Thinking Socially, Acting Entrepreneurially

I suppose, with yesterday's pontificating about a younger perspective on entrepreneurship, that I should talk a little about the project I spent time working on towards the end of my college career (one I'm still working on) and social entrepreneurship in general. College is a great laboratory for entrepreneurs to experiment and the timing has never been better to experiment in the newly coined field of social entrepreneurship.

In college I got heavily into sailing and was on the university's team. After spending some time in the sailing community, my friends and I began to realize an opportunity to do something good. What we realized was that racing sailors create a lot of waste when it comes to sails; a sail is still usable long after it is fast and new enough to race with. These discarded or unwanted sails were going to become our "product". Initially we realized that there were outlets for these sails where they were far more important to life and community than to trivial sailboat racing. Our first idea was to aide the fisherman living in the developing coastal communities of the Caribbean. These fishermen were using patchwork sails to power the boats that feed their families and villages. Anything we could give them was going to be more effective than the sails they were currently using. Yes, we were acting charitably but we were thinking like entrepreneurs who were out to do some good. Rudimentary as it may seem this is social entrepreneurship in its most basic form.

Moving on from finding the impetus to start a nor-for-profit organization based around something we loved doing, we needed to gain some organizational structure if we were going to be acting efficiently to channel the goodwill we were dealing in. With a position in the South Florida Sailing Community, collection of old sails was not going to be an issue. Our issue was going to be finding outlets to funnel the donations to and the places where they would do the most good. Through some former contacts we found some peace corps individuals who were willing to help with the cause. They would serve as intermediaries between South Florida and the coastal villages and act as distributors when the shipments arrived. The idea had gained support and we were now able to fund the deliveries with donations as well as cover most of our operating expenses. In pondering our next move we began to realize that if sustainability for these communities was to be our goal, then we needed to take some steps to aid these communities in the transition from subsistence to sustainability. It was then that realized that our "product" was not sails necessarily but the durable and strong cloth that they were made out of. This brings us to our current status of designing and developing products that can be produced out of the cloth, like fashionable bags and other textile goods. The production will occur within these developing communities and the goal is that the production process and its associated factors will be a boon to the development of sustainable economies in these areas.

It is important to note that this is not necessarily the profit minded model that is talked about in the press. At least its not profit minded for ourselves, the initial entrepreneurs. Hopefully we have correctly aimed our desires for profit at making the villages and towns into viable economies and creating a new population of entrepreneurs of the periphery like the ones being developed by organizations such as Kiva.org. I think the main thing that a person should take away from the story of Sails for Sustenance is that it is the unlikely places where the opportunity may arise to act as an entrepreneur to benefit others and how easily the skills you use in the business world can transition to social causes. Charitable acts are no longer stale and bureaucratic, they have moved into the dynamic world of entrepreneurship.

Sails for Sustenance is currently looking at expanding its collection efforts to other sailing communities in the United States. If you would like more information or would like to help or offer advice in some way, please contact us by visiting www.sailsforsustenance.org