In this presentation, the author will comment upon the process of creating our blueprint and business plan for creating our social entrepreneurship organization Singapore. Briefly, our plan is to come up with a company to provide retired and or retrenched professionals with a platform to equip students towards intellectual and professional development of social entrepreneurship skills. It is our goal to provide students with a fun, interactive and exciting method to learn skills, aiming to provide them with a break and fun among their stress study life. In the commentary, we will link the document back to entrepreneurship theories to illustrate the theoretical basis for key decisions.
Social Entrepreneurship
Briefly, our plan is to come up with a company to provide retired and/or retrenched professionals with a platform to equip students towards intellectual and professional development of social entrepreneurship skills. Up front, we are confronted to justify this decision. In terms of pros, we are choosing retired teachers and professionals due to their years of experience in the field of social entrepreneurship that will benefit the students. In addition, while social entrepreneurs do make money from what they do, retired and older teachers and professionals present more of an image of a not for profit. As we will see later in the commentary, this will help to overcome problems in the Singapore context.
However, in terms of cons, older personnel may require extensive retraining, particularly in new technologies such as Powerpoint software or social media technology platforms such as Facebook or Twitter. The retraining has to be accomplished before they are on the team. Of course, this downside will be far made up for in terms of their ability to provide the students with social mentoring.
It is our goal to provide students with a fun, interactive and exciting method to learn skills, aiming to provide them with a break and fun among their stress study life. In the commentary, we will link the document back to entrepreneurship theories to illustrate the theoretical basis for key decisions. In this way, we will see the benefits from recruiting retired professionals with experience as social entrepreneurs.
The SE Training Center will offer classes in social entrepreneur skills that are general in nature and not of a specific market niche in an interesting way that is not dull to turn them on to the positive potential of social entrepreneurship skills. This is to be done in coordination with the Singapore Ministry of Education and will provide grants of up to $10,000 per junior or secondary college, $50,000 per ITE college, or $100,000 per polytechnic college. It is the aim to attract retired professionals and teachers with social entrepreneurial staff to man the program. The organization selects retired teachers as volunteers who help teachers and students and on school campuses learn the skills of social entrepreneurship. In this way, the organization will be pushing the ideas of a sustainable type of approach and a cross sector where the organization will hopefully involve government, schools, and NGOs. ultimately together in social entrepreneurships. The benefits of recruiting retired professionals is obvious. They have done this before and will be injecting their years of experience into the mix.
The Singapore Context -- the NKF (National Kidney Foundation) Incident
Allegations in July of 2005 concerning the scandal were about false declarations on the amount of the NKF's financial reserves could last and a number of other allegations. This caused a toppling of the organizations leadership and a falloff in donations from primary contributors (Hian 2007). Originally, the Singapore business community was very enthusiastic about social entrepreneurship and marshaled vast resources to help in making the context a success until the advent of the NKF Incident, chilling the traditional willingness and ability of Singapore's citizens to support charities and social entrepreneurial efforts (Leong 2006).
Much of this reaction was due to the local Singapore community's lack of experience with the U.S. And the U.K. model of social entrepreneurship where the organizational CEO's are paid well to motivated them to do well in fund raising and in managing the organization overall. The people of Singapore see charity as totally altruistic and does not include notions of sustainability and corporatization to maximize full potentials. Therefore, more work is needed in educating the public and government in understanding the proper administration of a social enterprise (ibid.).
We need to consider theories on social entrepreneurship before we link our blueprint to them. One theory known as the triple bottom line (3Ps-People, Planet and Profit) which measures corporate social entrepreneurship of organizations such as charity foundations and apply corporate finance and economic calculations to measure the efficiency of social organizations. The modern perspective of social entrepreneurship is slightly altered in U.S.. There is also the model provided by the William and Melinda Gates Foundation operate where money no longer goes to governments and the ministries who determine how the charitable institutions will decide on how to spend the money. Unfortunately, many governments waste a lot of charity money on other projects. For this reason, Gates applied a social entrepreneurship model about money and helping the poor where he his foundation did not give the money to governments, but to create a programs to administer the projects (ibid).
Our Approach
You’re 71% through this paper. Sign up to read the full paper.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.