From Entrepreneurship to Sensitivity: Learnings from the Ashoka Fellowship Exprience. A tribute to the work & thought of Kishore Saint 1932-2022 https://youtu.be/dMT5e5nDMWw Saint told us in this interview in January 2017 that he regrets using the terms social entreneurship as it perhaps allowed for the Sensitivity and Solidarity, of the Constructive Workers to be captured by finance capital.
ENTERPRISE AND INNOVATION IN CONSTRUCTIVE WORK by Kisbore Saint https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0256090919850211 Vikalpa, Vol. 10, No.2, April-June, 1985 Motivated by a sense of worth and value for rural life and culture, these entrepreneurs saw in it a potential for a different future, as an alternative to western modernity, whose dangers were becoming manifest. It was a vision which reflected the principles of decentralization, social coherence, moral rectitude and strength, ecological viability, and self-management at the local community level. It was not just community participation or community development-oriented, but was community-based, with community planning and decision making built into it. The role of the state and market arrangements was visualized as supportive and promotive to this. We saw its powerful expression in the Bhoodan-Gramdan movement and its caricature in the Community Development-Panchayati Raj institutions.
the social entrepreneur, as the mediator between the system and the community (or what remains of it), has sensitive, often difficult choices to make in terms of direction, strategy, linkages, resource mobilization, technology, and management. Experience shows that most social entrepreneurs, despite their radical and
people-oriented declarations end up promoting the system and people's participation in it essentially on its terms. This has been the fate of the bulk of constructive and voluntary effort in the post-independence period.
The first need, therefore, is for large scale and widespread support of social entrepreneurs with indigenous resources. At present, very few young .people are in the field or are attracted to it. A climate has to be created in which not only this kind of initiative is supported but is also recognised and respected. Second, the entrepreneurs have to be helped to see their effort in the larger historical, systemic, and future perspective. Third, the need for networks and movements as alternatives and as initial steps into a better future has to be recognized by the social entrepreneurs and their supporters.