SSP's - Revamped !

I think we all realize that the MF SSP projects could do with a "shot in the arm". We realized that our SSP's have a much greater potential to create social change. Prior to the symposium some of us at Proj.SSP were seriously thinking about ways in which we can improve MF SSP's. Of course DU 2008 was a great opportunity to do that.

So, at the symposium we decided not to do the SSP "presentations" in the traditional sense, but instead ask each campus to introspect and self-evaluate their SSP project. So each campus then shared with us the successes, the challenges and even some of the frustrations they encountered with their SSP's in concise five minute presentations.

As I mentioned earlier we had a professor and two students from Brown University who helped us out with the SSP presentation. The professor was Dr. Chris Bull a research engineer at Brown who teaches a social entrepreneurship course. Dr Bull had very generously agreed to help facilitate a discussion about our SSP's and sort of help the audience to arrive for themselves at some of the problems and possibly some of the solutions.  Two Brown students Charles and Andrea, students who have taken the social entrepreneurship course at Brown also presented the social entrepreneurship projects that they have been involved in.

Charles while not only being a full time student at Brown, is also the director of international development at an organization called Longitude. Longitude is an organzation that works with volunteer organizations in Ghana and India (http://www.golongitude.org/www/Longitude_Volunteer_Ghana_India.html) . Charles shared with us his opinion on how he got started with social entrepreneurship and the ways in which he thinks and organization can keep itself sustainable. He really stressed on rigorous self assessment - constantly thinking about what the SSP is doing and the impact it is creating as a way toward sustainability.

Andrea, meanwhile is involved with the Real Food Challenge (http://realfoodchallenge.org). This is an initiative that aims to promote environmentally sustainable food and where workers producing the food are fairly treated. Andrea was one of those that helped Brown University dining services to start using some "Real Food" and now apparently a good percentage of the food served at Brown comes from sustainable food sources.

These two projects were quite interesting and showed us how these organizations have set themselves up to create a substantial social impact. Winthrop meanwhile spoke about how the MF institutionally sees the SSP's as an important part of "creating postive change" and how as an organization the MF is committed to supporting SSPs.

Dr. Bull then faciliated the discussion with the audience to help find common patterns of successes and challenges from all the presentations that we saw. Everyone had lots of opinions to offer and it was a very busy discussion to say the least. Opinions included facts that the SSP's were not in touch with the community, i.e. we were not trying to fix an actual problem, but instead assuming what the problem was and trying to address it. Also, many of the fellows expressed a sense of frustration after seeing a project not being able to sustain itself after lots of hard work being put into it.  Funding issues were also a major grouse point.

Steffen Bethmann, SF from FSU then faciliated a discussion to elicit some next steps that can be performed as a result of this analysis. One of the important things that will be done as a follow up task is to establish a Proj.SSP solution group to take into account the inputs that we have received.

I believe this is really an important activity - the group will try to address all major issues - instituitional expectation of SSP's, global collaboration, funding, support etc. If any of this sounds exciting to you and you want to be a part of this, please write to me (suhridk@gmail.com). I will announce a call for participants later as well. I am really looking forward to an exciting and productive MF year ahead and I know you are all too !