Encouraging entrepreneurship is difficult enough these days, but cultivating social entrepreneurship, where the reward is measured by the number of people helped rather than the amount of money made, is even more difficult. These three people are doing just that, with some international assistance
WE ALL KNOW THAT banks are extremely reluctant to lend money to start-up enterprises now. But imagine just how reluctant your bank manager would be to give you funds if you told him that your proposed business venture was not even interested in making a profit?
That is exactly the situation that social enterprises find themselves in. The success of “social entrepreneurship” is not measured by the profits generated but rather by the social change it creates. A social entrepreneur is a visionary who has a solution to society’s most pressing problems across the spectrum of human rights, health, education and the environment.
There is one organisation that is happy to invest in these enterprises, however. Founded in Washington in 1980 by management consultant Bill Drayton, Ashoka is essentially a venture capital company for social reform. The organisation now operates in 60 countries and works at locating the best ideas for social change, and then helping the social entrepreneurs behind those ideas to develop and sustain them. It supports more than 2,000 “fellows” around the world by giving them access to financing and connections to business, academia and, perhaps most importantly, other social entrepreneurs.
Ashoka set up in Ireland in 2006 and elected its first “fellow” shortly afterwards – Caroline Casey, creator of the O2 Ability Awards. Since then, two additional fellows have been elected and the organisation is on the lookout for more, according to Irish Ashoka director Paul O’Hara. Its annual budget globally is approximately $30 million (€24 million). This is financed by individuals, foundations and business entrepreneurs around the world. In this country, the organisation partners with Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, and receives financial support from private foundations and from businessmen such as Denis O’Brien and Maurice Healy.
There is a long and vigorous assessment procedure to become an Ashoka fellow, according to O’Hara. So how does he identify the projects and people to invest in?
“Generally speaking, we go looking for them, but of course people contact us with ideas too, and we work closely with Social Entrepreneurs Ireland,” he says. “We are ahead of the curve here in terms of the number of fellows we have elected since we started. They are slightly easier to track down in Ireland because of our size, but it is still extraordinary that we have found these three incredible social leaders in such a small country.”
These profiles are of extraordinary people who combine business acumen and entrepreneurial flair with a burning desire to change society for the better.
www.ashoka.org
DAVID EGAN – REDBRANCH
MANY PARENTS ARE asked to come in to their children’s classroom to talk about their job – it’s a daunting task, but for David Egan it was a life-changing moment that led him to establish RedBranch. An exercise physiologist, Egan had worked with top Irish and English athletes and was asked by the principal of his children’s school to come in and talk about health and nutrition.
“I assumed that these children had the same life as my own kids, that they had a reasonable level of exercise and a reasonable diet,” he says. “But what I discovered was a huge subset of children who don’t eat fruit or vegetables at all. I came across a child who had never eaten a piece of fruit or a vegetable and was hospitalised with scurvy from a lack of vitamin C. After that day I kept coming back to asking myself how would I feel looking back on my life if I didn’t try and do something. Maintaining the health of athletes, important and all as that is, is just a game. This was the real thing.”
Egan established RedBranch to help children, parents and schools to make healthier lifestyle choices by communicating with them about over-consumption, junk food and passivity. The entrepreneurial optimism that marked the start of the venture soon received a jolting reality-check.
“With schools you are working in a toxic environment from a health perspective. When the bell goes at break, Irish children have the shortest break time in Europe in which to eat their lunch. Then there is nowhere for them to eat it and there is nothing healthy available to buy in the school. We are basically training kids to eat unhealthily, and on the run, and to be inactive.”
Egan believes the discussion about childhood obesity should be reframed to focus on the fact that it is essentially a lifetime illness – and 86 per cent of all deaths in Ireland result from lifestyle-related chronic illnesses. Cardiovascular disease, which begins in childhood, kills 40 per cent of Irish adults. The poor eating habits and sedentary lifestyle that we are teaching our children in school will eventually kill them.
