The Need for Strategic Thinking in (Youth) Social Entrepreneurship

What Would You Do?

Yesterday, I was at the dosomething.org conference in the Golden Gate Club of San Francisco attending workshops on how to start a nonprofit if you’re a young person (which they define as being under 25). There were a couple of recent grads like me who work in the nonprofit consulting world, but the vast majority of people at the conference were high school and college students looking to start or build their nonprofit organization. (Quick shout out to @Kjer, who led a great session on international projects – if you’re starting an international project, make sure you think carefully about 1. logistics, 2. culture, and 3. sustainability).

However, to my surprise, I felt completely out of place and extremely worried while I was at the conference. What worries me is how we’re teaching the future generations to change the world.

I was a Youth Venture kid back in the day. I applied for and received a $1000 grant to start my “social enterprise” to try and change the world. While I’m not going to go into every detail of why the nonprofit sector, particularly youth programs like Youth Venture frustrate me, I do want to focus on one particularly alarming problem: the lack of emphasis on strategic thinking in many nonprofit bootcamps.

At the dosomething.org conference, the day starts out with a quick introduction to the day’s events and it immediately has participants jump into sessions like “Branding and Marketing,” “Political Activism and Community Organizing,” and “Corporate Sponsors.” But what’s missing is a more robust discussion on how to approach problem solving in the social sector (or what some call social innovation). If you want to see organic food in your school’s cafeteria, does seeking corporate sponsorship or thinking about branding and marketing really make sense? Or if you want to address the issue of homelessness, why does creating a nonprofit that raises awareness of the issue among students the best solution?

The design of programs like Youth Venture and dosomething (and even classes on social entrepreneurship at Stanford) share something in common: they begin with the implicit assumption that the way to change the world is by creating an organization. There’s no discussion of working closely with an existing nonprofit, no discussion of what research they should be doing about the problem, or what solutions already exist out there or why past solutions have failed. These are critical thinking skills that are direly needed in this sector but omitted in these contexts. By focusing too much on youth empowerment and not necessarily on youth impact, I’m worried that these kinds of programs might be setting students up for failure, or even worse, a false notion of success that is already too common in the nonprofit sector.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for youth entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship – and I think the dosomething staff are an extremely enthusiastic and talented bunch – but I also want to make sure we provide today’s youth the necessary critical thinking skills that can help them understand how to be strategic in their social entrepreneurship and innovation. Maybe sessions on 1) how to recruit a board, 2) how to research problems, and 3) how to design effective solutions would help.

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On a side note, I really enjoyed the speed pitching session at the end of the conference and got great feedback from the people I pitched my idea to. A program director at a local foundation is helping me to identify sources of program related investment (PRI) while two VC professionals, including one from DFJ, both think the idea has a lot of merit and worth pursuing. I’m planning on making a video common-craft style – so stay tuned!