I first heard about social businesses and social entrepreneurship in a seminar at the Stanford GSB three years ago. At the time, it seemed like an interesting concept but was not something I gave much further thought.
Then last summer I spend five weeks in South Africa and had the privilege of speaking with many of the Africans affected by poverty in the rural townships there. One particularly striking moment for me came during a conversation I had with one man who was twenty-three, just a year older than myself at the time. He talked about how he had dropped out of school at age 12 to support his family but was now struggling to find jobs, essentially working for free at a factory in the hopes of eventually being hired on. That experienced truly showed me the desire that people in these extremely poor conditions have for work. They want to be empowered through work. Only work can ultimately bring a someone out of poverty and more importantly bring them self-esteem.
When I heard about Samasource, I immediately saw this business as an opportunity to bring the gift of work to people living in poverty. Better yet, Samasource has the opportunity to scale itself because of its business model, while treading the fine line between business and non-profit.
It is hard to define exactly what Samasource is, but after working in sales for Samasource for three months, I have come to believe that more organizations should be modeled like Samasource. While I often am making sales calls and writing up contracts, I also have the pleasure of working with our service partners in Africa and Asia, making daily cross-cultural connections.
Samasource is a business in many ways, but it is not focused on profits; instead it’s focused on empowering people through work with the tools of business. It has been a powerful motivator to know that each project that I closed would directly lead to more work for workers at our service partners. There is something fresh and different about working in the Samasource system, where doing good means doing good business. I hope that more businesses like Samasource will be founded around this genuine desire to help people because because I have seen the power of this model in my short time at Samasource.
