Lessons From 22 Ashoka Social Entrepreneurs About Systems Change

With a four decades-long track record of promoting and supporting social entrepreneurship, for-profits and nonprofits alike have a lot to learn from the ventures the nonprofit Ashoka has fostered.

With that in mind, Konstanze Frischen and Michael Zakaras, leaders of Ashoka North America, are about to release America’s Path Forward, which features lessons from 22 Ashoka social entrepreneurs. Bother are co-editors of the book, which is published by Georgetown University Press. “It’s not the case that the entire country is polarized and dysfunctional,” says Frischen. “There are things going on beyond ideology that are working, with real tenable impact and these stories aren’t told enough.”

They recently discussed some of the book’s key lessons.

You talk about the importance of using empathy to shape social entrepreneurial ventures. Why is that so crucial?

Michael Zakaras: People often think the reason Ashoka entrepreneurs, or fellows, have been so successful is because of the business plan or some innate talent. But it’s that they have the ability to understand a problem deeply, often from people who have lived that problem themselves. When you really understand who your clients are and what they’re grappling with, you build a smarter solution.

Konstanze Frischen: It’s a different view of how development works. Often, big development projects implemented from above don’t work. They don’t match what people think is needed on the ground.

Zakaras: Real change is to not going to happen if we’re just focused on treating symptoms. One of the four criteria for us to select Ashoka fellows is whether they have a systems-changing approach.

Can you talk more about that approach?

Zakaras: It means social entrepreneurs are focused less on serving people than on changing conditions. They do it through policy change, through creating new markets, through seeding the work elsewhere. We look at what we call independent replication—how many people are taking what I do and replicating it elsewhere.

Frischen: Our fellows work on changing roles, changing structures, changing mindsets.

Zakaras: It’s a lot easier to measure how many mosquito nets you delivered. While that’s needed, changing mindsets and culture requires real patience. Yet the world of social entrepreneurship is calibrated toward a direct service approach. As opposed to what are you doing to introduce a new normal in the world. Are you focused on root causes? Or are you focused on treating symptoms of much deeper problems?

Frischen: It may be in an areas where markets have failed. But social entrepreneurs see ways of tapping into the resources of the people who live there and creating systemic incentives to build something new that works.

One social entrepreneur who seemed to stand out is Brandon Dennison and Coalfield Development in Appalachia. Can you talk about his approach to seeding businesses?

Zakaras: Brandon’s role at Coalfield Development is almost like an orchestra conductor as opposed to an engineer of one particular thing. He started with the idea that workforce development in Appalachia isn’t working. We train people but there are no jobs. He has a model of 33 hours of paid work, six hours of study and three hours of professional and personal development, while also incubating businesses at the local level, often green enterprises. The goal is to create a forward-looking 21rst century economy.

Through his new coalition, which just got a huge infusion of federal dollars, he’s working with mayors, social enterprises, companies, universities, nonprofits and saying how do we reinvent the economy in Appalachia? It’s not about how do we launch one solar enterprise—although they are launching a lot of social enterprises, including solar ones, because that’s the opportunity. He’s saying we have the people, the spirit, and the infrastructure to pump huge amounts of power out of West Virginia. But this requires cooperation, doing workforce development work in a different way, helping social enterprises launch and succeed.

Frischen: He’s building an ecosystem. You don’t do it in isolation. You do it as a community.

It’s an example of starting from the bottom up, listening to people. He has a vocational training program. But it also involves tapping people on the ground in a way that is owned by the community, with their ideas for what should be built.

For that you need smaller seed grants which allow these business to launch, in addition to training. That is a way to rebuild the infrastructure at a fraction of the cost a top-down approach would require. There have been so many top-down attempts to develop this region and it never works.

Zakaras: To create the right kinds of for-profit economic activity allowing many more people to thrive, there’s a critical role for nonprofit or civil society organizations that are creating the foundation for this economic impact to happen.