Lessons - The Evolving Role of Social Entrepreneurship | Abby Falik - Founder & CEO of Global Citizen Year

In this episode, we break down what defines social entrepreneurship and how it differs from traditional business. You'll learn how leaders can balance profit with purpose, measure real impact, and approach education as a tool for change. We also explore key leadership traits like empathy, resilience, and agency, and how they shape the future of responsible business. Now, this is what I want to understand. What is social entrepreneurship? I ask that because if somebody is looking at, for example, like an Elon Musk, and he's putting people on Mars, and he's creating an electric car, and he's doing all these incredible things, and he's like, well, that's advancing humanity. How is that not to the benefit? But ultimately, as driving incredible profits, there's shareholders, stakeholders. Obviously, he's incredibly wealthy himself. So how do we define what social entrepreneurship is? What isn't it? Is there some gray area for some causes? Or is it very black and white? Oh, it's simply not black and white. I think fairly, fairly, fairly, you think is our ever black and white. And I think that the lines between, what we've called entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship are blurring. I think the lines between the sectors, the traditional, non-profit, for-profit, public sector distinction, also totally blurring. And frankly, don't make sense anymore. I think those are outmoded and not useful designations in many ways. For me, my favorite definition of entrepreneurship is the pursuit of resources. Sorry, the pursuit of an opportunity independent of the resources under control. It's this notion of stepping off a cliff and having a little confidence that you will assemble the airplane or the parachute as you, before you land. But it's a pursuit of an opportunity before you know where the resources come from. And in social entrepreneurship, I think that the opportunity or pursuing holds people and our planet and some sense of social purpose as your bottom line. I think we get tied in circles when we think about double and triple bottom line businesses. So this is probably the gray area where, you know, when push comes to shove at the end of the day, and you're making decisions as a leader of an entity, one line is on the bottom period. So we set ourselves up as a not-for-profit global citizen year by design so that we could be clear that impact and not profits at the end of the year were the singular bottom line. That doesn't mean we don't raise, you know, money or think about revenue strategically or fine paying customers. It just creates a clarity about to what end we will make decisions when things are marquee. Very smart. And how do you measure impact? Transformative experiences for young people who wouldn't have otherwise had them. We with a framework for training and measuring what we call the real 21st century skills, R-E-A-F, your resilience, empathy, agency, and leadership. And leadership we define not as a position or an arrival point or a title or salary leadership as a practice. And they're set to be eighths that we believe our leaders need to exhibit. It's, you know, practicing curiosity before judgment, aligning your life with your convictions. Have encouraged to do hard things connecting across lines of difference to build empathy. And our belief is that we can embed those behaviors and practices in young people whether 18 and create a community that supports them in continuing to exhibit them as they move into their careers. So over time, it's about launching new leaders who will approach their sense of responsibility in a completely different way. And how do you, as because obviously businesses don't operate in silos? So how do you convince the shareholder is a stakeholder is the investment, the philanthropist? How do you convince them that this is the model that's going to move the needle in the future? Because that's probably a very difficult conversation. That's half the battle with social entrepreneurship, right? How do you get everybody on board with it? When I have an opportunity to sit with somebody and if they are open to listening and reflecting on their own lived experience, it's pretty universal that education was formative. It's fairly universal that there's a distrust and frustration with the way that leaders across sectors are approaching their roles and responsibilities. And it's not a leap of faith to then recognize that if we want the future to look better than the present, the input to that shared future is changing way we approach education. The status quo will get us more of the same and revolutionizing our approach to education gives us a shot at actually preparing young leaders, a new new cadre of leaders who are more representative, more courageous, more humble, more empathetic, and who can actually outpace the existential challenges work against. Actually, I'm going to ask you a question on that one first. Then I just want to talk a little bit about leadership. But when you find leaders that are listening to this and they're like, yes, I do want to have more of an impact. I want to take my organization in one way, but I'm in this particular position. And when I report my Q1 financials, my board doesn't care that much about the impact. They're when we're not making the money that we're supposed to be making. How do you remove yourself out of that position? How do you make your situation better so that you can focus on or perhaps better educate the people that you work with about that long-term vision? What's your leadership lessons for getting people on board with what you believe? How do you change that change management? That's taught. Seeing if I'm understanding right, it starts with the foundational purpose of the entity. And I think so many businesses have been founded with a very singular and focused and easy to measure and define profit, maximizing purpose. Period. And I think it's actually really hard. It's not just about managing change around that. It's about a whole reset that says, whoa, as an entity, what do you exist to do? Because what you measure is what gets done. It's what you manage toward. And the form and the function of what you're actually oriented around follow from what's that north star. So I would just encourage people who are thinking of starting new businesses to be very clear about what the purpose is. And one externality is your accounting for, right? So you can have, I don't mean that the sort of profit maximizing orientation is necessarily bad. I think the problem is when you're not then accounting on your balance sheet for all the externalities or harm you may be causing. So it doesn't work for society to have companies, you know, maximize profits for shareholders with, well, ignoring other stakeholders, including humans and health and the planet's sustainability. And then out of those profits, you give some of it away to help, you know, you've made the money in one hand and you're giving it away with the other to sort of often put band-aids on problems that may have contributed to solving. So it's just a much more holistic way that I think we need to see the role of the corporation in society as accounting for its positive and detrimental contributions. Very good. I love that. And it's something that hopefully if you are in an organization, you can move forward and start to bring up those ideas so that you're right. If it's a large organization, it's hard if it wasn't founded on the correct principles or principles that should matter. But ultimately, that's the direction you should be moving in. And I always share one thought, Scott, as you talk, you've used the word should. These are the things we should be doing, should be doing. And I just hear that as a little bit of a, I think that's a really hard place for as a human to respond from because it feels like an obligation or a corporate social responsibility. As there's something that needs to shift from the should to the must to the, I can't not do it this way because of experiences I've had because of the way I see the world. And I think that's where the clarity comes from. And we get quite mushy or gray when there's a, well, we do it this way, but we should be doing it this way. As I think the language may matter as we're inspiring people to think about new forms and functions for business. I want to get your perspective on on leadership because I thought that was a good point as well. So let's talk about what leadership is and what leadership isn't. From your definition, leadership is what exactly? How do you, how do you become a leader? What is a leader? Leader is not just a title or a role or a salary. Leader is, leadership is how you approach the world is. What is leadership and who can be a leader? Leadership is knowing your ability, exert power and influence from wherever you stand. It's being grounded in a place that on the you stand and only you know from the full accumulation of your experiences and life and you know, it's important. View on the world. And it's knowing that inside of you is an engine to make choices that inspire and influence people around you. And every single person, every single person has that inside them. Absolutely. Absolutely has that inside them. And it is not a role, it is not a salary. And if you feel like you cannot influence your incorrect. So I would say on that, on that a little bit more and whatever you do, whatever you do in your life, it's important to know that you do have that power. You have that agency too. Your agency, which I think is most essential is especially clear word in this. Well, I thought a bit about this, but thinking about you know, in an era when big tech and social media hijack our attention and sell it, unless we know our ability, choose how we respond, what we attend to, what we invest in with our time and energy and resources. If we are just carried along without a sense of our own independent decision making ability, we end up in a spot where there's a threat of authoritarian leadership or we are the product. And we live at a time that requires every human to know important talks about, to citizen is a verb, everybody knows their responsibility to contribute to solving problems big or small. Because without all of us having that orientation, we will just get sort of swept along and swept off a cliff. We need everybody to sort of see their power as change agents. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.