<p>It is amazing to see the idealistic and passionate youth of today engrossed in this growing phenomenon called social entrepreneurship. For the past eight years, as Go Negosyo pursues its passion of building a country of enterprising Filipinos, we have adopted along the way the beauty of social entrepreneurship, since we see that it is not only an enterprise for profit, but an enterprise that also helps solve a social issue, or benefits a particular underprivileged sector or community. In a way, we have treated Go Negosyo as a social enterprise that provides competency-building and mindset change for those who want to beat poverty or become successful. Like many social enterprises in the US, UK and other developed economies, many are enabler-institutions that provide training to marginalized groups, and like them we get to sustain our operations through corporate partnerships and revenues generated from paid seminars we also conduct. These revenues help us provide free seminars, mentoring fora and summits in many parts of the country.</p><p>We have also witnessed how social entrepreneurship can become more sustainable and scale up, and this is mainly through corporate social innovations where we link a social enterprise to a bigger corporation that will serve as a regular market for its product. This is what we call corporate social innovation, which in effect, encourages bigger corporations to integrate, say in its supply chain, the sourcing of materials from a particular community or cooperative, making it part of a sustainable business model. In our Selecta ice cream, we have started to develop certain farmer-communities in Davao as our regular source of ube for our ice cream. Entrepreneur awardee Jim Ayala is a good social enterprise example: he established strong links with partners to provide Hybrid Social Solutions' solar lanterns that fuel development in remote rural communities.</p><p>Sen. Cynthia Villar has also developed several social enterprises, like the famous products from water lilies that used to clog the Las Pinas river, or the coco coir that comes from a huge pile of buko waste in Las Pinas. She then trains several communities to make the coco coir, which she markets initially to the Vista Land projects and other property developers.</p><p>I also remember that when we were starting with our Go Negosyo advocacy, we were doing some forums and seminars in some Gawad Kalinga communities. As we featured in previous columns, our partnership with GK has gone a long way. We often discuss with GK founder Tony Meloto that they have been very effective in providing "kabahayan" while Go Negosyo centers on "kabuhayan." It is good to see that somehow our paths have crossed as we now see GK increasing its involvement in developing social entrepreneurship. They have even built the GK Enchanted Farm and transformed it into the Enchanted Farm Village University, to focus on being an enabler in providing social enterprise models, training and incubation of these enterprises.</p><p><a href="http://www.philstar.com/business-life/2013/09/30/1239157/social-businesses-better-philippines">Keep reading...</a></p>