bornstein spoke with Faith & Leadership about social entrepreneurship and lessons for institutional leaders. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: In your most recent book, “Social Entrepreneurship,” you talk about building institutions. What is the value of institutions?There’s this expression: “There’s nothing more powerful in the world than an idea whose time has come.” But that’s not true. There are lots of ideas whose time has come -- and some whose time has come and gone -- because of a lack of institutions to embed them in reality, or the wrong institutions.
Look at the institutions in the Islamic world that promote Wahhabism; look at what happens when you have institutions promoting that brand of Islam that are very powerful and very well-financed. What would the world look like today if the institutions promoting religious pluralism had the same amount of power and reach to challenge those ideas? Institutions make ideas real, whether they’re religious ideas or whether they’re practical, social change ideas.
Q: How do established institutions encourage, support and integrate entrepreneurship?There are two questions. One is, how do you create institutions that don’t already exist and breathe life into them? The next one is, how do you revitalize institutions that have been around for decades or hundreds of years? Really, the question of how to renew institutions gets to the question of entrepreneurship every bit as much as how to build them at the outset.
There is no such thing as sustainability. There is really only continuous renewal. Bob Dylan said, “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” To some degree, every institution is either busy dying or busy being born.
The question that every institution today faces is how do you unleash the change-making power of every single person in the institution? How do you turn everyone into a creative thinker who feels confident to try to advance an idea, someone who believes that it is his job or her job to improve upon things that they see and not just accept the status quo? How does the leadership of the institution communicate, reward people, excite people to see that their job is not merely to fulfill some function but to be a creative actor in the remaking of that institution every single day?
That’s an enormously difficult leadership challenge, one that requires extraordinary communication abilities. You now have essentially said, “Everybody in this institution is a creative actor. Now we have to work together, and what are we going to create together?” We have to be able to build teams.
We need empathy so that we can talk to each other even if we have different opinions about important questions. This is the challenge today in the field of social entrepreneurship, as people are building institutions across society. They’re all facing the same challenge, which is, how do I unleash the creative capacity of every single person in our institution and not just rely on 5 or 10 percent of the people to be the leaders?
Q: Do you have any examples of established institutions that have been successful in this kind of continuous renewal?If you look at Ashoka(link is external), for example, an organization that supports social entrepreneurship around the world, they expect every one of their employees to be an “intrapreneur,” which is an entrepreneur who works inside an institution.
If you look at the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, they expect their bank workers to be not just people who administer loans; their job is to help villagers solve their problems.
At companies like Google, a certain percentage of everyone’s time can be devoted to projects of their own choosing. Most of their innovations come from that 20 percent of their time when people can work on whatever they feel like, as long as it is something good for the company. If you look at organizations like City Year or Teach For America or the Acumen Fund, you’ll find the same pattern. They have to be unleashing the creative capacity of everyone in their organization, or they wouldn’t have come so far.
Q: In your new book you describe the process of entrepreneurship as one of leadership more than of creating the best ideas. How is that kind of leadership unleashed and developed?You have to break these things up into small boxes. From the point of recruitment, right from the outset when they come into an organization, you want to send them signals. You want to choose people who want to be creative actors.
We’re living in a world where people may be coming to a job with conditioning that makes them think, “I don’t want to be a creative actor. I want to know what’s expected of me, and I want to be able to deliver that and go home. It is too much pressure to have to be thinking all the time and to come up with new ideas and be expected to be bold and use my voice.” There’s a lot of old conditioning, which told people they should fit into a certain slot in society and deliver what’s expected of them.
Our test-taking culture -- which tells children that you should memorize this information or understand this and then give it back to the teacher on the test -- reflects that kind of conditioning. You want to make sure that you’re recruiting people, or at least enough people, who want to behave entrepreneurially and would like to be able to express their full range of talents in their work.
The second thing is the way you communicate. It’s very important to let people know through the storytelling culture -- through the speeches, through the newsletters, through whatever the organization rewards or highlights -- that we want people to be trying new things and we don’t penalize people for their experiments that didn’t work. We celebrate them for their effort. The one thing that we do penalize or we don’t pay much attention to is business as usual or people who respond to problems by hoping that things will just get better without some new action taken.
