I want to be a social entrepreneur when I grow up!

I am researching non-profit related items for my class, and I have decided to use my blog to keep track of my internet adventures and findings. My goal has been to use my class assignments for my MPA classes to help me figure out this "green cemetery" concept that just won't leave me alone. It was not until I was tagged for a "25 random things about me" on Facebook that I connected it to my other longstanding dream of a off the grid cooperative housing unit that has both private space and common space, with shared major appliances, etc...

I have been considering that a green burial site could be a source of income for a conservation, environmental non-profit, and wondered if that could even work. I struggled to term search on google for what I was looking for. My starting point was to follow up on an article I read somewhere, some years ago about a non-profit that escaped the trap of grants by producing a commodity that funded their operations. (The article stuck with me because I have experienced the time and mission sucking effects of grants.) I did find a reference to the trend of " nonprofits being more businesslike and for-profits doing a lot of corporate social responsibility" at Stanford Social Innovation Review, but it wasn't very revealing. This is an area I will need to explore more later.

I did find some interesting financial resources of information and networking for non-profits...

- National Council of Nonprofits
- The Chronicle of Philanthropy
- Idaho Nonprofit Center
- National Center for Charitable Statistics

I finally stumbled upon "social entrepreneurship" and it was a revelation.

"Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. "

I felt like a lost sheep that had found its flock. Then of course, I found my flock's online home, Changemakers, which in their own words is

"... building the world's first global online "open source" community that competes to surface the best social solutions, and then collaborates to refine, enrich, and implement those solutions. Changemakers begins by providing an overarching intellectual framework for collaborative competitions that bring together individual social change initiatives into a more powerful whole".

Open source, collaborative, competition to fix things that are broken in our world. Yes! Sign me up! So I did.

I am not sure where this all will take me, but I feel as if I have the wind at my back.