Information, Inspiration, and Ideas for a Sustainable Rural Future

Promoting the Entrepreneurial Community Spirit

Cross-Sector Partnerships: New Perspectives in Social Entrepreneurism

Tuning the Two-cylinder Engine of Capitalism NARFI/Sohodojo's presentation and discussion at the Wired.org Conference

Cross-Sector Partnerships in Social Entrepreneurism - The Presentation

Click to learn more about the Wired.org on-line conference...

Cross-Sector Partnerships: New Perspectives in Social Entrepreneurism was presented at the Wired.org on-line conference by Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky as representatives of Sohodojo and the North American Rural Futures Institute (NARFI).

Listen to the audio-enhanced Flash-based version of Cross-sector Partnerships...

Traditional approaches to public-private partnership often have an unspoken assumption of Big Is Good underlying them. Funders too often tell us things aren't worth doing unless they are done in a big way, with large-scale impact. This puts rural communities and distressed urban neighborhoods at a disadvantage where constituencies are often small, and geographically or socially isolated.

In this session, we'll explore emerging organizational and operational strategies for social entrepreneurism that creatively combine non-profit and for-profit organizations in an extended enterprise to support solo and family-based entrepreneurship. We'll focus on how Open Content and Open Source licensing can be used to outsource R&D and technology support for microenterprise networks.

Please see the following documents for additional resources:

Post-Presentation Discussion

Learn more about ICohere's collaborative communities hosting service at their web site...

The post-presentation discussion was primed with a few provocative questions to stimulate the conversation:

  • Do non-profits feed off the scraps of capitalism?
  • What