On Social Entrepreneurs as Enculturators

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

Enculturators are dedicated to altering systemic challenges through cultural change. Enculturators seek to restructure that edifice which reinforces co-dependency. We believe that an important component of the edifice is the very pattern of beliefs, practices, and routines – the culture of our daily lives – that keeps our patterns of co-dependency firmly in place. We seek to shift that co-dependency to a re-newed sense of empowerment.

A major access point in shifting the culture is the new trend of “social entrepreneurs.” Legacy XXI is committed to work with organizations and individuals who seek to be transformative forces in the community. We believe that the vision of the social entrepreneurial movement is to advance systemic shifts in entrenched social challenges, often characterized as being in a state of hopelessness and despair, and to do so as a self-sustaining enterprise.

The social entrepreneur spearheads a new initiative for cultural change – the citizen sector. Participation is open to all. The opportunity is to generate a shift in a host of entrenched societal challenges, including homelessness, poverty, literacy, drug-abuse, and other dilemmas which have produced a multi-generational entropy of hopelessness, despair and choicelessness.

The social entrepreneur is a transformative power for creating new possibilities, opportunities and choices within the general community as well as within the social service sector. It is a paradigm shifting methodology:

• The social entrepreneur is empowered by enhanced and renewed access to their own dignity, respect, and opportunity in a profound and measurable way;
• The community is enhanced and empowered by a model of performance within a domain of renewed possibilities and choices;
• The new enterprise offers the community an alternative to the existing co-dependency of process related social service programs, which is the current paradigm;
• The larger community benefits from the opportunity to support social entrepreneurs in their commitment to transform societal issues through a positive, useful and self-sustaining economic model;
• Local, state, and federal governments benefit through the possibility of transformative initiatives that operate in a self-sustaining structure and both inspire cultural change as well as perpetrate a cultural change momentum;
• Local, state, and federal governments, as well as all of society, may benefit from a reduction in the need for funding ever expanding social challenges; and,
• Social entrepreneurs may have the transformative power to alter the funding structure by foundations and governments from process-related funding to measurable, results-oriented investments that finally create a turn-around in the most intractable of societal challenges.

The social entrepreneur has the opportunity to operate in a manner here-to-fore unthinkable in the global free-enterprise system. They seek to be self-sustaining in the short-term, and are a living model of the transformative cultural shifts they serve. They employ those who may otherwise have been recipients of aid and services, and they produce a result that intentionally reduces their marketplace of need. Thus, the more successful social entrepreneurs are, the less needed they become. In many critical social areas, the social entrepreneur is the pioneer of a new field of business practice that succeeds by intentionally reducing the marketplace for their goods and services.

The challenge for social entrepreneurs is to emerge from within the community. Following the existing pattern of social service, the current thrust of social entreprenueurism is still delivering for someone in need rather than by someone committed to diminishing the need. Much like the existing social service system, the focus is on the professionals having the knowledge to deliver the results to those unable to take the actions for themselves. Most actions done for us, because they think we need it done for us, breed co-dependency, and co-dependency is what keeps systemic change from taking place. One social entrepreneurial success will be a terrific model for the community; a dozen social entrepreneurs will change the community from despair to turn-around.