Hey hey! Welcome back! In this video I'm going to share 8 social problems
that are just begging to be disrupted with somebody's entrepreneurial thinking.
If you are an entrepreneur looking for your next idea, or a way to impact
the world in a big way, this video is definitely for you. I'm Amber Melanie
Smith and I help aspiring changemakers with tips and strategies to help you
change the world while living a life of impact and purpose. So I was really
excited when I found this old Journal of mine from about 10 years ago. Basically
what this journal is, is a place where I was writing down all of the different
social problems I could think of in the world and then just kind of
brainstorming different ideas and how I might solve them or tackle them with
different kind of entrepreneurial projects. So that's kind of the
inspiration for the video today. I was just thinking about how as a society we
have the tendency to put the least amount of investment time and money into
the things that we all generally agree are important for our happiness, our
health, our being knowledgeable, and just generally being good humans. So I'm
talking about things like education and teachers, emergency services, affordable
housing, stuff like that. And then on the flip side, we have a tendency to put a
lot of money and time into things that are actually causing us a bit of misery -
like buying a lot of stuff that we don't need. What would happen if we flipped
our way of thinking? Instead of viewing helping address social problems as just
a nice charitable thing to do what if we viewed them as solid business or
leadership opportunities? For those of you who are already familiar with the
idea of social entrepreneurship, you know that this concept is at its core. So for
those of you not yet familiar, an entrepreneur of course is a person who
operates a business or an enterprise that has some
kind of risk usually associated with it, like it being a startup or involving
some big financial investments. A social entrepreneur, on the other hand, is
someone who operates a business or an enterprise with an ultimate goal of
attacking a social problem. A social entrepreneur is using their business
savvy to address the social problem - but it could be through a for-profit
business model, or it could be through a nonprofit organization as well. So we're
gonna get into some social problems that are just begging to be disrupted by
someone with a really innovative mindset, but before we get into that, I just want
to say if you're new welcome please take him out to go ahead and subscribe to my
YouTube channel and go ahead and give this video a thumbs up! So before I get
into these eight social problems that are ready to be disrupted, I just want to
say that of course major social issues really take a lot of different parties
coming together to solve them permanently or for the long term.
Businesses, nonprofits, activists, everyday people - all of these organizations and
people are required to make social change stick. But somebody's got to get
the ball rolling, so why not a socially conscious entrepreneur? The problems
that I'm about to describe could be tackled by any kind of entrepreneurship
model - that could be a business, it could be a non-profit, it could be social
enterprise - it really depends on the specific idea and the best model
required to bring that idea to life successfully. Let's get into it! Here
are 8 social problems that are just begging for some entrepreneurial
disruption. The first social problem is student loan debt! Woo! We're talking
billions of dollars of debt here faced across the country in the United States.
And this just needs some help. Please help us! There are some great
programs like AmeriCorps who help address this a little bit they offer
honorariums and stipends and scholarships and whatnot to help pay off
past student loan debt and provide for future education but these programs have
limited scope and not everyone has access to them so what else can we do
here. I've seen a couple organizations and businesses
try to tackle this in the past and are trying to tackle it presently, but so far
I haven't really seen anything big that's really shaken things up. One
organization called SponsorChange was really exciting. They were encouraging
people to volunteer and then businesses and other people and entities would
sponsor a person's volunteer time by helping them pay off some other student
loan debt. I'm not really sure what happened - SponsorChange's website and
their social media is not really active right now. I hope that they're okay, but
this was a promising idea that I thought might really take off. But if it hasn't
taken off, we really need something else here to help us out.
The second problem I want to talk about is affordable housing. A lack of
affordable housing is leading to all sorts of income inequality and
homelessness issues in cities across the country. A couple of really creative
ideas are emerging in the space. Tiny homes is a great example.
Another one is Western University students cohabitating (not like that!) with seniors in
retirement community. That's a really exciting one because it gets at the
housing situation and also combats loneliness for both parties. Of course
the best social innovations combine different problems and tackle multiple
things at once. So my question for you is what else can we be doing in this area?
The third area ready for Destruction is the prison system the goal here of
course would be to reduce overcrowding in the prisons and ideally focus on
lowering recidivism. Recidivism being of course the tendency of an offender to
commit another crime so there might be a lot of potential and programs that
emphasize rehabilitation. One solution I recently read about that was just so
inspiring to me was Malaysia's Community Rehabilitation Program. Basically what
they did was they had several different issues they were trying to tackle. They
had to address how expensive it was to operate manage and build prison building
and they had to address the recidivism rates of folks in their country so they
came up with his brilliant and elegant solution that addressed all of these
things at once what they did was they side empty unused spaces on their
country's military bases and instead of building a new prison building they just
had an agreement with military to occupy some of that unused space and say both
parties money the second thing they did was they looked at some research that
talked about how rehabilitation is most successful when the inmates are
connected to their families instead of separated from their families and where
they had more opportunities to learn and train in job skills so they could have
something to do to raise money for the themselves and their families once they
got out of prison so in this prison system that they built
they focused on having families be able to come in and connect with the
offenders and their family and also they focused on training programs so that
they could be learning job skills and learn reading and writing and business
skills and everything else not only has this approach saved the Malaysian
government millions of dollars but they have one of the lowest recidivism rates
in the world. The fourth social problem ready for
disruption is a lack of education or lack of access to education. Now I am
talking about education in the United States, but these are problems that need
to be addressed around the whole world. Brookings and other organizations have
been compiling innovations in education to take a look at how we can make big
strides in this area one example is United World Colleges. They focus on
bringing people together across cultural divides to promote education and peace
at the same time. Another innovation comes out of La Bastilla, the technical
agricultural school in Nicaragua and what they are doing is promoting job
training and education in the same environment by providing learning
learning experiences that allow the students to start businesses and operate
micro enterprises especially with relation to agriculture what are some
other ideas that you have to tackle the issue of lack of access to education and
possibly combine it with some of these other problems that we're talking about.
