In order to best understand the approach behind our work and creation of Social Entrepreneur Corps, an understanding of the history and background may be helpful.  Social Entrepreneur Corps co founders Greg Van Kirk (recently recognized as an Ashoka Fellow) and George Bucky Glickley were Peace Corps Volunteers in Guatemala from 2001 to 2003. While still in the Peace Corps Greg recognized that tourists were regularly visiting the Guatemalan town of Nebaj where he was working and they were leaving quickly without spending any money in the local economy due to a lack of infrastructure. Identifying a problem, he received special dispensation from the Peace Corps to invest some of his own funds that he had saved working in investment banking to start several tourism businesses including a restaurant, a Spanish language school, a hiking and trekking service, and an artisan store with local residents. This was the start of the Turismo Ixil (TIX) businesses.  The idea was to help the local economy by creating local jobs and to motivate tourists to stay an extra day or two in Nebaj spending money on goods and services. The long term strategic vision was to have local entrepreneurs earn ownership of the ventures through sweat equity and take over when financial and administrative self-sustainability was achieved. This “hand off” successfully took place in early 2004 and these ventures continue to function profitably to this day. In addition, he was teaching part time in a local high school and recognized the almost complete lack of resources. He also noted that even high schoolers were lacking many of the fundamental skills they would need to have an opportunity for future success. As a solution to this problem with the help of other Peace Corps volunteers in the area and funding from the TIX businesses he started the Centro Explorativo (CentroEx), a local library, computer literacy and after-school center accessible to all local residents at no cost.

The MicroConsignment Model (our signature innovation,) first emerged when Greg donated money to a wood-burning stove project from the profits of these tourism businesses. This donation supplied a handful of stoves to an equal number of families in a local village. Like millions of Guatemalans, these families had always cooked campfire-style on their dirt floors. Cooking this way had long been recognized as extremely energy inefficient and harmful to the health of family members, particularly women and children. Relief agencies had determined that the construction of inexpensive, locally manufactured, concrete stoves could immediately and dramatically reduce energy costs and improve the health and safety of family members. Greg realized, however, that merely donating stoves severely limited the capacity for distribution. Once the relief money was expended, nobody else could get a stove. Greg concluded that many more people could obtain these stoves if their distribution was built on a sustainable economy.  As a response to this ongoing challenge he developed what would become the MicroConsignment Model (MCM). Stoves would be locally manufactured, materials provided to local entrepreneurs on consignment and marketed and sold to low income families in villages on an interest-free basis. The money saved in energy costs allowed the stoves to essentially pay for themselves as families made payments over six months. The health, economic and environmental benefits would go on for years. This model would not only provide an essential, high-quality product at an affordable cost to villagers but would provide new income generating opportunities to local individuals as entrepreneurs. Soon after this initial iteration of the model was launched, George joined Greg to further develop and expand this initiative amongst others.

Upon finishing their Peace Corps responsibilities, Greg and George stayed in Guatemala and formed NDS Consulting as a means to provide consulting services to USAID, Chemonics, Soros Foundation and the like. Development professionals working in Guatemala had seen their success in Nebaj and were desirous of contracting their services to support their own projects.  In March of 2004, they were contracted by Scojo Foundation (now VisionSpring) to work in El Salvador to help them find an effective way to distribute reading glasses to low income villagers. It is estimated that over 90 percent of people over 40 years old will need near-vision reading glasses to see up close. VisionSpring was utilizing a micro credit model at the time to provide local women with a means to distribute the glasses but it wasn’t working effectively.  Greg and George noted that micro credit is very effective for people who already have established businesses and purchase raw materials from a local distributor to meet unmet demand. However, selling reading glasses, much the same as selling wood burning stoves requires a different approach. Due to the fact that awareness needs to be created, a high quality service is the driver, there are no local distributors, training is essential and the perceived and real financial risks for potential entrepreneurs is very high, they concluded that micro credit was a suboptimal model to achieve VisionSpring’s desired outcomes. Micro credit by and large looks at the entrepreneur and is neutral regarding what the businesses buy and sell. Any effort to deliver new, “medium and high intervention” products and services to vulnerable villagers must first look at the villager’s needs and then through backwards induction create an entrepreneurial structure that meets those needs. Greg and George concluded that the MCM could effectively mitigate the challenges that VisionSpring was confronting utilizing micro credit. As a consequence, after in-depth analysis and testing, VisionSpring decided to adopt the MCM as its implementation mechanism. For Greg and George this was the “Aha!” moment. They realized that the MCM could work as a unique means to get villagers potentially myriad products and services that addressed health, economic, environmental and educational needs. It was this realization that led to them to  establish the US non profit 501 (c) (3) Community Enterprise Solutions (CE Solutions) in 2004 specifically as the engine to test, develop, implement and expand the MCM in Guatemala and ideally other countries in the future. CE Solutions was also formed to support the TIX businesses and CentroEx’s growth. With regards to the MCM, their concept was to devise a way to create national scale and local self-sustainability. The key as they recognized, was to train a growing number of primarily women entrepreneurs who could offer a growing mix of essential products and services in an increasing number of remote villagers. And as in the case of the tourism businesses, the concept was to create a local social enterprise, owned and run by the leaders that emerged through their entrepreneurial work, which could achieve financial and administrative self-sustainability. This led to the idea of establishing a Guatemalan owned social enterprise called Soluciones Comunitarias (SolCom) in 2006.

Greg and George continued to consult for VisionSpring (amongst others) to help them expand their reach. This included running the El Salvadoran operations and facilitating expansion of VisionSpring’s MCM reading glasses initiatives in Mexico, Paraguay and Nicaragua.

The successful growth of the MCM in Guatemala through CE Solutions support led to typical challenges associated with expansion; the need for additional human and financial capital. During the first phase of this development, Greg and George depended solely upon donor contributions to provide the necessary financial capital. They did not, however, want successful growth to be 100% dependent upon oftentimes sporadic donations.  As sustainability in the field was a primary driver and was being slowly achieved through the income that SolCom earned on product sales, they additionally wanted to create a sustainable mechanism from an overall organizational perspective. They solved this problem by establishing Social Entrepreneur Corps in 2005 as a sister organization to CE Solutions to offer opportunities for students and recent graduates to volunteer in Guatemala (and now Ecuador and Nicaragua) supporting the entrepreneurs and the MCM’s continuous innovations and growth. They had learned through working with recently graduated volunteers that fairly inexperienced individuals from diverse backgrounds could make a measurable impact in a short period of time. In addition, these volunteers had conveyed to them that they had gotten more out of their experience working within the model than they had in other more traditional study abroad experiences in which they had participated. Creating a mechanism for students to volunteer and contribute thus offered an elegant solution to the financial and human resource constraints that Greg and George had been confronting. Training and supporting students in many regards as apprentices, who in turn supported and funded the MCM work, was a much more efficient and effective use of time than bifurcating work between fundraising and field implementation.

Social Entrepreneur Corps has been fortunate to grow through success. Social Entrepreneur Corps participants now work on a variety of economic and educational development programs apart from the MCM. As well, although Social Entrepreneur Corps is open to all applicants, we  have established strategic relationships with the University of Notre Dame, Duke University, the University of Connecticut, Columbia University, The College of William and Mary, Miami University (Ohio) and Franklin and Marshall College. Our work continues in Guatemala and in January of 2009 we began in Ecuador. Expansion to Nicaragua will take place in 2010. The concept is to mimic the successful Guatemalan experience in a growing number of countries in future  years to create as much impact as possible for both our rural developing world clients and passionate participants.

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