Excerpt
SUMMARY: In “Getting Beyond Better,” Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, explores how social entrepreneurs can confront the status quo to improve the lives of others in real, measurable ways. She sits down for a conversation with economics correspondent Paul Solman.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): Sally Osberg, welcome.
SALLY OSBERG, Author, “Getting Beyond Better”: Thank you, Paul. It’s wonderful to be here.
PAUL SOLMAN: You write about the key to social entrepreneurship being an equilibrium shift. What do you mean?
SALLY OSBERG: It’s a status quo in which — which affects everybody.
But it takes the entrepreneur to see how to shift that status quo. Think of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There’s this Internet full of information, and yet there’s no ability for the ordinary person to search out and retrieve what she or he wants to know.
They develop a search engine, Google. The rest is history, right? The difference is that the social entrepreneur also understands that this equilibrium, this status quo, is affecting some marginalized population in some very significant way, and that population very rarely has the power or the means to effect the transition on its own. Enter the social entrepreneur.
PAUL SOLMAN: Like Molly Melching, whose organization Tostan, has been working in West African villages for 30 years now on human rights issues, most notably, eliminating the painful and dangerous 2,000-year-old practice of female genital mutilation.
SALLY OSBERG: Something that seems pretty horrific to many of us in the West.
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