Social entrepreneurship means dirty work to me. It's the work that need to be done but that very little people are willing to do. Scholarship is asking the tough questions and social entrepreneurship is having the willingness to stick your neck out in order to try to solve those questions. Social entrepreneurship, as cliché as it sounds, is being the change you want to see in the world. It's having the freedom to advocate for something the way you want and take control of your own representation in a particular market or community. Social entrepreneurship is about understanding — understanding the political, cultural, and economic context of the problem they are trying to solve.
On Friday Carly and I went to the Hamtramck district court to help launch a new pilot of our program — Street Outreach Court Detroit. When talking about social entrepreneurship, I think it's quite hard to understand the need without being where the need is. It's one thing hearing and learning about broad concepts like institutional racism and the poverty cycle on the news and in class. It's another thing being in the office working to fight things like this. Those are both great ways to learn about what social entrepreneurs do. But to really learn how and why they do it I think it was beneficial for me to be in that court that day to talk to the people directly, to see the conversations that Jayesh and Charles were having with Judge Krot, and to actually have a part in legal reform in the state of Michigan.
SOCD so far has been a program that has been implemented after the fact. This means that after people have accumulated fines over time and have already dedicated money to paying off their fines we come in and try to eliminate those fines through creating an action plan for the people we represent to to get out of their current situation. However, in Hamtramck we're trying to eliminate that from the get go. So having a part in interviewing those people and helping with intake of legal reform that has not happened yet in this district was really cool and for me defined what social entrepreneurship is for me. It's the ability to look at a system, a problem, or even a current way of doing something and then taking the initiative to find innovative ways of fixing for a targeted group of people or social welfare.
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