Category Archives: inspiration

  • Three postcolonial concepts for social entrepreneurs

    September 28, 2012

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    By Editor of SocialBusiness.org

    Prayer on the Housetops, Jean-Leon Gerome, 1865

    Orientalism Orientalism is one of those books that changed the world. And in my undergraduate education, probably around my third year in university in Montreal, I was exploring beyond my traditional International Development Studies courses, and found myself in both a Gender and Postcolonial Lit class and a Theories of Difference English course. It was then that Orientalism changed me, too. Orientalism is a concept developed by postcolonial theorist Edward Said and is also a book published in 1978 under the same name. For Said, orientalism is “a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient.” It’s essential to think about when entrepreneurs talk for or even about marginalized subjects. Orientalism creates objects, especially, as we see in Gerome’s piece, in art. It’s the way we (read: The West) talk about, present, re-represent and imagine the Other. Hybridity Hybridity is a term typically attributed to being developed to the postcolonial intellectual Homi Bhabha in his 1996 book The Location of Culture. It can be, and it is to me, a little more optimistic than orientalism. Hybridity, as you can imagine, is an in-between state. Or rather, an in between process. “The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity; realign the customary boundaries between the private and the public, high and low; and challenge normative expectations of development and progress,”  writes Bhabha. Hybridity can be creative, it can also be a site of resistance so think about productivity and creativity when you’re straddling two worlds, whatever those worlds are. Maybe it’s business and social good or maybe it’s the United States and Kenya. Subaltern Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony laid the grounds for the postcolonial concept of the subaltern as it is viewed today. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is maybe the poster woman for “subaltern” as a concept and she insists that

    “subaltern is not just a classy word for “oppressed”, for [the] Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie. . . . In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern — a space of difference. Now, who would say that’s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It’s not subaltern. . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don’t need the word ‘subaltern’ . . . They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They’re within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern.

  • Don’t look to your social good job for fulfillment

    September 22, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Senior Editor of SocialBusiness.org

    Image of Tiffany Persons via Mindvalley

    Last week week iOnPoverty featured Tiffany Persons of the NGO Shine On Sierra Leone. Here’s a bit of what the email shared with its readers:

    When someone asks you why you’re interested in changing the world, is your answer something like: “Because it feels good to do good”? If so, Pathfinder Tiffany Persons, says be careful. “It’s an addiction and no one talks about this.” Her bottom line: filling an internal void with doing good is not okay – it will leave you unhappy in the end and it will negatively impact the people you seek to help. So examine your motives carefully.

    Pathfinder Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg said something similar when she noted: “The most useless people in the world are driven by guilt.”

    Jonathan Lewis continued on Huffington Post:

    If you think “doing good” is a recovery program for a deadend career, or a panacea for personal happiness, or a path towards building a personal brand, forget it. As Tiffany notes, “If you don’t find happiness where you are right now, you are going to be unhappy in the social sector.”

    As Levitt and Dubner summed up in SuperFreakonomics, “Most giving is… impure altruism or warm-glow altruism. You give not only because you want to help, but because it makes you look good, or feel good, or perhaps feel less bad.” The same can hold true for casual volunteerism and, all-too-often, for switching from a soulless industry to a mission-driven career.

    At first glance, perhaps, this kind of thinking could seem controversial. But I think that the social enterprise community becomes sanitized into this idea that good is good is good is good. In a lot of ways, it’s not about what you do necessarily but how you do it. Being in the social business or non-profit industry doesn’t necessarily make you a better person.

    I’ve encountered this in the flesh while I was completing my undergraduate degree in Montreal in International Development Studies. The very name of the program, i.e. the “development” part, suggests a sort of ownership about what development means and to whom. The main lens through which development is traditionally looked at is economic, even though many of my brilliant professors do make an effort to remind the students that there simply aren’t enough resources for every country to industrialize like the West has (which feeds into the “West versus the Rest” idea). The field also subscribes to a sense of nationalism that is problematic in many cases and ignores marginalized populations.

    But it was really the students, no, I can’t place blame on the students. Rather, it was (and is) the industry that really rubbed me the wrong way especially after a few years knee-deep in the program. It’s about the language, too, that “go volunteer in an Indian orphanage for four weeks and change lives” type of mentality. While I don’t find anything necessarily wrong with voluntourism, there’s a sense that it’s good no matter what. But like everything, including social good careers, it’ necessary to question the why.

    As always, this is something to think about. My posts on this blog are about being critical, living consciously and challenging the norm. And we all know that we can create micro-norms within our own fields, workplaces and minds.

  • Empathy: it’s all good, right?

