I clearly remember my first encounter with Social Entrepreneurship.
It was when I saw one of my cousins wearing a canvas shoes that said TOMS on the back. The branding and the look of the shoes caught my attention so I googled TOMS and was astonished to find that for every pair you buy they give a pair for a child in need.
Since then the concept of social entrepreneurship was always in the back of my head until I was further exposed to it during my MBA in Madrid and the leadership program that I joined in South Africa.
Learning about the beauty of the concept and its impact lead me to pursue a career in social entrepreneurship myself.
These are 3 of the many reasons why I believe that social entrepreneurship is good for both the community and business:
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When you incorporate a social cause into your business you add purpose to your passion. Passion fades away after some time. Link passion to a purpose that is bigger than yourself and the result is long-term drive. Knowing that my job can have a positive impact on someone's life and seeing the results of the giving back motivates me to work harder everyday.
- When you link a social cause to your business goals, there is no need to choose between doing well & doing good. When you have a social for-profit business where the business goals are linked to the social goals, wanting to feed one side of the equation positively impacts the other side. This means that making more revenue means giving more to the community and wanting to give more to the community translates into the need for more revenue. This way you become financially independent which results in a sustainable giving back model that doesn't depend on outside inconsistent funding.
- When you authentically link your business goals to a social cause, you attract amazing customers, awesome volunteers and partners who care about making a difference. Since we started selling our t-shirts our customers proudly wore our t-shirts to represent our cause, volunteers gave their time to become part of The Orenda Tribe's giving family and partners supported us through our journey using their resources.
Focusing on authentically giving back automatically paved the road for The Orenda Tribe in different areas of the business.
Within 2 and a half years we completed 20 giving back projects in 7 different communities, empowering more than 2,000 children through art and sold our t-shirts online to 23 countries across the world and physically in more than 9 different stores.
I am grateful for the inspiring messages that I receive on daily bases from our awesome fans and customers, our volunteering community that is growing by the day and the amazing companies that want to associate themselves with The Orenda Tribe because of our social cause and help us using their resources.
The moral of the story is that giving is good for you, the business and the community.
Start today, incorporate giving into your business in whatever way possible!
Inspire Hope,
Zaid Souqi