Then thirdly, it’s very important to bring in people in the organization who are very, very well versed and skillful at managing teams. The team is very different from the assembly line.
Q: In your previous book, “How to Change the World,” you discussed the importance of investing in young people. Which of these social entrepreneur organizations does a good job of bringing up another generation of young leaders?One of the goals is to encourage people to grow up so that they have a sense of agency, which means if they see something is wrong they think, “I can fix it.” They don’t feel that something terrible is going to happen if they take the initiative. They can imagine the world better than it has been. How do you bring up children to have moral imagination and a sense of agency? We’ve been seeing organizations that come into children’s lives at a young age and teach them the skill of empathy.
There’s an organization in Canada called “Roots of Empathy.” They bring an infant into a classroom environment with the mother to show what empathy looks like. They ask young children to imagine the experiences of the baby at many different stages in the baby’s development. This process has been demonstrated through independent research to dramatically improve the children’s empathetic ethics. It’s a powerful change. It makes people more loving and kinder and more understanding.
How do you encourage that throughout childhood? One of the best ways to encourage that kind of behavior is by helping children to play in a more beneficial way. Many school districts in the United States have cut down or eliminated recess from the elementary school day because of disciplinary problems, and also because of pressures to cram in as much math and English practice as possible for the state assessment tests.
Recess games are very complex and meaningful. A game is an agreement. A bunch of kids come together and agree to abide by the same rules. In order to have the experience of playing, they have to subvert their own needs for the needs of the group, which is essentially what citizenship is all about. It’s a voluntary agreement to participate in this collective, even when it’s not in your own personal interest.
Organizations like Playworks go into public schools and help bring back this culture of play, not by telling children to play but by helping them become leaders in organizing successful games. This also allows them to demonstrate their teamwork and their leadership and their empathy -- all of the skills that any institution needs to be great.
Q: What would you identify as the critical or defining traits of social entrepreneurs, and how can those be taught?The most important quality is the sense of agency, the sense that you can and you want to take action to change the status quo in any area. So the first thing is this belief that it’s a good thing to take initiative. That you’re not going to be yelled at for stepping out of line or challenging authority. That people will want to listen to you. That’s the first quality.
The second [encompasses] skills like empathy and leadership and teamwork, because as soon as you have an idea, the next thing you have to do is reach out to a bunch of people and say, “I have this idea. Would you like to work on it with me?” That’s about how well you communicate with people and how much they want to work with you and whether you can figure out how to co-create an idea and give everyone a sense of ownership.
Then the third thing is probably what meaning you give to failure, because once you’ve tried something, once you’ve gotten a group together, the next thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to do something, and most likely the first thing you try is not going to work that well. It may work all right, but usually not as you intended. Or, more likely, parts of it will work and parts of it won’t. Or you may believe that you have a great idea and you need to raise some money and it takes you a year before one person says “yes” after 50 “noes.” What does that process mean to you? Do you see it as a failure, or do you just see it as part of the process, not to be taken personally? One of the things that I’ve seen from successful social entrepreneurs is that they don’t take “no” as an answer. They take it as information -- that something that they’re doing is not working, which means that they’re going to have to change their approach. It doesn’t mean that “no” is the answer. It just means that “no” is a signal that something is not quite right. What many other people see as failure, they see as guideposts.
Q: Sometimes, for example in science, you can learn more from failure than from success.If you set up the experiment the right way. And you can do this with children, by the way. You can play a game of 20 questions with children. You can say -- John Holt wrote about this in one of his books years ago -- “I’m thinking of a number between one and 10,000.” And as the first kid says, “Is it between one and 5,000?” and you say, “No,” you’ll see that the kids in the class will go, “Aw.” They’ll groan. They hear the “no” as a failure, when in fact “Is it between one and 5,000?” is the best question that the first child could ask, because it cuts the possible numbers in half. It’s exactly what you’re supposed to do in that game. Why do the kids hear the “no” as failure rather than as useful information?
Q: That’s interesting.Every social entrepreneur I’ve interviewed or written about has heard the response “no,” like Thomas Edison, thousands of times. Thomas Edison said, “I didn’t fail. I just found 10,000 ways it won’t work.”