    August 24, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Senior Editor of SocialBusiness.org

    Empathy has been studied seriously since the 1960s as something more than an emotion. It’s an affect, yes, but it has implications for things outside of the personal realm. Social activist and cultural critic bell hooks cultivated an idea of “engaged pedagogy” which centers on the idea of mutual recognization.  “Engaged pedagogy rests on a compassionate premise: to be effective, teachers need to be engaged with students, to nurture not only their classroom performance but their whole well-being: mental, physical, and spiritual,” writes Janet M Lucas in her 2011 dissertation “Not just a feeling anymore: Empathy and the teaching of writing.”

    How empathy works in social businesses may be difficult to assess. After all, it goes back to whether or not intentions matter. But empathy has been and continues to be a hot topic online in the social entrepreneurship world. I’d say it’s pretty much a buzz word by now. Intentionally or not, affect and emotion have always held a premier role in social business. Especially when it comes to companies selling products, it takes emotional marketing and/or a “virtuous” feeling on the part of the consumer, to sell a fair trade, environmental, ethical (etc.) product, considering that it’s usually at a higher price.

    Empathy: it’s all good, right? Well, maybe not. In “The risks of empathy: Interrogating multiculturalism’s gaze,” which was published in Cultural Studies, Megan Boler argues that “passive empathy… falls far short of assuring any basis for social change, and reinscribes a ‘consumptive’ mode of identification with the other.” Consuming the other (or “eating the other” if we look at this again through a bell hooks lens) is already a huge issue in social business. The so-called exotic is sold, bought and traded through goods manufactured (but sometimes not) in the Majority World.

    Last year, Ashoka launched their empathy initiative in which they outlined the following: “Empathy. We don’t hear the term every day, but Ashoka Fellows over the past thirty years have shown time and again that there is no practice more fundamental to the human experience and no skill closer to the heart of what it means to be a changemaker. Its presence–and as profoundly, its absence–can be seen amongst the myriad challenges that populate our daily headlines, whether school bullying, ethnic conflict, crime, or the global preparedness of tomorrow’s workforce.”

    But is it really possible to “identify with another person’s feelings” as Mary Gordon’s Cultivating Empathy describes empathy? How could a straight able-bodied white middle-class North American male identify with the feelings of a poor black lesbian from Zimbabwe? But this isn’t about the Oppression Olympics. Rather, if I go back to Boler, it’s about being active in not consuming identities because claiming to empathize is far different than acknowledging someone’s right for self-determination and ownership.

    To problematize empathy isn’t to disregard it, but rather, it’s to take a look at how promoting empathy can blind being critical, which is crucial, especially in an industry that purports to care.

  • Three unlikely quotes for social entrepreneurs

    May 9, 2012

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    By Tiana Reid, Editor and Community Manager at SocialBusiness.org.

    There are already a slew of “quotes for social entrepreneurs” blog posts out there but how can social entrepreneurs pull from other spaces?

    What’s so great about the tight-knit #socent community is that, well, it’s tight-knit. At the same time, however, sometimes, like all communities, it’s too inward-looking and can become a recycling bin for so-called best practices.

    In light of all that, here are three unlikely quotes for social entrepreneurs:

    “I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.” – Anaïs Nin

    To say that Anaïs Nin’s writing has depth would be an understatement. This quote in particular is next-level cathartic. I mean, the social entrepreneur has feelings too. What’s more, for the business creator, it speaks to not only to diving deeper into models and impact, but also to mysticism. Surrendering to the outside, to forces beyond control (and not in a religious sense), can relieve stress and create a “breath in, breath out” moment.

    “The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane.” – Phaedrus

    I chose this almost to counteract the Nin quote. (You see what I did there?) Social entrepreneurs, much like more “traditional” charities and non-profits, are bombarded with the need to measure everything. Sometimes it’s crucial to step back, look at the big picture and think like a toddler, that is, ask why. Why are you measuring this? Why is this measure important? Why aren’t I measuring something else? It could always be otherwise.

    “Feminism is for everybody.” – bell hooks

    Not simply a quote, this one is also a book on passionate politics. In it, hooks defines feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” For her, feminism(s) is/are intertwined with race, class and sexual orientation (etc.) — the infinite intersectionalities. So, this stems beyond “mere feminism” and everyone, not just social entrepreneurs, needs to recognize and acknowledge privilege and oppression alike. What’s particular about social entrepreneurs, and anyone in the business of social change, is that people often think they’re always helping. On-the-ground services, donations in particular, can have positive and negative consequences on the market economy, local culture and the entire big bad globe. In particular, the way in which the West talks about Africa (not a country!) is often clouded with racism—in spite of, or perhaps because of, the seemingly altruistic nature of social good. Just look at this.