Unreasonable Institute Pitchfest

Last Monday, I had the pleasure of attending the Unreasonable Institute Pitchfest at the Hub (right across the street from DDD’s San Francisco office!). To be honest, when I first scanned the profiles of the 19 ventures being pitched and the problems they were aiming to fix, I had a glass-half-empty moment. Urban homelessness, lack [...]

Last Monday, I had the pleasure of attending the Unreasonable Institute Pitchfest at the Hub (right across the street from DDD’s San Francisco office!). To be honest, when I first scanned the profiles of the 19 ventures being pitched and the problems they were aiming to fix, I had a glass-half-empty moment. Urban homelessness, lack of electricity, human trafficking, preventable deaths, food insecurity, illiteracy, youth unemployment, physical disability, unsanitary living conditions–pick your cause. It’s easy to read the list as a catalogue of global tragedy, and to be staggered by the impossibility of making a dent. Luckily, these entrepreneurs aren’t.

The event opened with the George Bernard Shaw quote that inspired the institute’s moniker: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable persists in adapting the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man [and woman].” The social entrepreneurs who presented were young, impassioned, and confident they could make a difference. After spending weeks at the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, CO to refine their models and write business plans, they came to San Francisco to solicit funding for their ventures. The issues they zoomed in on and the approaches they chose were drastically different, but a common energy threaded through all of the presentations.

As I listened to one pitch after another, my initial sense of being overwhelmed bloomed into a feeling of comfort–empowerment, even. It’s always a  relief to be reminded that I am just one tiny piece of this huge, motley army of people fighting to do something good, each chipping away at poverty or injustice from their own angle with their own weapon. Listening to the Unreasonable Fellows testified to the value of this community–though scrambling for capital from funders and validation from beneficiaries, they seem to have been most shaped by another audience: each other.

As social entrepreneurs, doing what we do often requires a tunnel-visioned focus on our own goals, and a single-minded devotion to our specific work–sometimes I feel like I don’t have the mental space to care about multiple sets of causes. That’s when it’s most valuable to look up and find camaraderie in the community sprung from all of these singular devotions. Whether in the snatches of conversation that float to my desk in Mission*Social, at the pitchfest or a similar social entrepreneurship event at the Hub, or in the orbit of blogs centered around development and social innovation, it’s always energizing to be reminded of the ways in which other people have decided to care and commit unreasonably.

1. Eric Gold says:

   July 27, 2010 at 5:20 PM

   What up Kat?!! Word.