Anybody who is going to try to bring change within an institution, especially if it’s an old one with established practices, is going to immediately have people say, “But that’s not the way things are done here” or “That’s the way it has always been” or “Who do you think you are?” And those are all “noes.” I would encourage people to hear those phrases and think, “This is good information. I have to understand exactly who I’m dealing with and the sources of resistance I’m going to be facing in order to navigate this change. If I don’t understand that, I won’t be successful.” So to hear those words and not be disheartened, but to look upon them as helpful information -- that will let you know what your next question should be, and it will also help you keep up the courage to persist.
Read more from David Bornstein »
Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, SOCIAL INNOVATION, MANAGEMENT
Bill Drayton: How to be a change agent
Institutional leaders today all face the same challenge, says author and journalist David Bornstein: How do I unleash the creative capacity of every person in our institution?
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, every institution is either busy dying or busy being born, said David Bornstein, a frequent writer on social innovation. There is no such thing as sustainability -- only continuous renewal.
Given the inevitability of change, leaders need to behave like social entrepreneurs, or intrapreneurs, turning everyone in their organizations into creative thinkers bold enough to remake their institutions every day, he said.
Bornstein, whose books have been translated into 20 languages, is the author, with Susan Davis, of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.”(link is external) He also wrote “How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.” His first book, “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” chronicled the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Grameen Bank and the global emergence of microfinance as an anti-poverty strategy. He received the 2008 Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Bornstein spoke with Faith & Leadership about social entrepreneurship and lessons for institutional leaders. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: In your most recent book, “Social Entrepreneurship,” you talk about building institutions. What is the value of institutions?There’s this expression: “There’s nothing more powerful in the world than an idea whose time has come.” But that’s not true. There are lots of ideas whose time has come -- and some whose time has come and gone -- because of a lack of institutions to embed them in reality, or the wrong institutions.
Look at the institutions in the Islamic world that promote Wahhabism; look at what happens when you have institutions promoting that brand of Islam that are very powerful and very well-financed. What would the world look like today if the institutions promoting religious pluralism had the same amount of power and reach to challenge those ideas? Institutions make ideas real, whether they’re religious ideas or whether they’re practical, social change ideas.
Q: How do established institutions encourage, support and integrate entrepreneurship?There are two questions. One is, how do you create institutions that don’t already exist and breathe life into them? The next one is, how do you revitalize institutions that have been around for decades or hundreds of years? Really, the question of how to renew institutions gets to the question of entrepreneurship every bit as much as how to build them at the outset.
There is no such thing as sustainability. There is really only continuous renewal. Bob Dylan said, “If you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying.” To some degree, every institution is either busy dying or busy being born.
The question that every institution today faces is how do you unleash the change-making power of every single person in the institution? How do you turn everyone into a creative thinker who feels confident to try to advance an idea, someone who believes that it is his job or her job to improve upon things that they see and not just accept the status quo? How does the leadership of the institution communicate, reward people, excite people to see that their job is not merely to fulfill some function but to be a creative actor in the remaking of that institution every single day?
That’s an enormously difficult leadership challenge, one that requires extraordinary communication abilities. You now have essentially said, “Everybody in this institution is a creative actor. Now we have to work together, and what are we going to create together?” We have to be able to build teams.
We need empathy so that we can talk to each other even if we have different opinions about important questions. This is the challenge today in the field of social entrepreneurship, as people are building institutions across society. They’re all facing the same challenge, which is, how do I unleash the creative capacity of every single person in our institution and not just rely on 5 or 10 percent of the people to be the leaders?
Q: Do you have any examples of established institutions that have been successful in this kind of continuous renewal?If you look at Ashoka(link is external), for example, an organization that supports social entrepreneurship around the world, they expect every one of their employees to be an “intrapreneur,” which is an entrepreneur who works inside an institution.
If you look at the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, they expect their bank workers to be not just people who administer loans; their job is to help villagers solve their problems.
