Earlier this month, NYU’s Reynold’s Program in Social Entreprenurship kicked off its speaker series for the Fall, with a conversation between Catherine Reynolds, who heads a foundation that finances American college students, and David Gergen, a senior political analyst for CNN, a professor of public service at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a board member of Teach for America.
The panelists raised several interesting points. While Reynolds highlighted public private partnerships as one valuable way to scale up a project, Gergen pointed out that “the relationship with the government comes fraught with problems.”
He talked about the hazards of entering the public realm. In particular, he said that policy barriers, involving foreign ventures, tax and other regulations are hindering social entrepreneurship ventures from achieving scale.
Gergen suggested that perhaps one way for social ventures to achieve scale is through franchising: encouraging communities to locally implement an idea or project. He called social entrepreneurship “The most important movement in this country since the civil rights movement,” stating that the two share many of the same qualities.
Reynolds agreed that with the policy obstacles to social entrepreneurship, pointing out that current policies affecting the ability to raise capital, or the tax structure are not up to date with the world as it truly operates. Social ventures, which are a hyprid between for and nonprofits are a particularly problematic animal for organizations like the IRS, who haven’t yet figured out quite how to treat them.
Reynolds also made special mention of how the growth of social entrepreneurship can largely be credited to the “academic seal of approval” that comes from its increasing institutionalization through academic programs in social entrepreneurship like those being offered at NYU and Harvard.
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