The following is copied from Social Edge (http://www.socialedge.org/discussions/responsibility/doing-good-while-living-well/).

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Do you have to live like the poor to help the poor? Is it wrong to want it all - making money and a difference? Controversial questions indeed, but increasingly there are ways you can live in accordance to your conscience without giving up on the creature comforts.

• Pursue private sector perks: Keep the stock options, climb the corporate ladder, and still keep your feet on the ground with great new opportunities in the burgeoning fields of corporate responsibility and environmental affairs. To find these gigs, try searching job sites for buzz words like: “corporate responsibility”, “social responsibility”, sustainability, eco-friendly, organic, “fair trade”, "socially responsible investing", or their abbreviations, SRI, CRO, CSR, etc. You could also work for companies that support organic, fair trade, alternative energy, and the like, or simply lobby your existing company to offer pro bono work to support other nonprofit efforts.

• Fish for opportunities at foundations: OK, perhaps there are no stock options here, but take a look. In addition to competitive salaries, they may offer contributions to retirement plans, matching donation gifts, and (sometimes) better work-life balance. If time is money, there is a lot to be said for a reasonable work week and flexibility. Universities even offer tuition grants and sometimes childcare, which leads us to the next topic:

• Give nonprofits another chance: Many nonprofits are paying more these days! Check out Laura Gassner Otting's new book called "Transitioning to the Nonprofit Sector" or the recent article "Nonprofit groups pay competitive salaries" by Andrea Kay to see how nonprofits are getting more competitive. And they really need to be competitive since Thomas J Tierney's report: The Nonprofit Sector's Leadership Deficit points out that "By 2016, these [nonprofit] organizations will need almost 80,000 new senior managers per year." (See also 2007 CEO Compensation Study, Top Nonprofit Executives See Healthy Pay Raises, and New Rules Lift the Lid on Nonprofit Pay).

BUT it's not all rosy in nonprofit-land, so you have to look hard and high for the right opportunities since "Long Hours, Low Pay Turn Off Young Nonprofit Workers, Study Finds" and "Your nonprofit salary might be as little as 40 percent of your for-profit equivalent, but it doesn't have to be," said Laura Gassner Otting in her book."

• Keep your day job: The other way to go is to keep you corporate gig, earn a bucket-load of money and then invest in social entrepreneurs. With money you can do some great things. Or if you want to be directly involved, keep the high paying job and find a way to do good on the side. Here's a few ways you can put your capitalist talents to work on mini-projects, pro-bono work, or two week adventures.


Take a look at the "Without Borders" organizations: Doctors, Lawyers, MBAs, Teachers, Engineers.
Volunteer on a short-term project basis: Volunteer Match, Tap Root, Global Volunteer Network, e-Volunteer.co.uk, Action Without Borders, Just Volunteers, Desire of Ages Volunteer Network (Tanzania), iVolunteer (India), more options.
Invest: Calvert, Kiva, Silicon Valley Venture Fund, Social Ventures Australia, Venturesome, Venture Philanthropy Partners

...or start your own social enterprise. As Kate Dunn said in her article "...There are around 55,000 social enterprises in the UK right now, according to government figures. They’re turning over £27bn and employing half a million – eye-popping figures. The founders come from two ‘pots’. Many are from the charity or not-for-profit sector, and decide that a sustainable business will generate more cash and potential for social change. Increasingly, however, social entrepreneurs come from the private sector. People like you."

• Find what you want: What do you care about? Start with that, and search job sites for alternative energy, climate change or whatever rings your bell. Then try to narrow your search with senior job titles and/or companies to zero in on the jobs that fit the bill in more ways than one. To help with the search for these types of jobs, review listings for phrases or terms that are used in the jobs you are interested in. We have aggregated a LIST OF CURRENT OPENINGS that might be of interest from India, Paris, the US and more. Searching for key phrases can help narrow the job results to ones you are really interested in, and eliminate the less relevant and/or low paying/volunteer opportunities. Where are these jobs? Besides the generic job sites, there are a number of specialty websites for environment, nonprofit, and other social venture jobs, but keep in mind, this is just the tip of the iceberg, not an exhaustive list.

I just came across the Sasi Foundation (http://www.sasifoundation.org/). It looks wothy of investigation.

Here's another. Coro at http://www.coro.org.

"What if you could harness the power of the free market to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, and inequality?" See Muhammed Yunnus' _Creating a World Without Poverty_ and _Banker to the Poor_ at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/002-0707286-0774446?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=creating+a+World+without+poverty&x=16&y=23.

