Social Entrepreneurship Gets its Own TV Show

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2010-02-21 07:13:00 UTC
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Well, this must mean we've reached the big time. A partnership between the BBC World and the Skoll Foundation has resulted in a primetime television show on the global network about the work of social entrepreneurs like Kiva, Apopo and Partners in Health.

The program is called Alvin's Guide to Good Business, and is hosted by Wall Street business guru Alvin Hall. The basic premise of the show is that Hall visits eight different enterprises as they head into some new phase of expansion and growth. Six months later, he follows up to see how they've done in the intervening period.

In that way, the show deals with an issue at the heart of social entrepreneurship: how to successfully scale impact for new communities. The process of going from small to bigger means making choices about how fast to grow, as well as how to adapt to different environments.

While the first episode that's now available online here suggests there won't be a huge amount of new material for those already immersed in the field, I'm feeling positive about the show for a couple reasons. First, I think that scaling process is pretty complicated, and if the show can shed some light on how top social entrepreneurs have dealt with those questions, it would be doing the field good.

Second, I think that this field is still immensely young, and has barely scratched the surface of its power to make people think differently about what they should expect of the businesses they interact with every day. The BBC is a major, major platform to spread this message, and so I'm all for it.

You can watch episodes in full on this site. The first episode posted focuses on Riders for Health, and you can watch it as well, below:

Photo Credit: schmilblik

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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