Motivated by Social Justice

A unifying force for next-generation social entrepreneurs is the desire to promote social justice, and the deep integration of this desire in their daily lives. This has resulted partly from the disintegration of the boundaries that have historically divided people—technology, geography, and value systems—giving these entrepreneurs a window into today’s problems. For many of my generation¹ and those who came before us, geography, income, and indeed the inclination for some to avoid or refuse to see the social ills closest to us placed limits on the scope of our experience. That made it hard for us to build empathy for geographically distant communities or even communities physically closer and experiencing equally troubling levels of systemic racism, poverty, or violence. To younger generations, social injustices do not exist only in some remote location or in a community far removed from their own. They see them right in front of their eyes through the touch of their fingertips on their keyboards. They are also more keenly aware of, and interested in, the issues facing low-income communities nearest to them. For them, investing in social change is not a zero-sum game.

Of course, some people might correctly point out that we are living amid intense political, social, and economic divisiveness. However, that very polarization has served to elevate social justice as a value. In fact, these newer generations place a higher emphasis on social justice, equality, and inclusivity than any cohort we’ve encountered in the past—though many older generations are also striving to live these values. Over the years in which the Case Foundation has been running the Millennial Impact Project, it has consistently found that, regardless of personal background or experience, this generation holds civil rights and racial discrimination among its top concerns.² In a recent survey of DoSomething.org members, Covid-19 and racial justice came out as the top factors influencing the way those eighteen to twenty-four years old said they would vote in the 2020 election.³ One study found that for 65 percent of Gen Z’ers, social change activities were seen as central to their identity.⁴

Social justice has also become a more prominent feature of the culture in the institutions educating this generation of change makers. In addition to rapid growth in the number of international students on campus, universities have been pushing—albeit not always successfully—to become more inclusive places that provide education to all ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic groups. Meanwhile, an even greater shift toward progressive liberal thinking in higher education has elevated discussions of racism, inequity, and civil rights. In my teaching, I see the impact of all this in the social consciousness, purpose, and conviction not just in members of student identity groups but in all my students. What I see is a generation wanting to speak out and whose voices are being listened to in a way that they weren’t in the past. Today’s students are moving beyond reading the white Anglophone and European canon. In addition to reading authors such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, they are reading feminist writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ocean Vuong, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bernadine Evaristo, and others with beautiful intersectional identities.

Digital Technology

The way today’s young people think and act has been shaped by the connective tissue of digital technology. Social media and other online digital channels have exposed them to suffering, injustice, and inequality in a way that previous generations were not. As digital natives, this generation of change makers has been able to interact with people from all over the world, including underprivileged communities, and they want to do something to address the suffering, injustice, and inequity they see.

Digital technology has given young social entrepreneurs a window into the world’s problems and a powerful tool to help solve them. For example, among respondents to the 2019 Porter Novelli/Cone Gen Z Purpose Study, 80 percent of Gen Z respondents said they believed they could have an impact on issues by using social media.⁵ Online, this generation can now engage directly with everyone from smallholder farmers in Bangladesh to schoolteachers in Afghanistan and contribute to making a difference in their lives. Back in 2005, Kiva.org showed how technology could make this possible. Kiva (cofounded by Jessica Jackley, one of my former Stanford GSB students) pioneered online peer-to-peer loans between individual donors and people in developing countries. Critically, Kiva also enabled lenders to receive direct feedback on their loans, via photos of the borrowers and from their stories about what the loan helped them achieve.

As Kiva and the others that followed have demonstrated, digital technology is the lifeblood for this generation of social entrepreneurs. It not only provides visibility and transparency but also makes possible the design of social change models that simply would not have been feasible in a predigital age. Digital technology also offers the new generation of social entrepreneurs channels through which to fundraise at scale and to spread the word about the social issues they care about and what they are doing to address them.

Using an Empathetic Approach

For the longest time, decisions about the direction of social change lay largely in the hands of experts or technocratic elites. Whether the issue was health care, education, or homelessness, social change was about bringing in specialists who, with the best of intentions, created organizations and programs based on their professional knowledge, years of study and research, and the academic studies produced by peers in their field.

The research-based approach is certainly not to be dismissed. In fact, in recent years, mistrust of science (including the social sciences) and the diminished respect for experts has not helped the world, contributing to political upheavals and exacerbating a pandemic that the world is still struggling to control. However, in the domain of social change, the focus on top-down, paternalistic approaches often comes at the expense of the very individuals and communities social entrepreneurs aspire to help.