From the NY Times:

January 29, 2008, 7:12 pm
Many Are Already at Work on Fulfilling Gates’s Vision
By John Markoff

Bill Gates’s bold Davos challenge to the world’s capitalists last week should have come with equally bold footnotes.
“There are billions of people who need the great inventions of the computer age,” he asserted. “Breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them.”
Conspicuously missing from the appeal, which asserted that human nature is not just driven by greed but also by concern for our fellow beings, was any reference to the work and thinking of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.
The microfinance innovator, who is known as the “banker for the poor,” recently wrote a book, “Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism,” that foreshadows Mr. Gates’s newfound social philosophy.
Last week Mr. Gates called on the executives of the largest corporations to add social entrepreneurship to their agenda, a leopard-spot-altering exercise at best. However, in challenging his compatriots, one of the experiments he overlooked was Mr. Yunus’s stunning success at Grameen Phone in Bangladesh, an effort he has pioneered during the past decade in partnership with Telenor, a Norwegian wireless carrier.
Intended as an experiment to extend wireless communications networks to the world’s poorest people, the program has become a remarkable success on multiple levels. Not only did it create a class of “phone ladies” who brought wealth into village communities, it has grown quickly enough and been profitable enough that Mr. Yunus said this week in Davos that Telenor had decided to break its original promise to his organization and refused to turn over control to allow the program to be run on a not-for-profit basis.
The challenge now facing the firm is to replicate its success as a wireless voice provider as a wireless Internet company. This week in Davos, Mr. Yunus said that that transformation was well under way.
The deeper implication of that shift would be an advance from a communications to a computing revolution. As voice networks have paved the way into the farthest reaches of the emerging world, it is likely that they will quickly be followed by the Internet and the World Wide Web. That in turn could become a great leveler, bringing markets, electronic commerce and health care networks to the world’s poorest.
With any luck it will mean that the emerging nations will finally complete the promise of a failed computing experiment played out by a team of French and American computer scientists in Senegal a quarter of a century ago. The original idea was that computing technology would make it possible to skip a stage of economic development, with people in developing nations quickly joining the information society without having to undergo industrialization.
Which brings us back to Mr. Gates’s plea at the World Economic Forum last week. Microsoft’s research lab in India, he said, was focusing on a variety of projects, ranging from low-cost wireless to new computing interfaces that will allow semi-literate and illiterate people to use computers effectively.
These are great ideas, but at Davos this year there were already a proliferation of technology-driven projects in evidence, all targeted at the bottom of the economic pyramid. They indicated that over the next decade the so-called “digital divide” may prove less of a barrier than previously thought.
Because Moore’s Law — the doubling of chip density at regular intervals — drives down price while increasing performance, computing has reached an increasing portion of the world’s population at an accelerating rate. Today over three billion people — half the world’s population — have cell phones. This year at the World Economic Forum, wireless industry executives predicted that two billion more would be added in the next six or seven years.
This underscores the increasingly rapid spread of the Internet, for what is a cell phone but a computer and a radio attached to a wireless data network?
The real challenge may prove to be whether the emerging world will modernize without repeating the mistakes of Mr. Gates’s developed world that have produced climate and pollution crises.

In Yunus' own words (http://www.grameen-info.org/bank/socialbusinessentrepreneurs.htm):

Social Business Entrepreneurs
Are the Solution
Muhammad Yunus

Capitalism is Interpreted too Narrowly

Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly. In this narrow interpretation we create a one-dimensional human being to play the role of entrepreneur. We insulate him from other dimensions of life, such as, religious, emotional, political dimensions. He is dedicated to one mission in his business life ---- to maximize profit. He is supported by masses of one-dimensional human beings who back him up with their investment money to achieve the same mission. The game of free market works out beautifully with one-dimensional investors and entrepreneurs. We have remained so mesmerised by the success of the free market that we never dared to express any doubt about it. We worked extra hard to transform ourselves, as closely as possible, into the one-dimensional human beings as conceptualised in theory to allow smooth functioning of free market mechanism.

Economic theory postulates that you are contributing to the society and the world in the best possible manner if you just concentrate on squeezing out the maximum for yourself. When you get your maximum, everybody else will get their maximum.

As we devotedly follow this policy sometimes doubts appear in our mind whether we are doing the right thing. Things don't look too good around us. We quickly brush off our doubts by saying all these bad things happen because of "market failures"; well-functioning market cannot produce unpleasant results.