But how do you inspire young people to change when they are notoriously resistant to preaching about health? “It depends on the age group,” he says. “When dealing with teenagers, we appeal to their rebellious streak. If you go in to a school and tell teenagers that they should stop drinking soft drinks for health reasons, you will be laughed out of the building. But if you explain to them that they are being heavily marketed to and help them to deconstruct advertising messages, you do get through to them.”
He has a no-nonsense message for parents. “Parents are interested in anything that will help their children and the simple truth is that if you get your kids active you are saving them from future chronic illness. Some parents will say that if they take away the TV, the child will do their nut. Well I’m sorry, but if they do their nut, your job as a parent is to deal with that.”
In tandem with providing education and inspiration, the organisation works with schools to restrict the sale of junk-food and make healthier alternatives available. This initiative has taken the form of school-run healthy tuck shops and canteens, and healthy food-vending machines. Egan is currently negotiating a five-school pilot programme with a major food company aimed at helping schools to make hot meals available for students. “The meals will be nutritionally evaluated by us and 40 per cent of the price goes to the school.”
The organisation helped remove fizzy drinks from vending machines in 60 per cent of the schools in Co Clare and replaced them with bottled water for sale at half price. “You have to have an alternative. Students want to have something to carry around and water has that cool factor.” In one school, RedBranch got the transition-year students to set up a fruit micro-business, causing the number of children eating fruit to rise from 18 to 38 per cent.
Ashoka’s involvement means a vital supply of capital for the vulnerable early years of the business. “Ashoka came on board and promised to pay my wages for three years. For a start-up, that’s enormous. The panel of people that they put in place to advise me are giving me a really clear idea on how to progress a social idea in an entrepreneurial way.”
www.redbranch.ie
CAROLINE CASEY – KANCHI
THUS FAR, Caroline Casey’s life has been dedicated to ensuring that people with disabilities are defined by the things they can do, not by what they can’t. The 37-year-old chief executive of Kanchi (formerly the Aisling Foundation) and the O2 Ability Awards was born with ocular albinism, a condition that leads to severe visual impairment.
Casey says she knew she was different all through her teens (“I just thought I was incredibly clumsy,” she laughs), but she refused to accept the “disabled” tag and kept her condition pretty much to herself. “I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me or perceive me as being weak.” She describes her search for a career as being “littered with ‘no’s” because of the problems with her sight – she considered archaeology and horticulture but opted in the end for a role with management consultancy firm Accenture. After two years, the stresses of the job aggravated her condition to the extent that she temporarily lost her sight completely. That experience, she says, forced her to face up to her condition and do something she had never done before – ask for help.
"I went along to an eye specialist and the minute I walked in the door he said, 'I know what's wrong with you'." Rather than being downcast by the diagnosis, Casey characteristically opted to challenge herself even more. She trekked across southern India on the back of an elephant called Kanchi (hence the company name), raising money for Sightsavers International and the National Council for the Blind. Her journey was chronicled in the National Geographic documentary Elephant Vision.
"I had always wanted to be Mowgli from The Jungle Bookwhen I was a kid, so I decided to take off on a great adventure. I also felt if the trip could capture people's imagination, then it would help promote disability in a positive way. I had four months on the back of an elephant thinking things over and what I realised was that companies weren't hiring disabled people and there wasn't any organisation working to project a different image of disability. I set up the Aisling Foundation to give people the chance to reach their potential."
Because of the publicity around the India trek, the corporate world started to sit up and take notice. “Business leaders told me honestly that they just didn’t see disability as being of value to business. I understood from that that we had to make a disability business case. I knew I had to go to the top of organisations and market that business case smartly in a language they could understand.”
A piece of classic entrepreneurial brilliance followed. Her father had worked in developing ISO standards for business, and Casey had the idea of having something similar for companies that promote a positive image of disability. Sensing the rising tide of corporate social responsibility and knowing that business loves to be seen to do the right thing, she set up an awards ceremony in 2004 to honour companies that implement best practice for the employment and inclusion of people with disabilities.
Casey decided at the start that only the chief executive of a company could collect an award, which made the awards show a sponsor’s dream. Politicians and celebrities were brought in to give the TV audience something to wow at. The image gallery on the Kanchi website demonstrates the blend of political, business and celebrity muscle that Casey manages to get involved – sitting at the one table are President McAleese, Dermot Desmond, Danuta Gray, Denis O’Brien, Eddie Jordan and Brian O’Driscoll. Now that’s high profile.
