#wjfgathering

This is a post I wrote for the Unsectored Blog. It was originally posted on July 1, 2013.

People always ask me if I want to be a social entrepreneur and start my own “thing”. It’s the one question I get asked by a large portion of the people that I meet. I don’t – not right now anyway. I think that question says a lot about the field of social enterprise and sustainable business: It is relatively young and there are still a lot of resources that need to be built out. So if you want to be a part of it, you have to start something. It’s easier to do that than join an existing social enterprise, or work for something supporting social enterprise.

At the William James Foundation we’re working to build the field of social enterprise as a whole. For us, there are two major pieces to this work: 1) Supporting for-profit social entrepreneurs, and 2) working with other organizations providing support to social entrepreneurs and sustainable businesses to make sure they have all of the tools, resources and support they need to succeed and change the way the world does business. We support entrepreneurs through our sustainable business plan competitionwhere every entrant gets an average of 20+ pages of feedback per round; our Green Grab investment program where companies pitch for on-the-spot seed-stage investments in front of an audience; and a number of other efforts.  We’re also helping to lead the charge of the newly formed “Impact Accelerator Network,” an effort of the leading social enterprise and social innovation accelerators to connect,  learn about others’ work, pool resources and generally advance the field of social entrepreneurship and sustainable business.

We’re gearing up for our largest Annual Gathering ever—it also happens to be our 10thbirthday.  Most conferences have great keynote speakers, and so do we – Seth Goldman, co-founder and T-EO of Honest Tea and Jigar Shah, founder, of SunEdison and former CEO of Carbon War Room. But what I’m most excited about are our practitioner gatherings, where we put a bunch of people working on similar things in a room and let them talk through their successes and challenges and learn from each other. Last year we put all of the entrepreneurs doing work related to bikes in a room and created our very own “biker gang.” This year,  we’ll  feature the finalists of this year’s sustainable business plan competition and a live Green Grab event for those of you that want to see impact investing up close.