I think things are going wrong not because of "market failure". It is much deeper than that. Let us be brave and admit that it is because of "conceptualisation failure". More specifically, it is the failure to capture the essence of a human being in our theory. Everyday human beings are not one-dimensional entities, they are excitingly multi-dimensional and indeed very colourful. Their emotions, beliefs, priorities, behaviour patterns can be more aptly described by drawing analogy with the basic colours and millions of colours and shades they produce.


Social Business Entrepreneurs Can Play a Big Role in the Market

Suppose we postulate a world with two kinds of people, both one-dimensional, but having different objectives. One type is the existing type, i.e. profit maximizing type. Second type is a new type, who are not interested in profit-maximization. They are totally committed to make a difference to the world. They are social-objective driven. They want to give better chance in life to other people. They want to achieve their objective through creating/supporting sustainable business enterprises. Their businesses may or may not earn profit, but like any other businesses they must not incur losses. They create a new class of business which we may describe as "non-loss" business.

Can we find second type of people in the real world ? Yes, we can. Aren't we familiar with "do-gooders" ? Do-gooders are the same people who are referred to as "social entrepreneurs" in formal parlance. Social entrepreneurism is an integral part of human history. Most people take pleasure in helping others. All religions encourage this quality in human beings. Governments reward them by giving tax breaks. Special legal facilities are created for them so that they can create legal entities to pursue their objectives.

Some social entrepreneurs (SE) use money to achieve their objectives, some just give away their time, labour, talent, skill or such other contributions which are useful to others. Those who use money may or may not try to recover part or all of the money they put into their work by charging fee or price.

We may classify the SEs, who use money, into four types :

i) No cost recovery
ii) Some cost recovery
iii) Full cost recovery
iv) More than full cost-recovery

Once a SE operate at 100% or beyond the cost recovery point he has entered the business world with limitless possibilities. This is a moment worth celebrating. He has overcome the gravitational force of financial dependence and now is ready for space flight ! This is the critical moment of significant institutional transformation. He has moved from the world of philanthropy to the world of business. To distinguish him from the first two types of SEs listed above, we'll call him "social business entrepreneur" (SBE).

With the introduction of SBEs, the market place becomes more interesting and competitive. Interesting because two different kinds of objectives are now at play creating two different sets of frameworks for price determination. Competitive because there are more players now than before. These new players can be equally aggressive and enterprising in achieving their goals as the other entrepreneurs.

SBEs can become very powerful players in the national and international economy. Today if we add up the assets of all the SBEs of the world, it would not add up to even an ultra-thin slice of the global economy. It is not because they basically lack growth potential, but because conceptually we neither recognised their existence, nor made any room for them in the market. They are considered freaks, and kept outside the mainstream economy. We do not pay any attention to them, because our eyes are blinded by the theories taught in our schools.

If SBEs exist in the real world, it makes no sense why we should not make room for them in our conceptual framework. Once we recognise them supportive institutions, policies, regulations, norms, and rules will come into being to help them become mainstream.

Market is always considered to be an utterly incapable institution to address social problems. To the contrary, market is recognised as an institution significantly contributing to creating social problems (environmental hazards, inequality, health, unemployment, ghettoes, crimes, etc.). Since market has no capacity to solve social problem, this responsibility is handed over to the State. This arrangement was considered as the only solution until command economies were created where State took over everything, abolishing market.

But this did not last long. With command economies gone we are back to the artificial division of work between the market and the State. In this arrangement market is turned into an exclusive playground of the personal gain seekers, overwhelmingly ignoring the common interest of communities and the world as a whole.

With the economy expanding at an unforeseen speed, personal wealth reaching unimaginable heights, technological innovations making this speed faster and faster, globalisation threatening to wipe out the weak economies and the poor people from the economic map, it is time to consider the case of SBEs more seriously than we did ever before. Not only is it not necessary to leave the market solely to the personal-gain seekers, it is extremely harmful to mankind as a whole to do that. It is time to move away from the narrow interpretation of capitalism and broaden the concept of market by giving full recognition to SBEs. Once this is done SBEs can flood the market and make the market work for social goals as efficiently as it does for personal goals.


Social Stock Market

How do we encourage creation of SBEs ? What are the steps that we need to take to facilitate the SBEs to take up bigger and bigger chunks of market share ?

