Emergence of Impactful Social Entrepreneurship entrepreneurship to be impactful, the social entrepreneur must first identify the community’s priority, and then ensure that the social enterprise idea addresses this priority area.
Principle 2: Impactful social entrepreneurship demands a good understanding of the community’s priority, not just its needs. The third principle asserts that impactful social entrepreneurship requires the application of the asset-based community development (ABCD) approach. According to scholars Alison Mathie and Gordon Cunningham, the traditional needs-based community development approach (in which a community development practitioner channels external resources to meet the needs of a community) does not usually encourage the community to be self-reliant. Rather, over time, the approach may lead its members to see themselves as deficient and incapable of taking charge of their lives and their community. In contrast, the ABCD approach identifies the assets of the community members, and challenges them to brainstorm creative ways of mobilising these assets to address their shared priority need. The ABCD approach recognises that their capacities as well as their associations can be harnessed to build up the community. Examples of assets include: individuals’ skills, expertise, knowledge, life experiences and stories; families’ histories, customs, rituals, cuisines, crafts and technologies; kinship ties and social networks; citizens’ and business associations; cultural and religious organisations; financial institutions; businesses (such as shops, factories and farms); services (such as education, healthcare, transport, water supply and sanitation); physical structures and spaces (such as houses, schools, libraries, religious buildings, hospitals, markets, shopping centres, cultural centres, recreation centres and parks); and natural assets (such as forests, mountains, wetlands, rivers, lakes, flora and fauna). Therefore, a potentially impactful social enterprise idea is likely to be one that harnesses the assets, resources and strengths of the community members.
Principle 3:
Impactful social entrepreneurship demands a good understanding of the community’s assets, resources and strengths, and consequently an asset-based community development approach.
The fourth principle asserts that the social entrepreneur needs to obtain buyin from the members of the community for the proposed social enterprise 81