Sustaining Sustainability

The best social entrepreneur advice I heard came inside a Ted Talk video by Ron Finley, a guerilla gardener in South Central LA.  He said, in his distinct inspirational swagger tone, “I am not talking about any free s#$! Cause free is not sustainable. The funny thing about sustainability is you have to sustain it.” What Ron was referring to is that with all social entrepreneurship, one must focus on a sustainable business model in parallel to providing the solution to the social problem.  Many non-profits rely on outside funding, whether by funding foundations, grants, or individual donations to keep them going year-to-year.  The reliability on such funds can fluctuate year-to-year as economies fluctuate year-to-year.  A better model would be a hybrid of non-profit and for-profit such that the for-profit side generates funds for the non-profit movement. In short, become a self-reliable foundation as best as one can.

Last year, I along with three other Carnegie Mellon classmates formed a team to compete in the Hult Global Case Competition (HGCC, now called Hult Prize).  The HGCC was a business competition that crowd source from the top universities around the globe to solve “the most pressing social challenges on the planet.” My team and I competed in the education category which required us to develop a new business plan that would catapult the non-profit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which provided a low-cost laptop called the XO to children in the developing world, from the existing number of 2.4 million laptops in the developing world to 1 0million laptops within one year. A lofty goal indeed, but the purpose was to have each team create a new business model that required each team to think out of the box. 

Our solution in its most primitive form was to sell the XO laptop to children in the developed world and use the funds to subsidize the cost of the XO laptop to children in the developing world.  We asked ourselves “where is the money!” (think Jerry Maguire-ish) and then asked “is there also a market where the money is?”  We believed yes!  So did the HGCC judges and our solution won!

One Laptop Per Child recently announced they will be selling their XO tablet at Walmart in the United States.  OLPC goal is to “offset the cost of getting cheap computers into the hands of children who need them by selling the same computer locally to those who can afford to pay more.” Sound familiar? Though the CMU team is not credited with the idea, I like to think we had a influence - big or small - in this decision. Making OLPC one more non-profit understanding that sustainability must be sustained.

Watch Ron Finley on Ted Talks.  His video is full of information on food deserts of LA, plus if you listen to him closely you will hear good advice on how to imagine your business model for all social entrepreneurships. Change the composition of the soil.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la.html

For more about the Hult Prize start-up accelerator for social entrepreneurship visit http://www.hultprize.org

Watch the video of President Clinton announcing CMU team winner 2012 Hult Global Case Challenge visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOjRx95LRM4