SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR SPECIAL ....A LITTLE HELP AT THE START

 A LITTLE HELP AT THE START 

An Indian origin entrepreneur helps social innovators translate their good intentions into ethically minded enterprises

    Jordan Phoenix was struck by what he thought was a noble idea: of mainstreaming philanthropy in First World societies. He quit his job and started living off credit cards to make his idea work, but was eventually forced to move away from Los Angeles because he could no longer afford to live there. A complete lack of emotional support for his social entrepreneurship project was another problem. “Not a single person in my social circle had any passion or interest in what I was doing, so I spent lots of time trying to justify it to myself. The hardest part of it all was that I had no one to turn to for advice,” says Phoenix, founder and director at Idea Launch Pad, a platform that harnesses the power and resources of the general public to create socially beneficial projects.
    In 2011, Phoenix met Kanika Gupta and found out about SoJo (SocialJourney) and realised that he wasn’t alone, or a failure. SoJo is an online one-stop-shop for social entrepreneurs. It aggregates information from everywhere — all the resources and the how-tos of building a project.
    Gupta, 26, has worked the last ten years in outreach programs on social change and community access. Having previously worked in West Africa and Tamil Nadu on social issues, Gupta undertook a six-month journey across Canada to understand the problems entrepreneurs faced from idea to impact. “That helped with a lot of insights. Everyone told me about things they didn’t like — for instance, how do you get yourself organised, how do you get the message out to the community. Every single person I met and interviewed told me that they wished they had the answers to those questions I was asking when they started. It was clear that there was no go-to place, to learn from others’ experiences, to share intelligence instead of having to figure everything out by themselves. They felt alone, down and lost,” she says. These learnings first found their way into a book, then an online blog and have now been developed into a consolidated online set of tools — and a support system — that has helped hundreds of struggling ideas to fruition.
    Phoenix’s Project Free World is one. Now rapidly expanding, it won the “Best Design Award” at a recent NYC hackathon and had even Google reaching out to form a partnership to help expand its user base. Phoenix attributes some of the success to SoJo, which claims in turn that it has reached 1,500 such people since it started six months ago. SoJo, which was recently endorsed by the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, stressed on how it helps guide people in understanding themselves, their ideas, and, more importantly, provides them with the knowledge on how to execute them.
    “But we don’t handhold the users. There is no one way to do this. We found that there is so much knowledge out there but it is often unacceptable in its original form. One of the insights was that that your time should be spent on the actual passion and idea and not on curating or breaking down a sea of information. We don’t prescribe anything. We embrace the whole idea of the journey because perfect answers don’t exist. There is so much you learn on the process and first timers are incredibly intimidated and need a close, warm, user-friendly space to start off,” says Gupta.
    Startup problems can be numerous: from funding, to business modelling, to impact measurements or team building, to even needing motivation through the roughest patches. “The biggest challenge is to get started. The next hindrance entrepreneurs face is that they don’t know how to ask for help or who to ask. The first two steps are the hardest. If you have the endpoint in mind, you won’t get anywhere. And glamourising only the grand, big success stories, like in most of media, is terrible. We celebrate micro actions. That is what is missing in this world. We start that starting point for people,” adds Gupta.
    SoJo figures that sustaining motivation is also a tremendous challenge. It has been documenting, on blogs, the stories of those who lost their will somewhere along the way but have been able to pick up the threads again. As Gupta puts it, “We are trying to build trust with our users and personal connections, so that they can help out peer-to-peer. I won’t tell anyone that it is an easy journey. It isn’t, but if you remind yourself that this is a privilege and a choice to actively participate in a world you believe strongly in, that’s powerful.”
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