At companies like Google, a certain percentage of everyone’s time can be devoted to projects of their own choosing. Most of their innovations come from that 20 percent of their time when people can work on whatever they feel like, as long as it is something good for the company. If you look at organizations like City Year or Teach For America or the Acumen Fund, you’ll find the same pattern. They have to be unleashing the creative capacity of everyone in their organization, or they wouldn’t have come so far.
Q: In your new book you describe the process of entrepreneurship as one of leadership more than of creating the best ideas. How is that kind of leadership unleashed and developed?You have to break these things up into small boxes. From the point of recruitment, right from the outset when they come into an organization, you want to send them signals. You want to choose people who want to be creative actors.
We’re living in a world where people may be coming to a job with conditioning that makes them think, “I don’t want to be a creative actor. I want to know what’s expected of me, and I want to be able to deliver that and go home. It is too much pressure to have to be thinking all the time and to come up with new ideas and be expected to be bold and use my voice.” There’s a lot of old conditioning, which told people they should fit into a certain slot in society and deliver what’s expected of them.
Our test-taking culture -- which tells children that you should memorize this information or understand this and then give it back to the teacher on the test -- reflects that kind of conditioning. You want to make sure that you’re recruiting people, or at least enough people, who want to behave entrepreneurially and would like to be able to express their full range of talents in their work.
The second thing is the way you communicate. It’s very important to let people know through the storytelling culture -- through the speeches, through the newsletters, through whatever the organization rewards or highlights -- that we want people to be trying new things and we don’t penalize people for their experiments that didn’t work. We celebrate them for their effort. The one thing that we do penalize or we don’t pay much attention to is business as usual or people who respond to problems by hoping that things will just get better without some new action taken.
Then thirdly, it’s very important to bring in people in the organization who are very, very well versed and skillful at managing teams. The team is very different from the assembly line.
Q: In your previous book, “How to Change the World,” you discussed the importance of investing in young people. Which of these social entrepreneur organizations does a good job of bringing up another generation of young leaders?One of the goals is to encourage people to grow up so that they have a sense of agency, which means if they see something is wrong they think, “I can fix it.” They don’t feel that something terrible is going to happen if they take the initiative. They can imagine the world better than it has been. How do you bring up children to have moral imagination and a sense of agency? We’ve been seeing organizations that come into children’s lives at a young age and teach them the skill of empathy.
There’s an organization in Canada called “Roots of Empathy.” They bring an infant into a classroom environment with the mother to show what empathy looks like. They ask young children to imagine the experiences of the baby at many different stages in the baby’s development. This process has been demonstrated through independent research to dramatically improve the children’s empathetic ethics. It’s a powerful change. It makes people more loving and kinder and more understanding.
How do you encourage that throughout childhood? One of the best ways to encourage that kind of behavior is by helping children to play in a more beneficial way. Many school districts in the United States have cut down or eliminated recess from the elementary school day because of disciplinary problems, and also because of pressures to cram in as much math and English practice as possible for the state assessment tests.
Recess games are very complex and meaningful. A game is an agreement. A bunch of kids come together and agree to abide by the same rules. In order to have the experience of playing, they have to subvert their own needs for the needs of the group, which is essentially what citizenship is all about. It’s a voluntary agreement to participate in this collective, even when it’s not in your own personal interest.
Organizations like Playworks go into public schools and help bring back this culture of play, not by telling children to play but by helping them become leaders in organizing successful games. This also allows them to demonstrate their teamwork and their leadership and their empathy -- all of the skills that any institution needs to be great.
Q: What would you identify as the critical or defining traits of social entrepreneurs, and how can those be taught?The most important quality is the sense of agency, the sense that you can and you want to take action to change the status quo in any area. So the first thing is this belief that it’s a good thing to take initiative. That you’re not going to be yelled at for stepping out of line or challenging authority. That people will want to listen to you. That’s the first quality.
The second [encompasses] skills like empathy and leadership and teamwork, because as soon as you have an idea, the next thing you have to do is reach out to a bunch of people and say, “I have this idea. Would you like to work on it with me?” That’s about how well you communicate with people and how much they want to work with you and whether you can figure out how to co-create an idea and give everyone a sense of ownership.