First, we must recognise the SBEs in our theory. Students must learn that businesses are of two kinds : a) business to make money, and b) business to do good to others. Young people must learn that they have a choice to make --- which kind of entrepreneur they would like to be ? If we broaden the interpretation of capitalism even more, they'll have wider choice of mixing these two basic types in proportions just right for their own taste.

Second, we must make the SBEs and social business investors visible in the market place. As long as SBEs operate within the cultural environment of present stock markets they'll remain restricted by the existing norms and lingo of trading. SBEs must develop their own norms, standards, measurements, evaluation criteria, and terminology. This can be achieved only if we create a separate stockmarket for social business enterprises and investors. We can call it Social Stock Market. Investors will come here to invest their money for the cause they believe in, and in the company they think is doing the best in achieving a particular mission. There may be some companies listed in this social stock market who are excellent in achieving their mission at the same time making very attractive profit on the side. Obviously these companies will attract both kinds of investors, social-goal oriented as well as personal-gain oriented.

Making profit will not disqualify an enterprise to be a social business enterprise. Basic deciding factor for this will be whether the social goal remains to be enterprise's over-arching goal, and it is clearly reflected in its decision-making. There will be well-defined stringent entry and exit criteria for a company to qualify to be listed in the social stock market and to lose that status. Soon companies will emerge which will succeed in mixing both social goal and personal goal. There will be decision-rules to decide upto what point they still qualify to enter the social stock market, and at what point they must leave it. Investors must remain convinced that companies listed in the social stock market are truly social business enterprises.

Along with the creation of the Social Stock Market we'll need to create rating agencies, appropriate impact assessment tools, indices to understand which social business enterprise is doing more and/or better than others --- so that social investors are correctly guided. This industry will need its Social Wall Street Journal and Social Financial Times to bring out all the exciting, as well as the terrible, news stories and analyses to keep the social entrepreneurs and investors properly informed and forewarned.

Within business schools we can start producing social MBAs to meet the demand of the SBEs as well as preparing young people to become SBEs themselves. I think young people will respond very enthusiastically to the challenge of making serious contributions to the world by becoming SBEs.

We'll need to arrange financing for SBEs. New bank branches specialising in financing social business ventures will have to come up. New "angels" will have to show up on the scene. Social Venture Capitalists will have to join hands with the SBEs.

How to Make a Start

One good way to get started with creating social business enterprises would be to launch a design competition for social business enterprises. There can be local competition, regional competition and global competition. Prizes for the successful designs will come in the shape of financing for the enterprises, or as partnership for implementing the projects.

All submitted social business proposals can be published so that these can become the starting points for the designers in the next cycles, or ideas for someone who wants to start a social business enterprise.

Social Stock Market itself can be started by a SBE as social business enterprise. One business school, or several business schools can join hands to launch this as a project and start serious business transactions.

Let us not expect that a social business enterprise will come up, from its very birth, with all the answers to a social problem. Most likely, it will proceed in steps. Each step may lead to the next level of achievement. Grameen Bank is a good example in this regard. In creating Grameen Bank I never had a blue-print to follow. I moved one step at a time, always thinking this step will be my last step. But it was not. That one step led me to another step, a step which looked so interesting that it was difficult to walk away from. I faced this situation at every turn.

I started my work by giving small amount of money to a few poor people without any collateral. Then I realised how good the people felt about it. I needed more money to expand the programme. To access bank money, I offered myself as a guarantor. To get support from another bank, I converted my project as the bank's project. Later, I turned it into central bank project. Over time I saw that the best strategy would be to create an independent bank to do the work that we do. So we did. We converted the project into a formal bank, borrowing money from the central bank to lend money to the borrowers. Since donors became interested in our work, and wanted to support us, we borrowed and received grants from international donors. At one stage we decided to be self-reliant. This led us to focus on generating money internally by collecting deposits. Now Grameen Bank has more money in deposits than it lends out to borrowers. It lends out half a billion dollars a year, in loans averaging under $ 200, to 4.5 million borrowers, without collateral, and maintains 99 per cent repayment record.

We introduced many programmes in the bank --- housing loans, student loans, pension funds, loans to purchase mobile phones to become the village telephone ladies, loans to beggars to become door-to-door salesman. One came after another.

If we create the right environment, SBEs can take up significant market share and make the market an exciting place for fighting social battles in ever innovative and effective ways.

Lets get serious about social business entrepreneurs. They can brighten up this gloomy world.