William Foote: Social Entrepreneur.

William Foote

Root Capital

At a Glance

• Age: 43
• Headquarters: Cambridge, Mass.
• 2010 budget: $6.2 million
• www.rootcapital.org

http://www.forbes.com/impact-30/william-foote.html

William Foote, 43, from the United States and the founder of Roots Capital initiative is an example of a social entrepreneur. His idea of providing short term loans to farmers who are willing but not able to work due to lack of funds all started when he and his wife, Virginia, were on a journey and then they noticed some small scale farmers who couldn't make much success in their agricultural production due to lack of funds, and today, he is a very successful social entrepreneur. William Foote then went of to Harvard business school with the notion of creating an organisation that would provide credit to small scale and mostly poor farmers, and today, we have Root Capital which has so far provided up to $260,000,000 in trade credit to certain small scale agricultural businesses.

Social Entrepreneurship.

source: 

Hello,
 I had earlier talked about the normal business entrepreneurs and the corporate entrepreneurs who work under an organisation, so now lets move on and take a look at the entrepreneurs who are more interested in making money from the lower class of our society, the SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS.
Take your time and examine these three pictures, 

source

PICTURE 1:

source:

PICTURE 2:

source

PICTURE 3:
If you had a couple of items to sell, for example some exquisite watches from Dubai, would you rather sell them to the rich man from the first picture, an engineer or banker from the second picture, or the poor old woman selling plantain? The normal entrepreneur or the corporate entrepreneur would rather get involved in business transactions with someone from either picture 1 or picture 2, but not from the poor woman from picture 3, probably because the poor old woman won't have the money to purchase this expensive item and even if she had as much, she would rather prefer maximizing utility by attending to her most pressing needs.  The pictures above represent the high class, the middle class and the lower class respectively which primarily are the different classes of people in our community. But it's interesting to know that a Social Entrepreneur would surprisingly go for the lower class and try making his profit from them  and at the same time assuring the success of his/her business. I hope this now helps in your understanding of who the social entrepreneur is and his interests. Lets now look at the definitions.

• Social entrepreneurship applies to social problem solving traditional, private sector and entrepreneurship's focus on innovation, risk taking and large scale transformation.
•  A process that begins with a social opportunity that is translated into an enterprise.
• A Social entrepreneur is a person or a group of people who founds an organisation or initiative engaged in social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurs are also called civic entrepreneurs. They are different from corporate entrepreneurs because corporate entrepreneurs aren't concerned about the lower class while for the social entrepreneurs, their business ideas come from solving problems of the lower class. The Social entrepreneur recognizes a perceived social opportunity, translates the social opportunity into an enterprise concept, then identifies and acquires the resources required to execute the enterprises goals.This is known as the SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR PROCESS.