Then the third thing is probably what meaning you give to failure, because once you’ve tried something, once you’ve gotten a group together, the next thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to do something, and most likely the first thing you try is not going to work that well. It may work all right, but usually not as you intended. Or, more likely, parts of it will work and parts of it won’t. Or you may believe that you have a great idea and you need to raise some money and it takes you a year before one person says “yes” after 50 “noes.” What does that process mean to you? Do you see it as a failure, or do you just see it as part of the process, not to be taken personally? One of the things that I’ve seen from successful social entrepreneurs is that they don’t take “no” as an answer. They take it as information -- that something that they’re doing is not working, which means that they’re going to have to change their approach. It doesn’t mean that “no” is the answer. It just means that “no” is a signal that something is not quite right. What many other people see as failure, they see as guideposts.
Q: Sometimes, for example in science, you can learn more from failure than from success.If you set up the experiment the right way. And you can do this with children, by the way. You can play a game of 20 questions with children. You can say -- John Holt wrote about this in one of his books years ago -- “I’m thinking of a number between one and 10,000.” And as the first kid says, “Is it between one and 5,000?” and you say, “No,” you’ll see that the kids in the class will go, “Aw.” They’ll groan. They hear the “no” as a failure, when in fact “Is it between one and 5,000?” is the best question that the first child could ask, because it cuts the possible numbers in half. It’s exactly what you’re supposed to do in that game. Why do the kids hear the “no” as failure rather than as useful information?
Q: That’s interesting.Every social entrepreneur I’ve interviewed or written about has heard the response “no,” like Thomas Edison, thousands of times. Thomas Edison said, “I didn’t fail. I just found 10,000 ways it won’t work.”
Anybody who is going to try to bring change within an institution, especially if it’s an old one with established practices, is going to immediately have people say, “But that’s not the way things are done here” or “That’s the way it has always been” or “Who do you think you are?” And those are all “noes.” I would encourage people to hear those phrases and think, “This is good information. I have to understand exactly who I’m dealing with and the sources of resistance I’m going to be facing in order to navigate this change. If I don’t understand that, I won’t be successful.” So to hear those words and not be disheartened, but to look upon them as helpful information -- that will let you know what your next question should be, and it will also help you keep up the courage to persist.
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Faith & Leadership
INNOVATION, SOCIAL INNOVATION, MANAGEMENT
Bill Drayton: How to be a change agent
How to be a change agent Leadership is about helping people give themselves permission to change the world, says the social entrepreneur pioneer and Ashoka founder.The world is going through its most important transformation since the agricultural revolution, said Bill Drayton, the founder and CEO of Ashoka(link is external), a global organization that offers venture capital for social entrepreneurs.
“We’re transitioning from a few people running everything and everyone else doing repetitive functions ... to a ‘changemaker world,’” said Drayton, who is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of social entrepreneurship.
Drayton grew up during the time of the civil rights movement and was heavily influenced by the Gandhian movement. After attending Harvard University, the University of Oxford and Yale Law School, Drayton was a consultant at management consulting firm McKinsey & Company and an assistant administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
He established Ashoka in 1980. Named after a third-century-B.C. Indian emperor, it is dedicated to supporting the “citizen sector” in effecting social change. Its motto is “Everyone A Changemaker.”
Drayton spoke with Faith & Leadership about how to be a “changemaker” and what role leaders and religious institutions can play in a “changemaker world.” The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What does it take to be a “changemaker”?[Changemakers] give themselves permission to see the world, to see things that could be better, and to believe that they can actually make things better.
[For example,] Mary Gordon, an Ashoka fellow in Canada, said children are not learning empathy. The education system isn’t addressing it, and parents don’t know how to give children this skill in many cases. Mary gave herself permission to see the problem and to find a solution that would change all the schools, not just her school.
She brings an infant to a first-grade or third-grade class. The infant [wears a] T-shirt ... labeled “the professor” and resides on a green blanket with mom or occasionally dad nearby. The students, not the teacher, have the job of figuring out what “the professor” is saying -- which is not that hard, because infants are really good at nonverbal communication -- and then what “the professor” is feeling. The students observe the parent-child empathetic tie, which is highly developed and very strong. The kids learn [empathy] and that everyone has the central inherited drive to be a part of society and to be a good person at a very significant degree.
