Transcript of Remarks of Marco Davis, Youth Venture
The Phoenix Project’s
“Accelerating Social Entrepreneurship in Virginia” Luncheon
July 25, 2007
Falls Church, Virginia
Thank you, Governor. Good afternoon everyone. I think my remarks will take a bit of a different tack. I’d like to give the global perspective on this question of social entrepreneurship and then actually drill down to the specific question of this next generation of social entrepreneurs. I think Youth Venture and programs like the Phoenix Project exemplify some of the best practices in the field.
So briefly, the thirty-second introduction is that Youth Venture is an organization that grew out of Ashoka, “innovators for the public,” which hopefully many of you are familiar with. For nearly the past 30 years, Ashoka has dedicated itself to identifying and supporting leading social entrepreneurs around the world. They have elected nearly 2000 Ashoka fellows. And some of these folks have been some of the most influential people in their country and in society. What Youth Venture does is to build a global movement of young people who are being change makers now. Establishing this movement of young people is the foundation of an “everyone a change maker” world. Ashoka shares this same vision. It is sort of the Ashoka 2.0 as we call it. We are working toward a long term vision of a society where everyone is a change maker.
What we have come to understand is that going forward the single, most critical factor for the success of any human grouping—whether a family or a neighborhood or an organization or a company or even a nation—the single, most critical factor will be the percentage of its people who are change-makers, who are people that take initiative, who adapt, innovate and who problem-solve. The world’s problems have become so much more complex. The problems are also interrelated, and in fact the rate of change in society has accelerated so much that the old solutions simply don’t work. As the Governor mentioned earlier, government alone cannot solve these problems. The small percentage of the world’s population who have the most access to resources do not have all of the solutions and do not have all of the ability to bring about solutions that improve our society. So what we’ve come to realize is that what we really need is a dramatic and significant increase in the number of people who play an active part, and social entrepreneurship is one of the methods.
What Youth Venture does specifically is invest in teams of young people to launch sustainable community serving ventures, connect them to a global network of like-minded people and a broader set of resources and thereby shape a culture of change making. We do this to respond to the challenges of encouraging and fostering social entrepreneurship. One of the challenges we have discovered is the mindset. Part of the reason more people currently do not participate in society is that they have not given themselves permission to be powerful. It is true, as Robert and Bill have said, that people are still not familiar with the term social entrepreneur. They have not encountered it as a career, as an option. They don’t understand how it fits within the different sectors and so on. But more importantly, people in general and young people in particular are simply hesitant to act on their ideas. They don’t think they have anything special to offer, or they are not sure that their idea will work, or they don’t think that anyone will support them.
The archetypal social entrepreneur, the one we all read about in the hero stories, is fixated on their vision and driven to the point where nothing will stop them from succeeding. So naturally, this concept doesn’t apply to the future Mark Warners of the world, but what we have found is that relying on those few outstanding, stellar people who are already going to make a difference is simply not going to be enough. So what we need is to help people, young and old alike, allow themselves to be powerful. And one of the things we have found, one of the most strategic and least difficult ways to do that, is by working with young people as the Phoenix Project does and as Youth Venture does. They have not yet reached the point where they have found limitation in their lives. So that’s one of the pieces that we think is a critical challenge and something that a strategy can address.
A second point, briefly, that I’ll mention is the question of strategy. The Phoenix Project has really understood this point—it is the importance of the network. By bringing that they will maintain connections to each other, to the institutions that they interact with and to the communities that they serve, so that collectively their impact is maximized and it is done so in an ongoing way.
Critical mass is important. Making the state of Virginia this hotbed of social entrepreneurship, like the cities of Boston and New York and San Francisco, is this question of critical mass. We need a tipping point in the culture whereby social entrepreneurship becomes the norm, where it becomes perfectly acceptable for people to realize, “I have a new idea. I can get people together to support me. I can find a way to make a difference right now. I don’t need to sit around anymore and wait or wonder who is going to solve this problem. I can get together, I can tap the existing institutions and resources that are already there and do so.”
[End of Transcript]