Social business

Grameen Bank founder, Muhammad Yunus believes that companies engaged in capitalist enterprise can have a dramatic affect on poverty.

He is not alone. We're reading more and more these days about "social enterprise" as a tool for impacting impoverished communities.

Last week I sat in on the final sessions of the annual meeting of a Fortune 500 company held here in Dallas, Texas. I was encouraged and, frankly, overwhelmed to hear and see this major worldwide corporation's plans for and growing commitment to social enterprise here in the U. S. and around the world.

The notion of making a profit after factoring in the cost of social benefit is intriguing to say the least.

Doing well while doing good is an idea to which Yunus subscribes, as you will see here in his address on The Social Business Model.

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A poverty-free world

Nobel Peace Prizer winner Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the world's largest micro credit lending network in the world, the Grameen Bank, understands that poverty is not the fault of the poor.

People are poor largely thanks to forces at work outside of their control.

The vast majority of the world's poor work incredibly hard and want to do better.

The lack of credit, education, proper nutrition, access to transportation and the unrelenting struggle to simply survive keep the poor trapped in poverty.

Yunus' vision is of a "poverty-free world." One of his trademark statements is that "the word human and poverty should never be used in relation to one another."

People were not meant to be poor.

Listen to his wisdom here.

Tell me what you think.

America's economy and markets are quite different from those of the developing world. How do we apply Yunus' values and vision here?

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