Skoll World Forum 2009 Introduction: New Heroes or a New System?

In just a few hours, I hop on a plane to the Skoll World Forum, the annual gathering that’s been called the “Davos of social entrepreneurship." The Forum is held this year in the midst of economic crisis and at a time when the foundational assumptions of our markets - and to the extent which they’ve become one and the same, our societies. My quest is to understand what social entrepreneurship has to offer as we go about the process of rebuilding, and, as usual, I’m starting with some history.

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In the late 19th century, the United States of America was a society of deep contrasts. On the one hand, the titans of industry had catapulted the young nation to the top of the heap when it came to manufacturing and the international economy. The Carnegies and Rockefellers created wealth on a scale never before seen in human history.

At the same time, America’s increasingly urban society heaved under the pressure of low wages, terrible working conditions, overcrowded living, lack of sanitation, and a host of other social issues that ensured that the prosperity of the Gilded Age was only skin deep.

Around the turn of the century, a young woman from Chicago began building what would became Hull House, a type of refuge designed to support the urban poor in a way that treated them like citizens of a common nation rather than wards of an unequal society.

Indeed, for Jane Addams, her work with the poor was never just about the specific enterprise itself, or even the movement of settlement houses she worked to inspire in cities across the country. For her, the context was always nothing else than the very fabric of democracy itself, and Addams would become one of the leaders of a new era of progressive reform that would fundamentally alter the American political and social landscape.

We slowly learn that life consists of processes as well as results, and that failure may come quite as easily from ignoring the adequacy of one's method as from selfish or ignoble aims. We are thus brought to a conception of Democracy not merely as a sentiment which desires the well-being of all [people], nor yet as a creed which believes in the essential dignity and equality of all [people], but as that which affords a rule for living as well as a test of faith. From Democracy and Social Ethics

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I travel today to the Skoll World Forum at a time when the patina has been scratched off of our own Gilded Age. Decades of largely uninhibited growth have indeed created new wealth and helped bring millions out of abject poverty, but as has become clear in the last six months, they have also corroded our understanding of value and our ability to guide the market’s invisible hand.

The Skoll convening happens at a time when no one is quite sure what will happen next or precisely how we will work our way out of crisis. Yet at the same time, many of us share a sense that the institutions and orthodoxy of the 20th century are not equipped for the century ahead. The question of whether the unregulated free market or the planned welfare state is the best vehicle of freedom and prosperity is largely resolved, and the answer is, of course, neither. The dogmas of the quiet past, are, as Lincoln so poetically put it, simply inadequate for the realities of the stormy present.

The question then becomes, what is next? What does a 21st century global capitalism look like?

The language of social entrepreneurship has ignited a new excitement among young people. It seems, to many, to be the emerging best answer to how to pursue a passion for social justice and make a tangible difference.

But the field is still young. Indeed, sometimes I worry we spend a bit too much time celebrating the idea of the ‘social entrepreneur’ and pondering just what characteristics qualify one for the designation. Sometimes I worry that we’re too focused on the innovative approaches and don’t spend quite enough time reflecting upon the implications the work of social entrepreneurs have for the larger institutions and economies in which the problems we seek to solve exist.

Just as the work of Jane Addams was not just about settlement houses but about building a democracy in which all could participate, so too is the work of a Dr. Paul Farmer or a Muhammad Yunus or a Dr. Victoria Hale about inequality, injustice, and about rejecting the false dichotomy that says we must chose between free markets and human rights.

The fundamental talent of any entrepreneur is to move resources from an area of lower yield to an area of higher yield. In the social sector, this means the ability to approach a problem in new ways and move the dial to produce results.

What I want from the Skoll World Forum is vision. What I want from the Skoll Forum are plans. If we believe, as Jane Addams , that “private beneficence is totally inadequate to deal with the vast numbers of the [world’s] disinherited,” then we must ask what role government must have in creating the future? If we believe that this version of capitalism is crumbling, with what shall we replace it?

These are the questions I’ll be asking for the next few days. I’ll be bringing you short video interviews with some of the brightest minds in the field. What I seek is past inspiration; its operation. Now is the time to leave the stands.

To end with one final quote from Addams:

“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt.”

The point? Let the conversations begin.