Excruciating joy. That’s as close as I can get to articulating the atmosphere at the 2011 Social Change Institute.

Hosted at Hollyhock, June 8 – 12, SCI brought together a group of 55 remarkably diverse individuals, each of whom is working on one or more of the most significant challenges we face: From the need to rethink our organizations and how they’re structured, to unification of distinct generations in service of challenges bigger than each of them, to the recognition that adaptation to climate change will be as challenging as reversing it, the questions posed at SCI required both widely expansive thinking and deep, personal engagement. And it is precisely there that the greatest lessons of SCI 2011 began.

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Annalea Krebs, Founder & President of Octopus’s client TheChange.com presented last week at EPIC. Check out their story:

The Social Entrepreneurship Experience, a student-run conference under the Enterprize Canada umbrella, took place November 21 at the Museum of Vancouver. The organizers’ goals were to “tackle the question of what social entrepreneurship really is and how local businesses are radically changing Vancouver and communities abroad.”

I put it a slightly different way: “Traditional business is a flightless baboon,” I said. (It’s a long story!) “I’m interested in the evolutionary next step.” And I believe it’s social enterprise.

The nature of ‘social entrepreneurship’ is as diverse as the individuals who adopt the moniker. Each of us can choose how we’ll build our organizations, but what we all hold in common is a purpose beyond profit, and an open, collaborative approach to resolving issues of sustainability. Yet it is the diversity that makes this burgeoning sector so hard to pin down. And so fascinating.

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