Interview by Nina Angeles
Can you tell us about the courses you teach? Why social enterprise and food systems? Why impact investing and social finance?
I’ve been teaching social entrepreneurship for over 10 years, mostly in the realm of international development practice, and one thing I’ve found is that to reach students, it’s important to find the link between social enterprise and social problems that are encountered every day. With food systems, it takes us away from looking at the poor as separate from us—we are all food poor in this country in a lot of ways. Looking at the social problems of food systems is personal and intimate, and allows for social enterprise to be studied within the realm of something we all need, not what somebody else needs. And food is just fun! It’s a creative outlet that we can tap into every day.
It also makes sense to teach design thinking using food systems. One of the key aspects of design thinking is empathy, and food is a convening force behind social organization so it lends itself to participatory design of holistic and blended value business models. For these reasons, and for the fact that I committed back in 2012 after meeting Sir Nicholas Stern to weaving climate change into all of my teaching, I’ve found food systems to be a great topic to begin to explore social enterprise and social entrepreneurship. I may move to another topic at some point, like water or transportation, but for now food systems as the point of entry into the field is working well. It turns out there are tons of resources at Northeastern focusing on sustainable food! Professor Chris Bosso’s work has been a big inspiration.
On the impact investing side—after starting my own, and advising social enterprises for almost a decade, the one issue I’ve seen as the greatest stumbling block is deciding how these great ideas are going to be funded. Impact investing is particularly exciting for social enterprises because it reshapes the relationship between investor and investee, and between capitalism and social impact. It really changes the formula for investors to reconsider the primacy of financial value and broadens the decision-making space to include longer-term considerations like sustainable development, eco-efficiency and economic democracy in how they define returns. Most social impact takes at least 7 to 10 years, if not longer, before communities can observe and then measure any real shifts in systems change. For students, impact investing connects them with the idea of impact as a process of democratizing finance, bringing money back down to earth, and shows them how you can empower yourself personally by making financial decisions in line with personal values, investing in ideas that we’ve assumed the market won’t reward. Social finance, in general, and impact investing, specifically, turns these assumptions on their heads. The students in my current class are creating a website, which will be an on-going project, to serve as a free resource for individuals interested in knowing what the steps are to engage in private wealth impact investing, and other kinds of sustainable or socially responsible investing.
Can you tell us about your research background and how it has influenced your thinking and teaching about sustainable development and social entrepreneurship?
After college I spent time in El Salvador and saw how slash and burn techniques particularly targeted the landless, the majority of whom are women in rural areas. I found this whole movement and body of literature on the links between ecology, women, development, and economics that I had never been exposed to before. During my Peace Corps service in Senegal years later, I started to put those ideas and questions to test and realized while I was there that my ideas about development required a whole new set of mental models and stocks of knowledge that I didn’t have. Some fundamental truths came to me while living in very poor communities of Senegal—work is a human right, and it should be dignified; women and men are equal but also different, and that complementarity is a beautiful thing; and there are only so many things government can do, so working with markets is in most cases the only way to secure sustainable long-term development when there are weak states. It was during my literature review on the history of informal trade networks in Africa for my doctoral thesis that social enterprise and social entrepreneurship came to me. I read about the origins of market creation from an African perspective, and how values in exchange are rooted in relationships, as social capital or as work in the care economy. Social entrepreneurship really became the lens through which I would analyze a whole range of economic phenomena in West Africa, and beyond, and it forced me to challenge basic economic assumptions, not just through studying social capital but through the economic efficiencies I found in informal exchanges created by social entrepreneurs that are undervalued but highly dynamic and productive.
Today, I use these frameworks and tools to analyze a wide range of issues, from advising banks on how to provide better products for SMEs (IFC), to analyzing social impact measurements for investors and social enterprises, to advising global masters programs in social entrepreneurship, global public health and social innovation. I try to employ design thinking in all my courses as it helps to remind well-intentioned changemakers that we are trying to find better questions to ask as opposed to serving up cookie cutter solutions to social or economic problems. We start from a much more humble place when we engage in design thinking, and this has been important for me as a rights-based and gender-focused economist and development practitioner.
