Talking Social Enterprise with Marc Kielburger

Change the world, do what you love, make rent: the beginning of taking actions towards social entrepreneurship

By: Imogen Grace, Staff Writer

You’re ten years old watching your favourite Saturday morning cartoons. An ad comes on the TV showing a child halfway across the world who is without food and water. For $30 a month, you can feed that child. Only problem is, $30 is all your allowance in the world, and giving it up will mean no back-to-school clothes in the fall, no movie theatre on Friday nights.

For many of us, this was our first experience with social outreach. A notion rooted in sacrifice and charity, and, yeah, sometimes guilt.

Fast forward ten or fifteen years and here we are. A generation that is hungry to define personal success and find careers that leave us fulfilled, wondering how we can make the world a better place while also making rent. This is a lot to reconcile.

What if there was a way to have our cake and eat it, too?

Social entrepreneurship

The Skoll Foundation, one of the world’s leading organizations in the field, defines a social entrepreneur as “society’s change agent; creators of innovations that disrupt the status quo and transform our world for the better”.  More specifically, a social enterprise is a business that operates in order to positively impact society or the environment, while still making a profit. It is the “simultaneous achievement of both economic and social values”.

Luckily, there are many individuals that have paved the way for us. Like Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and father of the world-changing invention of microfinance. Or social entrepreneur celebrity Blake Mycoskie, founder of Toms. Myscoskie came up with Toms shoes after taking a trip to Argentina and witnessing the hardships of children living without shoes. Toms calls their business model the “One for One” method: buy a pair of shoes for yourself, and a child in a developing country receives a free pair of shoes. It has proven to have a sustainable model and has positively impacted the quality of thousands of lives, donating over 10 million pairs of shoes.

There is also Newman’s Own, a gourmet food sauce line developed by movie star Paul Newman that has donated over $370 million US to charitable foundations since 1988. Or Samasource, which provides high quality data services to companies by harnessing the untapped potential of impoverished women and youth.

The rise of these and thousands of other social enterprises is by no coincidence perfectly positioned in the midst of the Millennial generation. Millennials have become increasingly aware that their consumer actions have consequences for the world around them. They are using their buying power to promote companies that use environmental practices and favour sustainability. They align themselves with causes, not just products. And by 2017, they will be spending about $200 billion annually, more than any other generation in history.

Perhaps that means we, oh burgeoning entrepreneurs, are perfectly positioned to combine our business innovation power with our commitment to leave the world better off than we found it.

Marc Kielburger

One of Canada’s most successful social entrepreneurs, Marc Kielburger, co-founder of Free the Children and Me to We seems to agree. In an interview with the Arbitrage last week, he stated “I truly believe [social entrepreneurship] is the future of philanthropy.” Kielburger has been awarded the Order of Canada and selected by the World Economic forum as one of 250 young global leaders. He told us that he first got the idea to branch from the non-profit sector into social enterprise in 2002 when he was in Sierra Leone at the end of the civil war. The country had been ravaged by 11 years of infighting, children had had their hands and feet systematically cut off, and over 70,000 people had died. As he and his Free the Children team were on the port in Freetown waiting to receive incoming aid, other charities were shipping out. The war was over, public concern had shifted to the next great disaster, which meant so had the NGO’s funding. “Rightly or wrongly,” Marc stated, “these organizations basically go to the next disaster zone in the news cycle. Their funding is so tied to disaster relief that they can’t talk long-term commitments.”

Marc and his brother and business partner, Craig, asked themselves how they could avoid falling into this cycle and come up with a stable revenue stream for their business and employees. So they began down the path of social entrepreneurship, starting Me to We, a company that sells socially and environmentally conscious goods and offers philanthropic trips to students. They donate half of the incoming profits to their own charity, and reinvest the other 50 per cent into sustaining and growing their business.

Though the Kielburger brothers pointed out in a recent Huffington Post article that Canada is lagging behind the UK and the United States in legal infrastructure to support social enterprises, Marc also highlighted organizations in Canada that are leading the way in this sector. For example, Enterprising Non-Profits in BC and Toronto is a program that provides matching technical assistance grants of up to $10,000 to social enterprises that are just starting or looking to expand. There is also the Centre for Social Innovation, with three locations in Toronto and one in New York City, a social enterprise with a mission to catalyze social innovations to improve our communities and the planet. Mars Discovery District in Toronto is a state-of-the-art business incubator that offers courses in social entrepreneurship with $10,000 in “pitch” prize money, as well as social venture registry where entrepreneurs can connect with potential investors and clients.

The availability of resources like these have expanded considerably since the Kielburger brothers began their social enterprise, answering to the demand for innovative philanthropy. Marc believes it is imperative to “think outside the box of traditional charitable routes.” He suggests that new social entrepreneurs not only have a big heart, but go to business school, understand finance, combine spending time overseas learning about global issues with an internship at a large company. A Rhodes scholar, Oxford-educated lawyer, and Harvard graduate himself, Marc is able to address issues of poverty and education from a business perspective. Like taking the statistic that says most Canadians spend about five per cent of their income on charities, and thinking: “that’s 95 per cent opportunity to buy services that drive social benefit.”

It is possible to make a difference and make rent. The progressive entrepreneur understands that there is a generation out there that desires to consume products that give back, and they are willing to advocate for them with their words and their dollars. You can look back at that ten year old version of yourself and say, there is a way to have your cake, and give it away, too.

Imogen is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker living in Toronto. Her work explores cross-cultural stories of immigration and gender. She writes copy for a creative design studio and the short film she wrote The Haircut, debuted at ReelWorld Film Festival this past spring.

Photo courtesy to triplepundit.com & The SAGE Scholar Program