Challenges for Social Entrepreneurs
Challenges for social entrepreneurs The field of social entrepreneurship is growing rapidly and attracting increased attention from many sectors. The term itself shows up frequently in the media, is referenced by public officials, has become common on university campuses. One of the most important reasons behind the popularity of social entrepreneurship is the inherently appealing stories about entrepreneurs and how they confront challenges. Finding the funding, building strong infrastructure, and creating innovative ideas are the three challenges social entrepreneurs face. Financing the growth of operations to achieve major objectives is undoubtedly the biggest challenge facing social entrepreneurs. Not all of the social entrepreneurs have sufficient funding to fulfill their innovative ideas. One way to solve this problem is crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is the collective cooperation by people who network and pool their money together. Entrepreneurs looking to finance socially responsible start-ups can use crowd-funding to find capital from patient investors who want long-term results and not just a quick fix. The Stockbox team used this web-enabled method to build Stockbox Grocery, (Woodward, 2011). Prior to this, people were not familiar with their plans and they had insufficient money to practice their ideas. To solve this, they engaged in crowdfunding. Crowdfunding offered a platform for fundraisers to access their community which enabled the Stockbox team to attract investors interested in their brilliant ideas and build the store in Seattle Washington, (Woodward, 2011). Fundraising is an important part of social entrepreneur. In order to get an ideal amount of money donated, Keith Curtis, founder of the Curtis Group, recommends social entrepreneurs to take 70% of their time to meet potential donors, (Heather Joslyn, 2010) Difficulty in building supportive infrastructure of the organization is another great challenge for social entrepreneurs. A
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