Homeless Founders
To be a social entrepreneur is to be homeless twice.
The charities and social causes are sceptical of the entrepreneurship, and the entrepreneurial community think the socials are too soft and fluffy.
You feel a bit like you have to be a shape shifter able to blend in amongst the squares and the circles, paranoid that you’ll never quite be fully one or the other.
I think growing up in my corner of Wales was a good training exercise for this. You’re not British, but you’re never truly Welsh. And these days you’re not even European as a catch-all.
This is post three in a three-part series on social entrepreneurship and it’s relationship with rocket science and Saudi Arabia. You can read part one here, and part two here.
Social entrepreneurship is on the rise, and that’s good for society and hopefully for the founders too.
A recent Gartner Employee Value Proposition report claimed that someone doing a job that realises their personal values is said to feel 52% more connected to their employer.
Doing work that is aligned to what you care about is a good plan for a fulfilling life.
You need to be able to sleep at night, and being a social entrepreneur can give you a purpose that makes those 8+ hours in the middle of the day more bearable too.
There’s a lot of research on the impact that bad sleep has on your work, but its a cycle - bad work also creates bad sleep.
That said, there are lots of restless nights for anyone battling broken systems.
It’s better than most jobs, but you need to know what you care about.
You can look at the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, you can use tools like the BBC R&D well-being toolkit, or you can just get out there in the world to see what you love and find your place.
I’ll share some life design tools in the not too distant future to help with other ways to map these things out.
No matter what you commit to, you will never be able to do it all alone, hence the need for bridges.
Social Innovation
We have a lot of long-established norms that need to be challenged but it feels like we’re a long way from even getting started.
In the last month there has been a lot of public discourse about the need to revamp the inheritance tax rules.
One staggering fact from Britannia Unchained was that 80% of Britain’s €6.7trillion wealth is owned by those born between 1946 and 1964.
The wealthiest 10% of the population hold 43% of all the wealth in Great Britain compared to the bottom 50% who have only 9%.
22% have a household wealth of over $1,000,000, predominantly in the south-east of England.
Statista describes that, “The UK has a healthy and growing population of millionaires,” but I think that word healthy might be slightly dependent on whether you’re one of them, or have a chance to be.
Between 1995 and 2005, those aged between 25 and 34 saw their wealth fall, while those between 55 and 66 saw it triple.
It isn’t a surprise that those who’ve lived longer have accumulated more wealth, but home-ownership has long been the easiest route to passively build wealth and this is becoming impossible.
One in five boomers owns a second home, by contrast, just 15 per cent of owner-occupied housing is owned by those under 44.
You can not honestly say to younger generations anymore that they have a chance to be better off than their parents or grandparents.
When I found out what proportion of people were outright home owners I was astonished. The majority of home-owners are now mortgage free, 8.8million, compared to 6.8million residencies mortgaged, and 4.1million in social rent (numbers are for England only).
When house values are doubling every decade, things like inheritance tax laws increasingly play a role in whether we’re resetting the advantage or giving a generation of people access to New Game+.
The book the Tyranny of Merit makes an excellent case for the impact of the failure of the level playing field.
We’re romantically attracted to the idea of merit determining the likelihood of success in life, but it’s been a long time since this was true.
If we look to the United States, our closest cultural comparison, everything that was the American dream has come under attack.
The American dream of the smoking, drinking, gun owning, manly man, driving a gas guzzler and going from zero to hero has been abolished, admonished, and adjusted.
For many this will be hard to take. The alternative path includes a lot of loss and no perceived upside.
We haven’t decided if we want our shared vision to be a society of fairness, equality, levelling the playing field, or giving a boost.
The argument about inheritance tax needs some pre-agreed points which we don’t all have. Should everyone have the same chance regardless of the family they’re born into or should the hard work of previous generations give future generations a better platform to start with?
What is fair for the child born into an adverse childhood experience vs the child born into advantage? What differences does it make to each group if the other group is helped or hindered?
I recently heard from a social entrepreneur who was refused access to significant funding because nobody in the team had “lived experience” of the challenge. They work in the justice sector, and are creating significant value, but their degrees and upbringing, along with never having slept in a prison cell, prevented them from being able to scale up - reducing the opportunity they have to serve a neglected audience.
Who wins and who loses in this scenario?
Social Entrepreneur Wanted, Salary £1
This was genuinely the ad I responded to when I first met my co-founders at ICE.
The world needs more social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurs who can tell these stories, invite others in to the challenge, and engage more to be change makers without alienating the very important established people who can create better conditions.
Being a social entrepreneur is a lonely journey. That’s why I wanted to pull this content together. You might feel like an island, but with the right bridges and rafts you can take on any challenge.
If we had a few more high profile investors and entrepreneurs take an interest in the world of social impact then maybe we wouldn’t all be in such a rush to leave this planet and colonise others.
Patient investors who appreciate that there will be fascinating lessons and stories along with their traditional ROI.
To bring it back to Wozniak and Musk: let’s fix what happens on our own planet before worrying about ruining the others.
Read next…
I really didn’t want to go to Saudi Arabia…
Social Science Is Harder Than Rocket Science (Part I)
One day last March, Steve Wozniak really pissed me off…