The good news is that, underpinned by ethnographic approaches long utilized by certain academics in multiple fields,⁶ these next-generation social entrepreneurs are moving toward an approach that is often described as a human-centered design model.⁷ This model does not rely on long-held assumptions or standard narratives about what we think people need. Instead, entrepreneurs are led by empathy, gained by listening to and engaging with the individuals and communities they aspire to serve and learning directly from them what they need and want.

For the entrepreneurs in these three case studies, human-centered design provides the guiding framework for their organizations (see also in this volume Stuart Coulson’s chapter 11 on the topic). Listening is the first step to identifying and defining the problem, and it is central throughout the process. Brainstorming and idea generation follow—with social entrepreneurs participating alongside those who will use or benefit from their products, programs, or services. Collaborative designing, prototyping, and testing come next. Finally, rapid feedback loops are created through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and conversations with users. This iterative process enables social entrepreneurs to improve their products, programs, or services and course correct or adapt them to minimize or eradicate potential errors or misunderstandings. Most importantly, it also centers the voices and experiences of the individuals they strive to serve at all stages of organizational, service, and product development. By engaging directly with and listening to these individuals, these next-generation social entrepreneurs prioritize empathy at every step.

More than any previous generation, today’s newer-generation change makers have grasped and elevated the importance of this human-centered design approach. They know that in designing products and services for the benefit of society, they need to understand the aspirations of the people who will ultimately use those products or services, as well as what obstacles affect those people’s lives. Of course, it can take years or decades for the ultimate impact of any investment in social change to become clear. But one thing we can measure immediately is whether the voice of the people we aspire to serve has been heard and integrated into program models. Developing empathy and human-centered feedback loops is fundamental to success for this next wave of social entrepreneurship.

Today’s generation understands the importance of learning from what they’ve experienced personally and what they’ve heard from people they aspire to serve. This is a generation that sees its work to fix social problems in the context of social justice and treats technology in the same way previous generations treated electricity, banking, or the printing press: as an essential tool and an enabler of innovation, education, and communication; of new business models and sources of finance; and—ultimately—of social impact. In the following case studies, I’ll show how three of my past Stanford GSB students have put all this into practice.

Filling the Gaps by Connecting the Dots: Christina Guilbeau, Hopebound

One of the wonders of the natural world is symbiosis, the process through which mutually beneficial relationships enable plants and animals to provide each other with elements essential for both to survive and grow. After listening to the communities around her, twenty-nine-year-old social entrepreneur Christina Guilbeau applied this principle to her model of social change. Through Hopebound, the organization she launched in 2019, she is using the power of technology to connect mental health clinician interns with young people who are struggling with mental health problems.

Hopebound partners with schools and community organizations to enable mental health clinician interns who need to obtain required supervised practicum hours to deliver virtual one-on-one mental health support to adolescents who would otherwise be unable to access therapy services. In Hopebound, the three pillars guiding this generation’s work can be clearly seen: Guilbeau has tapped into empathy, using her deep understanding of the communities the organization serves to inform the design of a human-centered model of social change. She is advancing social justice by increasing access to mental health services to populations who, for both geographic and economic reasons, otherwise would not likely have such access. To do so, she is harnessing the matchmaking power of technology.

In creating Hopebound, Guilbeau has also reinvented traditional service delivery relationships, in which needy communities receive support that is funded with charitable dollars and delivered by nonprofits or other social sector organizations. Instead, she has created a symbiotic ecosystem in which the service providers also benefit. “My primary mission is to make mental health support more accessible to adolescents, but my secondary mission is to make the pre-licensure process as efficient and high-quality as possible,” she says.⁸ In bringing these two communities together, Guilbeau has therefore created a model in which everybody wins.

Transforming a Region by Investing in Leaders: Diego Ontaneda Benavides, Latin American Leadership Academy (LALA)

To some, setting a goal of transforming an entire continent might seem impossibly ambitious. However, Diego Ontaneda Benavides, a thirty-two-year-old Peruvian social entrepreneur, believes he can make an outsized contribution to this mission by focusing his resources on one goal: identifying the talented, purpose-driven leaders of tomorrow and equipping them to achieve their social change goals.