The fifth social problem that needs so much help and so
much innovation is climate change and the destruction of nature. There's some
pretty exciting innovations and enterprises emerging to tackle this
issue but in my opinion we could use all the help we can get, so bring on more
ideas. One great example is Impossible Foods. They are tackling reducing meat
consumption by creating great tasting meat alternatives.
Another one is Bowery Farming - they are experimenting with indoor farming that
is completely pesticide free. So hopefully these ideas are getting you
brainstorming. What are some of the gaps in services and gaps and business
opportunities that no one else is addressing yet to potentially tackle
some of these major social problems? Ok! Sixth up - and I kind of alluded to this
in some of the other social problem areas - but this one is poverty and income
inequality. When you think about social problems, you can kind of see how
everything is interconnected. One thing shifts and it affects another thing. A
couple of successful approaches that are still ongoing today include teaching
young people high-level technological skills. So we've got a lot of programs
teaching kids coding - stuff like that. Also micro-lending is something that came
out of the world a couple decades ago that is still thriving and doing a lot
of great work today. Micro lending is making small bank loans to small
businesses and individuals who need to start a business to pull themselves out
of poverty or improve their financial situation. Usually it's done in smaller
amounts of money, and the awesome thing about it is there's sort of this
collective community around micro lending so when you get a micro loan you
aren't in a group often who of other people who have a loan so you can
support each other and get great feedback from each other and that also
leads to a really really high repayment rate of usually 97 to a
100 percent! But what are some more ideas? The seventh social problem is
large-scale conflicts and Wars. Now it may seem a little naive and idealistic
to think that some kind of entrepreneurial way of thinking can
address large scale conflicts and violence and
war, but it can, and there are some great examples of organizations of people
doing it. When we start limiting ourselves and thinking we can't tackle a
certain problem, that's when those problems persist forever. And any time
someone has stepped up to think outside of the box and try a new approach to
tackling some of these problems that just seems so daunting and so
overwhelming - that's when we've seen some of the most
amazing social change occur across the world! There is an amazing example for
this one, and that is the National Youth Orchestra in Iraq. Around 2008 a young
woman in Iraq wanted to start her country's first National Youth Orchestra
but resources were really limited to do something like this and people trained
in orchestral music were all so hard to find so she reached out across the
world - I think on social media actually - and found someone who was willing to
come in from out of the country to partner with her to make this happen!
The end result was an amazing orchestra made up of kids in Iraq who were now
able to not only get musical training but also promote peace and
cross-cultural learning by connecting with others in the orchestra across the
world. The eighth and final social problem that I want to talk about that
is just ripe for disruption is the refugee crisis. Now this is a really
tough one - it's a bit political and oftentimes it requires a large
government intervention in order to make any progress on this - but it's actually
for that reason that I think there could be some interesting entrepreneurial
opportunity here. I was recently reading how one of the biggest obstacles we're
facing in helping refugees is this notion of them as "the other", as a person
who is going to be a burden on our society instead of an asset. The reality
is of course that a lot of these people escaping conflicts and and needing
refugee support are business people themselves! They're entrepreneurs
themselves, and they come with amazing skills and talents that could really
benefit specific regions of other countries the problem that was stated in
this one article I was reading was that we are not
effectively matching people by their skills to the areas of need and a
country so it feels like things are not making sense we're sending farmers to
big cities and of course they're not gonna be able to use their skills as
effectively there because that's not where their training is so this idea of
matching these people who are escaping from conflict to the areas of an economy
in a city or rural landscape that they're needed in would help countries
feel like they are bringing in more assets instead of burdens so maybe
there's something there the best business ideas and social enterprises
often involve combining and intersecting industries and solving multiple problems
at once with a single elegant solution so when you're thinking like an
entrepreneur ask yourself how can we solve multiple problems with one
solution how can we tackle big social issues through a great innovation could
we reduce student loan debt and improve education and tackle poverty all by
addressing encouraging students and seniors and retirement communities to
live together could we tackle poverty and helping the environment by creating
technology that cleans up the air or the water and paying people to operate it
could we tackle war and improve education by creating global classrooms
that promote cross-cultural understanding collaboration and work
what are some of your innovative ideas to tackle one or more of these major
social issues we have to keep imagining a world that is better and we've got to
use all of the entrepreneurial technological and philanthropic
knowledge and wisdom that we've gained over the past several decades and
centuries to make it a reality what if more dollars went into solutions to
these problems instead of investing in things that make us unhappy anyway maybe
you'll be the next big entrepreneur to tackle any of these problems and change
the world I'd love to hear some more of your ideas and other social problems
that you think are just ready to be disrupted please feel free to share them
leave in the comments below as promised I'm
also sharing a few other resources like fellowships and grants for entrepreneurs
and social entrepreneurs and other informational websites so check those
out in the description below once again I hope you liked this video please go
ahead and give it a thumbs up and also don't forget to subscribe because I do
weekly videos every Sunday on topics like social impact nonprofits
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having some great conversations over there about how we can all help change
the world and of course the link for that is in the description too. Thanks so
much for watching!