What can students look forward to next year when they travel with you to India?
Students can look forward to a couple of things, the first being the opportunity to self-reflect in an amazing country through different forms of healing arts—daily yoga classes, music, arts, food and time out in nature. If students are looking for a program that creates space for self-exploration, this would be the program. The second is having the honor to meet with the women social entrepreneurs from the book “Poetry of Purpose,” which profiles women trailblazers in Indian society. It’s rare that students get to immerse themselves in the real lives of women social entrepreneurs and hear their struggles and victories, so this is a real gift, I think, that we are able to provide on this trip. Students can also look forward to working on teams in radical collaboration. The design thinking piece in Mumbai is focused on very tough issues of development: sanitation, health care, access to basic education, unemployment, reliable electricity, drinking water, etc. It is going to be really exciting working alongside the two university partners on a wide range of social enterprises that are inspiring and for students to in turn be inspired to bring these ideas out of India and carry them back into their own lives. My co-instructor Skip Bivens, who is a development practitioner, has years of experience working for the US Institute of Peace and other UN agencies training military in Afghanistan on post-conflict rehabilitation, engaging farming communities on design thinking, among other things. He has taught courses like this all over the world and worked in Mumbai for years, too, so he will be someone students can look forward to meeting and working with. He is a great resource on top of being a excellent listener and teacher.
As Northeastern continues to work toward becoming an Ashoka U Changemaker Campus, what opportunities (co-op, research, etc) do you foresee emerging for students in addition to connecting with Ashoka’s network of leading social entrepreneurs?
The Ashoka U Changemaker Campus designation we are working toward could be an exciting opportunity for students in a few ways. The first being we get to work on purpose together. The Ashoka U process is creating pathways for students to connect with each other- and in connecting, it amplifies the effects of what we all do well in the social impact and social justice space. Our hope and intention with this designation is to deepen the connections with our university community and with global partners to understand what social innovation is in terms of interdisciplinary ideas and 21st century solutions, and how social enterprise is a force that needs to be unleashed in society. We are building an ecosystem, which becomes much bigger than ourselves, that people from generations to come will benefit from. We are growing a creative commons through this designation and in the future, we hope to host Ashoka Fellows to hold inspiring lectures and set up Dialogue and co-op opportunities with some of these change-making organizations around the world.
What do you think is the most important trend in social entrepreneurship scholarship and practice at the moment, and how does it affect students studying these topics?
I think the most important trends happening right now are the new legal forms of social enterprise—Benefit corporations, in particular, which give shareholders and management the freedom to manage the firm according to their human values first. Impact investing, and recent rulings on ESG, are also in some ways legal forms for redirecting finance toward public welfare. In addition, I would mention all of the new models and methods for evaluating impact that are being taken up by non-social enterprises, such as Fortune 500 businesses, index funds, think tanks that are not necessarily ready to call themselves “social” per se but are measuring what counts. So it’s an exciting trend we are seeing now as the practice of these principles that we have been holding onto as explicit to social enterprise or impact investing are actually starting to be shared and integrated more fully into traditional business and finance. It dovetails with the evolution in thinking that has emerged from behavioral economics and behavioral finance and there is a lot of important scholarship that has just come out regarding these topics (I would recommend Akerloff and Shiller’s new book “Phishing for Phools,” Michael J. Sandel’s “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” and recent Nobel laureate Angus Deaton’s “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality”).
The relationship between challenges to shareholder value maximization and corporate governance with regard to impact, coupled with new understandings about homo economicus through behavioral economics and behavioral finance are shifting how we need to understand social enterprise and social entrepreneurship in the new economy, and this is a huge opportunity for study and practice. When the models change, then we have new research questions and we get deeper into unpacking what isn’t working, why it isn’t working, and we have more intellectual courage to take chances within disciplines and across disciplines.
