For each pair of shoes you sold, would you be willing to offer a pair to a person in need? In a much simpler way, we can say that this is the basis of social entrepreneurship: finding solutions for problems and promoting significant changes in people’s lives, communities, and the World.

Making the World a better place with sustainable business

Shoes for a Better Tomorrow, later TOMS, served as a motto for the beginning of this article. Founded by Blake Mycoskie, the company started to give a pair of shoes to children that needed it for each sold pair, using their funds. This social entrepreneur, through his company and his model “One for One,” has already donated over 100.000.000 pairs of shoes and supported health, education, and community development programs. It’s helpful to know more about this story and its results. 

In this case, combining social values with entrepreneurship has gathered everyone who recognizes and supports the company’s mission, such as selling shoes in countless stores worldwide.

We can then say that although social entrepreneurship leads the focus of businesses or companies to the transformations and positive impacts in society, that doesn’t mean they can’t be financially sustainable. Furthermore, having economic feasibility, they can further support people and underprivileged communities; encourage culture and education; create jobs; environmental and animal protection, among many other possibilities.

According to the Two Decades of Impact: Schwab Foundation on Social Entrepreneurship report, social entrepreneurship projects have already positively impacted over 622 million people worldwide.

Social Entrepreneurship for the World

Learn different examples of social entrepreneurship and the positive impacts they had:

Speak

SPEAK, a co-created business by the EDP Foundation Association Fazer Avançar (Push Forward) and Social Lab, was born in Leiria, in the center of Portugal, in September 2021 and has expanded to other cities.

The social innovation project, SPEAK, intends to support the integration of students and the workforce living far from their origin country. Their mission is to reduce the isolation felt by these people by promoting the learning of languages, equality, and cultural diversity.

These “students” are placed into small groups according to their language proficiency and the town where they live. Classrooms are oriented by a fluent element in language teaching, starting by sharing their tastes, traditions, and culture of the area while creating connections that will last long after the program ends.

During the pandemic, sessions were held online so that participants could continue progressing in language use and “mingle,” reducing social isolation.

Divine Chocolate

Divine Chocolate arose in Ghana because cocoa producers in this country decided, by the end of the twentieth country, to create their own company and launch the first Fairtrade chocolate product, targeting United Kingdom’s market.

This global social company’s mission is to help end the exploration of the cocoa industry, creating a world where farmers prosper, are adequately paid, and participate in their industry.

Kuapa Kokoo Farmers' Union, a credit union with over 100.000 coca producers in Ghana, is the biggest shareholder of Divine Chocolate. These farmers cultivate cocoa of the best quality for daily and seasonal products.

Divine Chocolate and Kuapa Kokoo even share the commitment to supporting women in cocoa agriculture to develop abilities and trust to cultivate better cocoa, create communities, and have business success.

Anchal Project

After a trip to India, in which there was a realization of the existence of the sexual trade market and the lack of opportunities for work for women in communities, sisters Colleen and Maggie Clines were inspired to shape the Anchal project. In collaboration with an NGO, they put their knowledge of sustainable design into practice in creating clothing and decoration items.

Anchal officially became a non-profit organization in 2010 and expanded through a partnership with Vatsalya, an NGO in Ajmer, India. This organization works as a business, uniting profit from sales to donations.

They connect tradition with modernism by producing clothing and decoration items. The items created are sewn to reduce the waste of fabrics and are made of low-impact ecological dyes, vintage fabric, and organic cotton with a GOTS certificate.

Deep-rooted in innovating design solutions, Anchal aims to reduce employment inequality, decrease the number of women depending on sexual labor, and eradicate the stigma that girls and women still face in this day and age all over the world.

In Anchal, almost all artisans have a personal banking account and consider their children’s education relevant, putting the exploitation cycle to an end.

Caring for the caregivers

The CQC (Cuidar de Quem Cuida) - (Caring for the caregivers) was recognized as an innovative social entrepreneurship initiative for a level of intervention by the IC (Informal Caregivers). In January 2019, one of the four financing instruments of the Social Innovation Portugal initiative was approved as TIS (Título de Impacto Social), or Social Impact Title.

This initiative offers several support responses to informal caregivers, such as psychological and educational programs, support groups, and individual counselling.

CQC developed in the first stage, from 2009 to 2013, in the Entre Douro e Vouga region, oriented for informal caregivers of people with dementia and post-CVA. In the second stage, from 2014 to 2016, the geographical acting area was broadened and targeted informal caregivers of people with dementia.

After the project’s team empowered the networks, councils became more autonomous in the intervention.

Between April 2019 to August 2022, the goal was to replicate the initiative in more councils throughout northern Portugal. The replication model is built on social transformation and sustainability, based on the resource mobilization already existing in the community, such as institutions, local network technicians, and informal caregivers.

Sun Concept

Sun Concept company, arising in Olhão, produces silent vessels moved on solar panels. This idea was born from a conversation between two people with similar social and environmental concerns.

Ships are built to reduce environmental impact by using materials with a  less ecological footprint, the absence of noise, and the used source used. These characteristics enable us to navigate more sensitive areas without harming marine life. With this Portuguese company, we can navigate silently and sustainably with positive impacts on the environment.

Social entrepreneurship examples are so diverse that they can also range through the development of technology to recycle organic subproducts of different industries, transforming them, and as a result, decreasing the environmental damage, as Grain4Grain does, or to light Sierra Leone, through the solar panel, as does Easy Solar.

According to those examples, we can safely say that social entrepreneurship requires some ingredients: attentive care, empathy, innovative and entrepreneurial spirit, sustainable strategy, commitment, and a lot of willingness to change.

We don’t live in Alice’s Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, but as he once wrote, “The only way to reach impossible is to believe that it is possible”... and do it!