Based in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, Latin American Leadership Academy (LALA) is building a systematic pipeline of ethical, entrepreneurial, purpose-driven Latin American leaders from every background. Its human development model is built around social innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership, social and emotional learning, and critical thinking. It includes both short and intense programs (the Leadership Bootcamps) and a gap-year residential program (the Leadership Academy). All LALA young leaders also join a lifelong community of mentors, resources, and opportunities, in which they find the guidance and support they need to chase their biggest dreams.

Long before he conceived of the idea of LALA, which he launched in 2018 with his cofounder, educator David Baptista, Ontaneda was aware not only of the obstacles preventing young people from realizing their dreams but also of what would make it possible for them to succeed. He learned this from personal experience. At age twelve, his parents’ business went into bankruptcy—“That burst my bubble,” he says.¹⁵

Fortunately, he was able to secure scholarships at top international schools in Peru and, later, at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “I had a lot of luck and resources,” he says. “But many people are not able to reach their full potential because there’s no safety net. So, one of my biggest motivations behind creating LALA was finding purpose-driven teenagers and empowering them to chase their dreams.”

Of course, LALA was not the first boot camp for social entrepreneurs. What makes it different, however, is its focus on including groups of socially driven leaders from the entire socioeconomic spectrum, including the region’s most underprivileged communities. In this, explains Ontaneda, LALA is rejecting the traditional model of development that prevails in Latin America, whereby experts bring in programs from New York or Washington, DC, while the role of local communities is limited to implementation.

“I’ve seen that fail again and again,” says Ontaneda. “Instead, we’re saying let’s find people who’ve grown up in those communities, who have experienced that injustice, that poor education, that lack of infrastructure, who have more trust from the local community because they are from there, and who might identify more innovative solutions because they understand the problem more deeply.”¹⁶

Harnessing Technology to Tackle Poverty: Manu Chopra, Chopra Foundation

When technology and innovation unite, it can be the catalyst for the creation of global enterprises capable of generating vast revenues and transforming the way people live. However, as twenty-three-year-old Manu Chopra is demonstrating, when technology and innovation are matched with human-centered design, they can create a powerful driver of social change. In his desire to help defeat extreme poverty, Chopra is providing villagers in India with dignified ways of earning a living by enabling them to use smartphones to build computational models for thousands of India’s languages. These models are then used by tech companies to build artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.

The child of refugees from Pakistan, Chopra grew up in an urban slum in India and thus directly understands the nature of poverty. One of his earliest memories was witnessing a “dowry death,” a form of violence in which a woman is murdered by her husband or his family because her family refused to pay an additional dowry. “That shaped me a lot,” he says. “I cannot sit still when things like this are happening.”²⁵ Through his parents’ hard work, he was able to receive an education at top schools, which eventually took him to Stanford at age sixteen. “I saw a level of mobility that most people don’t experience,” he says.

Seeing poverty and abuse firsthand and experiencing the transformative power of education and social mobility, Chopra was driven to use his powers of innovation to promote social justice. While in high school, for example, he invented an antimolestation device for women at a time when rape cases in India were on the rise. Later, at Stanford, he was one of a team that created CS + Social Good, a student-led group that runs fellowships, courses, speaker series, and other events focused on using technology as a tool to help solve big global challenges and to maximize positive social impact.

Chopra is nothing if not ambitious. He is now building a sustainable city in Kerala, in southern India, and he has launched one of India’s largest universal basic income experiments in more than fifty villages across the country.

However, a key focus for Chopra has been to tackle the extreme poverty that still plagues his home country, so upon returning to India after graduation, with the help of a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he spent six months traveling across the country, visiting more than a thousand villages—some of India’s poorest. While doing so, he followed the advice that Gopal Krishna Gokhale gave to Mahatma Gandhi and I cited at the start of this chapter: he kept his eyes and ears open but his mouth shut.

Like others of his generation, Chopra was putting empathy to work, and what he learned while visiting the villages and by listening to the people he met was that not one of them wanted charity. They wanted fair treatment, to be free from discrimination, and to have access to the same social and economic opportunities as others. In short, they wanted social justice. “I realized that poor Indians are incredibly aspirational,” he says. “All they want is an opportunity for a job. They’re not interested in handouts. So, then the question was: What jobs can you give people?”²⁶

The question is one many have tried to answer. Conventional wisdom is that poor people need education and training. However, with 800 million Indians either unemployed or underemployed, sheer numbers mean this is not a solution, at least in the short term. “There is no way you can train 800 million people,” says Chopra. “You can’t build enough schools and most people don’t have computers. My question was: What skills do they already have that they can get paid for?”²⁷