Casey says that the organisation’s achievement has been to put disability on the boardroom table. “That in turn raises expectations among people that have disabilities and their parents: there will be companies that will employ them.”
The Ability Awards will be exported around the world – O2’s parent company Telefonica will bring them to Spain this year. Casey hopes it will become a franchise – “like O’Brien’s sandwich bar”. she says with a smile.
She was appointed Ireland’s first Ashoka fellow in 2006. “It’s like a personal brand of excellence and business people get it. It gives you credibility. It also helps me to think big and confirms for me that this model we established is not insane, that it has merit and that there are other mad people around the world doing similar things.”
www.kanchi.org
TARA CUNNINGHAM – RELEASE
WHILE WORKING AS a fund-raiser for Down Syndrome Ireland, Tara Cunningham came face-to-face with the frustration that the parents of children with speech problems experience. At a meeting where she was trying to kick off a local fund-raiser, a parent of a little boy with Down syndrome asked her if the fundraising would help get speech therapy for his child. When Cunningham replied that it might in the future, the father told her in no uncertain terms that waiting was not an option for him and stormed out.
Deeply unsettled by this experience, Cunningham wondered what she could do to help. She researched the problem and found that speech therapy provision in Ireland (and globally) has been hampered by huge waiting lists and a shortage of therapists. Irish children requiring speech therapy face a wait of between one and three years for assessment and a further one to two years waiting to start treatment. After that they receive on average just six hours of treatment a year from the HSE.
Not surprisingly, results from this model are not exactly stellar. “I was driving to Cork with my boyfriend and I was giving out about it,” says Cunningham. “He said to me – you’re a smart girl, you figure it out.” She went silent for about two hours, and by the time they got to Cork she had the basics of Release figured out in her head. What is particularly remarkable about this is that someone who had no background in speech therapy could conjure up an approach to the provision of services that is now considered revolutionary.
“Whenever I talked to parents, what struck me was their overwhelming passion. They kept asking me, ‘What can I do to make my child better?’ My feeling was that if you could harness that and teach the parent to help their child, there would be a better outcome.” The Release approach is essentially to “train the trainer” – to increase the therapy time available to children by teaching parents and caregivers the techniques they need to help children overcome speech problems ranging from stammering to severe autism, from Down syndrome to dyspraxia. Instead of six hours a year, using the Release method parents and caregivers can give the child up to 160 hours of speech therapy a year. The results are stunning – since its foundation in 2005, Release has given speech therapy to almost 1,000 children and, says Cunningham, 45 children who were described as “non-verbal” are now speaking.
Cunningham set up Release armed only with her savings, a small grant from Dublin City Enterprise Board and collateral from her partner’s apartment. The organisation needs to raise about €500,000 this year – something she says will be an immense challenge. “I had in my head that I wanted to be a business, not a charity. I don’t believe in the handout mentality. But I also don’t believe that I should make a profit on the backs of parents whose children need therapy. If we ever do make a profit, the money goes back into Release.”
Originally from New Jersey, Cunningham went back to her roots in her efforts to strengthen the company’s methodology and gain credibility. She partnered with the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and several leading universities including New York University and George Washington University. The obvious next step, she says, would be for Release to be appointed as a national service provider in Ireland.
“About 52,000 children need speech therapy in Ireland and only 11,000 get it. If the HSE used us to deliver these services we would eliminate the waiting lists overnight without them spending a single penny,” she says. “Mary Harney and Brian Cowen have been really supportive but we can’t get past the HSE. Work practices would have to change to adopt this model and the unions are too strong when anyone tries to change things. I am not putting down HSE speech therapists, because they are really good at what they do – this is about middle management trying to protect the status quo.”
Ashoka’s involvement means there is now a big push to export the Release model. “We are currently looking at countries that would really benefit from it. Being an Ashoka fellow means that children not yet born in countries I will never visit should benefit from the approach I have developed.”
www.release.ie