NI09: Rebecca Onie and Alex Counts on Social Entrepreneurship

My favorite speakers from Net Impact 2009 were the Saturday morning keynotes on Social Entrepreneurship – Rebecca Onie of Project Health and Alex Counts of the Grameen Foundation. Both Rebecca and Alex shared stories about starting their organizations, the change they are trying to drive, and lessons learned.

Rebecca Onie, Founder and CEO of Project Health
Rebecca was a college student at Harvard in 1996 when she became disenchanted with the lack of health support for low-income youth and families, which often pushed them further into poverty. She and Barry Zuckerman, Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center started Project Health to break the link between poverty and poor health. Project Health provides undergraduate volunteers to staff clinics where they connect low income families with local resources to meet their food and housing needs.

Takeaways from Rebecca:
– Leaders are only as strong as their team. We need to do a better job of thinking strategically about how to build a pipeline of talent outside of the leadership team in social entrepreneur-run organizations.
– Social entrepreneurs have a desperate need for talent – people who are effective managers and can lead teams.
– The question of who is the consumer is complicated in the social sector. Project Health recently went through an analysis and realized that their consumer are the payers in the health care system, not the families or the doctors. That is the only way they will get systemic change.
– Insist you have the opportunity to work with someone you think you can learn alot from.
– Having a real appetite to learn from others is critical.

Alex Counts, Founder and CEO of the Grameen Foundation
Alex was a college student at Cornell in the 1980s when he was inspired by the work of Mohammad Yunus building the Grameen Bank to fight poverty in Bangladesh. Dr. Yunus eventually invited Alex to come to Bangladesh on his Fullbright scholarship. Cornell was 1 of 5 colleges that offered Bengali at the time, and Alex learned it before he left. Alex started the Grameen Foundation in 1997, which is now a major player in microfinance.

Takeaways from Alex:
– Talent is the biggest asset an organization has, and it trumps everything.
– MBAs often think they will go into the business world and come back later, but it doesn’t happen.
– Realize that fundraising is fun – “I realized that I am a broker between projects that need money and people who have money but don’t know where to put it.”
– Leaders have to reward failure, not just success.
– Find mentors (people who want to develop you) and build the next generation of leaders in your field.
– Engage the private sector with ambition, optimism, and no illusion (they can be enablers to solve social problems but don’t have any illusion about what they are primarily focused on)

Thanks to Rebecca and Alex for such an insightful discussion!