“ Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.”
－Bill Brayton, Ashoka
In 2006, TOMS founder, Blake Mycoskie, saw children in a village in Argentina who didn’t have adequate shoes to protect their feet. Wanting to help, he created TOMS Shoes.
This is a for-profit company, but driven primarily by a social objective. At the same time that the company was born, a program named One for One® also came into existence. In the beginning, they matched every pair of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes for a child in need. As TOMS has grown, the One for One® program has expanded from only providing shoes to also sight restorations and water to the need. With every bag of coffee purchased, TOMS provides one week of clean water to a person in need. Also, TOMS has helped restore sight to over 250,000 people and created jobs for communities in Haiti. The map below shows the communities being served by the program in the world so far:
For social entrepreneurships such as TOMS, profit is the means to sustain in both economic and social ways.All the facts mentioned above tell a truth that social entrepreneurships produce a good result: to make a better world. Undoubtedly, this approach has more influential power to expand the total pool of both economic and social value compared with traditional charity delivered by non-profits. In fact, social entrepreneurship creates shared value. At the same time, the social efforts it makes will result in keeping this kind of business sustainable. In a word, what’s most important is that social entrepreneurship can make this world better.
Sources:
http://www.waterhealth.com/sites/default/files/Harvard_Buiness_Review_Shared_Value.pdf
http://www.toms.ca/one-for-one-en
Images:
http://www.toms.ca/one-for-one-en