Bill Drayton, founder of Ashoka and a person who coined the phrase 'social entrepreneur', recently shared a historical analysis of why he thinks everyone can now be a changemaker:

The agricultural revolution produced only a small surplus, so only a small elite could move into the towns to create culture and conscious history. This pattern has persisted ever since: only a few have held the monopoly on initiative because they alone have had the social tools.

That is one reason that per capita income in the West remained flat from the fall of the Roman Empire until about 1700.

By 1700, however, a new, more open architecture was beginning to develop in northern Europe: entrepreneurial/competitive business facilitated by more tolerant, open politics. The new business model rewarded people who would step up with better ideas and implement them, igniting a relentlessly expanding cycle of entrepreneurial innovation leading to productivity gains, leading to ever more entrepreneurs, successful innovation, and productivity gains.

One result: the West broke out from 1,200 years of stagnation and soon soared past anything the world had seen before. Average per capita income rose 20 percent in the 1700s, 200 percent in the 1800s, and 740 percent in the last century.

The press reported the wars and other follies, but for the last 300 years this profound innovation in how humans organize themselves has been the defining, decisive historical force at work.

However, until 1980, this transformation bypassed the social half of the world’s operations.  Society taxed the new wealth created by business to pay for its roads and canals, schools and welfare systems. There was no need to change. Moreover, no monopoly, public or private, welcomes competition because it is very likely to lose. Thus, the social sector had little felt need to change and a paymaster that actively discouraged it.

Hence, the squalor of the social sector. Relative performance declining at an accelerating rate. And consequent low repute, dismal pay, and poor self-esteem and élan.

By the nineteenth century, a few modern social entrepreneurs began to appear. The anti-slavery leagues and Florence Nightingale are outstanding examples. But they remained islands.

It was only around 1980 that the ice began to crack and the social arena as a whole made the structural leap to this new entrepreneurial competitive architecture. 

However, once the ice broke, catch-up change came in a rush. And it did so pretty much all across the world, the chief exceptions being areas where governments were afraid.

Because it has the advantage of not having to be the pioneer, but rather of following business, this second great transformation has been able steadily to compound productivity growth at a very fast rate. In this it resembles successful developing countries like Thailand.

[Our] best estimate is that the citizen sector is halving the gap between its productivity level and that of business every 10 to 12 years.

This rapidly rising productivity means that the cost of the goods and services produced by the citizen sector is falling relative to those produced by business -- reversing the pricing pattern of the last centuries that led to the much-criticized “consumer” culture.

As a result, as resources flow into the citizen sector, it is growing explosively. It is generating jobs two and a half to three times as fast as business. There are now millions of modern, competing citizen groups, including big, sophisticated second-generation organizations, in each of the four main areas where the field has emerged most vigorously: Brazil-focused South America, Mexico/U.S./Canada, Europe, and South and Southeast Asia. (The field is also growing vigorously in Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and Australia/New Zealand, but these are much smaller clusters.) All this, of course, has dramatically altered the field’s élan and attractiveness. This is where the job growth is, not to mention the most challenging, value-rooted, and increasingly even well-paid jobs. Just listen to today’s “business” school students.

Given the results-based power of this transformation of the citizen sector, more and more local changemakers are emerging. Some of these learn and later expand the pool of leading social entrepreneurs. To the degree they succeed locally, they give wings to the entrepreneur whose idea they have taken up, they encourage neighbors also to become changemakers, and they cumulatively build the institutions and attitudes that make local changemaking progressively easier and more respected. All of which eases the tasks facing the next generation of primary pattern-change entrepreneurs.

This virtuous cycle catalyzed by leading social entrepreneurs and local changemakers is the chief engine now moving the world toward an “everyone a changemaker” future.

We are certainly witnessing this in the context of CharityFocus!

Posted by Nipun Mehta | comments (3) | permalink | more 'New Ideas' |