Chopra realized that the answer lay in the languages and dialects they speak—more than 19,500 of them, according to an analysis of census data.²⁸ Chopra knew that technology companies were rushing to develop AI-driven and crowdsourcing platforms across the Indian market. To do so, they needed to develop databases in local languages, and it takes a million spoken hours to build a database in a given language. “I saw a fundamental gap,” says Chopra. “There were hundreds of millions of people who spoke these languages who had no money, and there were all these American and Indian companies saying we need data.”²⁹

Through his Chopra Foundation, villagers are provided with free Android smartphones, along with solar chargers, so they can build computational language models for their dialects, digitize local government documents, and perform other kinds of digital work—all of which means they can generate the income they need to build better lives. Since 2020, says Chopra, the programs—which also prioritize women, tribal people, and those from low-caste communities—have moved more than 100,000 rural Indians out of poverty. “If you think about a ladder of social mobility, in India the bottom rungs are missing,” he says. “The idea of this work was to fill in the bottom rung of the ladder.”³⁰

Chopra’s way of advancing social justice is to bring about a transformation in the lives of the people he works with, enabling them to move from merely surviving to thriving and striving by giving them a stepping-stone to the next economic opportunity. While earning money, villagers are also building skills, since for many this is their first encounter with a smartphone, a key tool in today’s economy. It’s a model that’s opening a door to poor communities and letting them step in to participate in the economy in a way that would not otherwise be possible.

Moreover, in doing so, the impact of the Chopra Foundation programs extends far beyond the immediate recipients of the digital work. “They can make around $2,000 a month, which is significantly more than they had before, and they start using that to help other people,” Chopra says. “In India, one person’s problem is everyone’s problem, so you create this circle of compassion.” He sees this effect when villagers, recognizing the potential for self-improvement in the digital work, make it a shared project. “After the first week, everyone becomes closer and helps each other with pronunciation,” he says. “There are villages that are half Muslim, half Hindu—this brings people together.”³¹

A New Generation Steps Forward

While the initiatives of each of these social entrepreneurs rely on approaches that are distinct, all three illustrate how empathy, social justice, and technology shape the causes they focus on, the nature of their social innovations, and how they execute their ideas. These interconnected pillars are critical to enabling them to use a human-centered design approach to bring about meaningful change, thus renewing how social entrepreneurship is practiced.

For example, by traveling across India, listening to villagers, and learning about the skills they could tap into to earn money and change their own lives, Chopra has used empathy to inform his strategy for combating extreme poverty, treating the people he wants to help as strategic partners rather than passive beneficiaries. In helping adolescents access therapy services while also making it easier for mental health clinician interns to become licensed, Guilbeau is harnessing the connective power of digital technology. And, in focusing on developing the Latin American leaders of the future, Ontaneda is using empathy and digital technology to empower a new cohort of change makers to advance social justice in Latin America at scale.

To achieve this kind of ripple effect, in 1998 I developed and launched the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund (SV2). I wanted to unleash the resources of other change makers by helping them connect and support each other while exploring social issues and learning how to give more effectively through experiential education in grant-making, high-engagement relationships with SV2’s grantee partners, and collaborations with their fellow philanthropists.

In developing SV2, I was also informed by an empathy-led approach. I started by interviewing more than a hundred individuals. Through these conversations, I realized that they, like me, wanted to give more strategically, to pool their resources for greater impact, and to learn through doing. At the time, no organization existed to bring together these individuals to share passions, exchange ideas, and learn how to practice strategic philanthropy by actually practicing it. Now, twenty-three years into SV2’s life cycle, we are reinventing our model to prioritize empathy, social justice, and the power of technology through virtual education for our investors, collaboration with our grantee partners, and community building with all our stakeholders.

These kinds of approaches are being embraced by the next generation early on in their careers. They are starting their journeys in their early to midtwenties rather than waiting until retirement as so many have in the past. For these generations, this work is not something to do when they have spare time or money. They are immersing themselves in society to understand the gaps that need to be filled and how they can fill those gaps by using empathy, technology, networks, and experiences. Importantly, young social entrepreneurs have recognized that, if they focus on listening to the communities they aspire to help, they can achieve their goals with the resources they have at their disposal today.