This has gone from two classrooms to 14,000 classrooms in 14 ½ years, and is part of a larger collaboration that we have under way worldwide to make sure that all children master empathy.
Now when you listen to this story, this is not a solution that anybody else couldn’t do, but Mary gave herself permission to see the problem, to imagine a solution and to imagine how she was going to spread it across the world.
So the first principle [to being a changemaker] is to give yourself permission. Be polite to the people who say you can’t do something, because that’s just an expression of the degree to which they are limited. Don’t let them limit you.
Q: After you give yourself permission, what are the next steps to “changemaking”?Creativity in both goal setting and problem solving. That’s the first criterion.
Second is entrepreneurial quality. What is that? It’s not getting things done or leading or managing; millions of people can do that. It’s a deep drive to change society for the good of all -- so much of a drive that you can’t be satisfied in life unless you have actually seen that change come about all across society, not just in one community.
That means that [changemakers] care about “how to” questions. How are we going to get from here to there? How do the pieces fit together? How do you solve this problem? How do you seize that opportunity at the same time that [you’re] wedded, in the full sense of that verb, to the goal?
So they typically are double dominant, right and left brain. And they’re not ideologues. They’re open. They’re listeners. They’re realists, because they cannot be satisfied in life unless this thing actually works. That’s a very strong discipline. That’s entrepreneurial quality.
The third is not about the person; it’s about the idea. Will the idea spread? Does it have legs? How far will it go? How many people will it impact? How importantly? How about officially?
The final is ethical fiber. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to introduce a change, you’re asking people to do outlandish things that they wouldn’t normally do, and you’re asking them to be among the first to do it. Why will people do it? It’s not because of the words. If you say something really stupid, that could hold you back. But when the entrepreneur walks into the room, people know deep inside them, “I can trust this person.” They know that the person is married to the idea, and they sense the energy and the commitment and the togetherness of the person. That’s why they say “yes.” If there’s one person in the room the other people don’t trust, it kills the conversation.
Those are the four criteria -- creativity, entrepreneurial quality, the social impact for the good of the new idea and ethical fiber.
But it’s ultimately rooted in a very simple thing: Do you want to do good for the world, and will you give yourself permission? The first one almost everyone wants to do. The second is the problem. If people would just realize that they have the power, if they allow themselves to use it, the world would move ahead really quickly.
Q: How can leaders create an environment that encourages people to give themselves permission?Once people realize that the new game is “everyone a changemaker” and that everyone can play, their institution needs to be managed differently. They can’t be a hierarchy anymore. It has to be a team of teams.
If you say to the people leading a religious house, “This is a time when everyone needs to master the skill that underlies being a good person” -- isn’t that something that religion should be engaged in?
And by the way, if you lead in this area, you’ll be bringing huge value to society and to the people you’re serving, and your house will be vital. It will gain strength from doing this.
That’s the main strategic opportunity for a school or a religious house. Give people an understanding of their strategic environment and what their strategic opportunity at this moment in history is, and some of the people will respond.
Then you’ve got to help them do that. In doing that you are helping them become changemakers, which is, of course, helping them to be a more powerful contributor to the good, allowing them to express love and respect and action at a higher level. There is nothing that is a greater gift to anyone.
I think that’s really what leadership for society or for an institution is about: helping people see the strategic environment and the strategic opportunity and [that they can] give themselves permission to make a really big difference.
Q: What if you’re not a leader, and what if you work with people who are very comfortable with old patterns? What role can you play in the “everyone a changemaker” world?Well, if you help, say, a hotel company be the first changemaker company, it’s going to see many opportunities to create value and to do it efficiently. All the people in that hotel company are not mindless doormen and cooks and chambermaids; they are changemakers. They can see something that travelers or non-travelers need, and they can develop it. Well, of course, that hotel company will completely out-compete the others. So anyone can contribute by helping their organization change.
And anyone can contribute as a parent. If you’ve got a 15-year-old in your life that you care about, what would you do if she failed at math? You know you’d do something. If you’re good at math -- a tiny minority -- you might help directly. More commonly, you’ll think of bringing in a tutor or something like that.
