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Odin Muehlenbein
Source: Odin Muehlenbein

How To Create System Change As A Social Entrepreneur

This article originally appeared on Impact Boom

The motivation for that article came from talking to lots of social entrepreneurs about this idea of system change and there's a very common reaction to this topic and that's that people get into a defensive mode and sometimes that's because the system change is perceived as this large, big transformational change; like getting rid of capitalism and changing the way education works from the ground up. That scares people or makes people feel as if they cannot really contribute to these huge transformational efforts.

And that was always a bit startling to me, because the strategies that we developed at Ashoka Globalizer have very different kinds of goals, much smaller goals, still systemic goals, but much smaller. And so I thought that might be a message worth spreading; that system change can be systemic without being big.

I mean, systems can be very small, right? A cell in the human body is a system. A human is a system. A city is a system. A neighborhood is a system.

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Ashoka insight

Odin Muhlenbein discusses why creating system change needn't be an overwhelming task and how it can be done as a social entrepreneur without operating at a global level.