Via Matt at Signal vs Noise, an amazing article about an amazing person, social entrepreneur Bill Strickland. His story struck home with me on so many levels that by the time I finished reading it I had outlines for 8 different posts scribbled on a piece of paper. So here’s the first post in the “Strickland Series”.

Any way you cut it, social entrepreneurship is about the coolest thing going (here’s the wikipedia article). It’s a mix of pragmatism and idealism that pulls together two conflicting camps: the “That’s reality: deal with it” camp vs the “But this is how reality should be” camp. There’s a grain of truth in the over-generalized caricature of the mercilessly effective cut-throat capitalist and the pompously pontificating academic liberal who can only manage words, not deeds. (There. I’ve pissed off everybody.) Sometimes people try to simplify the complexities of life by filtering events through a one-sided advocacy of one camp without acknowledging any virtues of the other. Social entrepreneurship takes the best of both camps by not only getting things done, but getting the right things done.

What does this have to do with language teaching? We’ve been kicking around the ‘teachers as free agents” meme over the last few days (AJ’s original post that started the idea, me, Aaron, Scott). The idea I want to propose is that free agent language teachers working abroad have (literally) a world of opportunity to engage in social entreprenuership.

How? There are many types of social entreprenuership, so there are many different ways. One approach that comes to mind is for teachers to partner with corporate sponsors to teach less-advantaged kids. One of many possible scenarios would involve, say, an ex-pat Business English teacher doing in-company classes somewhere in Latin America.

Probably some of our hypothetical teacher’s BE students are in marketing, and therefore have access to the marketing budget, and may be open to sponsoring an after-school English program taught by our teacher in a public school. Our teacher would then work out the English program with the English teachers of the public school so that it complements the curriculum, and set up a Dekita exchange with kids in a school in our teacher’s home town (if they need a PC with internet access, then get the sponsor to help.)

Our teacher is paid for the classes by the corporate sponsor, perhaps less than an institute would charge, but perhaps more than our teacher would make working for the institute (if our teacher is in a position to donate his or her time for free, that’s great, but then we’re moving towards philanthropy and away from social entrepreneurship). The corporate sponsor gets publicity for being a good corporate citizen. In my experience most companies do want to do good things and if the market rewards them by buying more of their product, well, that’s OK. My thinking is that anytime you can move marketing money away from TV ads and into education, that’s a good thing for everyone.

Two years ago while I was teaching in Caracas I came up with a project, similar to this but at a much larger scale, and to my surprise got a corporate partner almost immediately. We started the project but later put it on standby - I profoundly underestimated the complexity of the technology I had proposed to build, but we’re slowly but surely pulling our resources together and hopefully we’ll have some news in a few months. I’ve got another project just barely in the planning stages here in Miami, and it’s too soon to tell if it’ll go anywhere, but I think it’ll be really fun if we can pull it off. We’ll keep you posted on of both these projects as they progress.