What would you do if she was not practicing changemaking? Well, you probably wouldn’t even notice. But actually, once you realize that is the most important thing that she should be doing now -- because in a world defined by change, where is she going to be if she doesn’t have that skill in 10 or 15 years, when she’s 30? -- as a parent, you’re going to feel awfully bad if you didn’t help your daughter get that skill.
So what do you have to do? You don’t have to change the whole system. You can start right there with her. She says, “Dad, Mom, the way this park is run is a mess,” or, “The school is doing a terrible job with these immigrant children; they don’t understand English.” Whatever it is, when your daughter says, “This is a mess,” as a parent, you can say, “Oh, well why don’t you get your friends together and go and fix it?” “Who me?” “Yes, you! Why not?” Any parent can do that.
Why shouldn’t we encourage kids to start things? Whenever they see a problem or something that could be better, why don’t we make it really easy instead of really difficult?
Q: Why invest in young people? Why should leaders take a chance on someone who is untested or inexperienced?With all due respect, there may be much less risk with young people who have not learned that they can’t do things than with the older person who never learned that they could have.
America will be Detroit and not Silicon Valley within 10 or 15 years if we don’t radically increase the proportion of young people who are changemakers -- and who are changemakers way before they turn 21. You don’t learn this by a book. You’ve got to get on the bicycle and ride. You’ve got to practice, practice, practice being powerful and being a changemaker. Once you know that and once you have the skills, you’ll learn whatever you have to learn. You have the key to the universe and to being a good person.
Q: What role should institutions, particularly religious institutions, play in the “everyone a changemaker” world?The half-life of knowledge is getting shorter and shorter. I was just told by the dean of a very good technical school in India that they have discovered that half of what they taught in the first year is obsolete by the time the students are in the fourth year.
But this set of [changemaker] skills is never obsolete. This is the foundational set of skills. And parenthetically, the foundation of the foundation is the skill of empathy, of being a good person. This is where we really need religious institutions to do what they did at the time of the great prophets.
Now we’re going through a transition period that’s just as significant but much faster. This is the time when everyone has to have that skill of empathy, and everyone has to have that skill at a higher and higher and higher level.
The religious houses that contribute to this, that understand it, and that make sure that every parishioner -- that everyone that they touch -- has this skill, and that explain the ethical urgency of it in terms of equity and equality within society, will be vibrant.
How can we be training young people to be ready for confirmation or bar mitzvah or whatever it is if they don’t have this skill? You can’t be an adult in the world we’re living in if you don’t have the ability to be a good person.
Read more from Bill Drayton »
ON SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Christian Social Innovationby L. Gregory JonesEverybody seems interested in innovation and entrepreneurship these days. Start-ups are generating new jobs, creating wealth and providing solutions to longstanding problems. People are also aware that old-line social institutions need innovative approaches that provide renewal, re-establish trust and cultivate sustainability.
What do faith communities have to do with innovation and entrepreneurship? Faith communities have their own need for innovation, demonstrated in a growing interest in starting new churches, developing "fresh expressions" for gatherings of community and discussions about how to cultivate a renewed sense of mission.
But do faith communities have anything unique to contribute to conversations about innovation and entrepreneurship, especially in "social entrepreneurship"? At first glance, the answer seems to be "no." Burgeoning literature on social entrepreneurship barely mentions the church or other faith-based institutions - and when it does they're often described as part of the broken institutional landscape.
However, Christian social innovation, at its best, depends on a conception of hope different than the optimism that often characterizes secular endeavors, a hope that acknowledges personal and social brokenness. Further, faith communities, at their best, have embodied perseverance, often bringing people together across generations and diverse sectors to imagine how common effort and faith might overcome obstacles.
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However, Christian social innovation, at its best, depends on a conception of hope different than the optimism that often characterizes secular endeavors, a hope that acknowledges personal and social brokenness. Further, faith communities, at their best, have embodied perseverance, often bringing people together across generations and diverse sectors to imagine how common effort and faith might overcome obstacles.
Learn more and order the book »
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