By grounding their strategies in empathy and human-centered design, a commitment to social justice, and the power of digital technologies, next-generation social entrepreneurs are democratizing social change—how it is created, who gets to participate, and which voices inform the models that are implemented. As someone who believes fervently in the need for this kind of democratization, I find the approaches of Guilbeau, Ontaneda, Chopra, and others like them tremendously exciting. From the Covid-19 pandemic to climate change, the problems we face today are global, rife with complexities, and often seemingly impossible to fix. But as I look at the way this generation approaches impact, I am filled with unbridled optimism that the next wave of social entrepreneurs will be increasingly young, diverse, empathetic, passionate, innovative, and able to scale up their ideas in new ways—and as a result may do more to solve today’s problems than any generation before them.

FOR FURTHER READING

For readers interested in exploring leadership in social innovation more deeply, I recommend four books. My book Giving 2.0: Transform Your Giving and Our World (Jossey-Bass, 2011) redefines what a philanthropist is and offers innovative and powerful methods for individuals to give their time, money, networks, and expertise. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, demonstrates how the practice of design thinking shapes and builds meaningful and fulfilling professional and personal lives. Social Startup Success: How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up, and Make a Difference (Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2018), by Kathleen K. Janus, uses real-life examples to help guide social entrepreneurs in building initiatives to scale and achieve sustainability. Finally, Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), by Roger L. Martin and Sally R. Osberg, provides a theoretical framework for social entrepreneurship and demonstrates how social entrepreneurs innovate and build solutions to maximize impact.

Notes

1. 1. I am part of the elder half of Gen X (born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s), although I have the spirit of a Gen Y’er.

2. 2. The Case Foundation, “The Millennial Impact Report: 10 Years Looking Back,” 2018, http://www.themillennialimpact.com/sites/default/files/images/2018/MIR-10-Years-Looking-Back.pdf.

3. 3. DoSomething.org, “The Pulse of Gen Z in the Time of COVID-19,” Medium, April 26, 2020, https://medium.com/dosomethingstrategic/gen-zs-thoughts-on-covid-19-2067b0f36af1.

4. 4. Zapier Editorial Team, “Misunderstood Generations: What Millennials and Gen Z Actually Think about Work,” Zapier Editorial Team, January 27, 2020, https://zapier.com/blog/digital-natives-report/.

5. 5. Cone, a Porter Novelli company, “2019 Porter Novelli/Cone Gen Z Purpose Study,” 2019, https://www.conecomm.com/research-blog/cone-gen-z-purpose-study.

6. 6. See, for example, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (New York: Public Affairs, 2011).

7. 7. Paul Brest, Nadia Roumani, and Jason Bade, Problem Solving, Human-Centered Design, and Strategic Processes (Stanford, CA: Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, 2015).

8. 8. Christina Guilbeau, Hopebound, interview, October 26, 2020. All quotations from Guilbeau are from this source unless stated otherwise.

9. 9. Mental Health America, “Youth Data 2021,” 2021, https://www.mhanational.org/issues/2021/mental-health-america-youth-data.

10. 10. Ibid.

11. 11. Ibid.

12. 12. World Health Organization, “Improving the Mental and Brain Health of Children and Adolescents,” https://www.who.int/activities/Improving-the-mental-and-brain-health-of-children-and-adolescents.

13. 13. Christina Guilbeau, Hopebound, interview, November 2, 2020.

14. 14. Ibid.

15. 15. Diego Ontaneda Benavides, Latin American Leadership Academy (LALA), interview, October 26, 2020. All quotations from Ontaneda are from this source unless stated otherwise.

16. 16. Ibid., January 27, 2021.

17. 17. Ibid., November 3, 2020.

18. 18. Ibid.

19. 19. Transparency International, “People and Corruption: Latin America and the Caribbean,” Global Corruption Barometer, 2017, https://images.transparencycdn.org/images/2017_GCB_AME_EN.pdf.

20. 20. Ibid., 11.

21. 21. Diego Ontaneda Benavides, interview, November 3, 2020.

22. 22. Ibid.

23. 23. Ibid., January 27, 2021.

24. 24. Ibid.

25. 25. Manu Chopra, Chopra Foundation, interview, October 28, 2020. All quotations from Chopra are from this source unless stated otherwise.

26. 26. Ibid., November 4, 2020.

27. 27. Ibid.

28. 28. Office of the Registrar General, Census of India 2011, Language (New Delhi: Office of the Registrar General, Census of India 2011, 2018), https://censusindia.gov.in/2011Census/C-16_25062018_NEW.pdf.

29. 29. Manu Chopra, November 4, 2020.

30. 30. Ibid.

31. 31. Ibid.