In this video, we'll be looking at the importance of the social mission. This social mission is the starting point for what you'll be doing. But where does it come from, and how can you find it? Now is a good time to think back to the first three chapters. The issues that affect you, the important things in your life, or the professional experiences you have had, are all factors that will certainly influence your choice of social mission. This mission really has to be your mission. You need to feel that it's truly yours, because you're going to be spending a long time working on it, with the energy and motivation needed to resolve a major problem in our society. It's important to understand that a social mission has some broad concepts, which remain stable over time and stay the same throughout the lifetime of the project. The products or services you are going to be providing are the logical result of that mission. Unlike the social mission, products or services may change over time. There are different ways of fulfilling your social mission. It's up to you to find the best products and services to fulfil your mission. Finally, your activities are going to have an impact on society, which can be split into an economic impact and a social impact. In chapter 5, you'll be learning how to improve your economic impact by using the best possible business model, and in chapter 6, you'll be learning the right methods for measuring your social impact. To sum up, here's a little quiz. What do you think changes over time: the social mission, products and services, economic impact or social impact? That's right. It's only the social mission that doesn't change over time. Bear in mind that the social mission remains stable over time and the products and services that you provide must flow from that mission. They will then define the impact you have on society. That impact will also change, depending on the products or services you provide. We're now going to hear from Charles-…douard Vincent, who is going to tell us about Emma¸s DÈfi's star mission, and how there can be different ways of fulfilling your social mission. "Yes, the Emma¸s DÈfi project was absolutely not linear in its progression. What we kept, the bearing we held - because it really is a bearing - was the vision and the aim of using work to give excluded and underprivileged people a place in society. But in terms of the path we took, I can assure you that we took quite a number of detours. At the time, I could see where I was coming from, I had an idea of where I wanted to go, but I can tell you that the paths I took to get there... Well, they had to be invented almost from day to day. We ran into big problems, we made mistakes, we had disasters, we messed things up, we thought we needed to do it this way rather than that way... And through all of that, it was important to keep asking myself: Was my original idea the right one? I'm talking about the path to follow here, not the ultimate goal. So was that path the right one, or was it just a dead end? There were a certain number of dead ends that we took, so we needed to build. So you know where you're coming from. You know where you want to go, and it's vital not to lose sight of that. What I mean by that is, the essence of Emma¸s DÈfi, is how we can make a place for homeless people in our society, once again. And for me, work is absolutely essential, but ultimately the path you take to achieve that... Well, you have to follow it to really know what it is. To begin with, we created an integration project, and we thought that our integration project and standard employment contracts would enable people to get back on the right track, and so on. We figured we'd offer a contract and then people would take it and that would be it. And that's what we saw to begin with. It gave people such a sense of hope that it really encouraged them and motivated them, so they committed to it. And then after a week or two... the problem was that we were looking for people who were living on the streets, who had nowhere to live yet. So after a fortnight or so, it all went wrong! The guy stopped coming in, or arrived in a terrible state, on edge. So there was some freaking out! And it was at that point we realised that traditional integration contracts were just not appropriate. So we had to say to ourselves: right, here we are, our project is to offer jobs to homeless people. Traditional integration contracts aren't suitable. So what do we do? And it took us about a year to really build our vision and say: yes, we're going to have to invent this "PremiËres Heures" programme, which is a little like temping work, but the other way around. So instead of it being dependent on what the company needs, it's based on the person's capabilities. So that's what we developed. Once we were able to build that, we were much more successful at integrating and stabilising those people. And at the same time, after a while we realised we were saying: Great! And internally, we'd hired someone to handle relations with businesses, in order to be able to then place employees in businesses. What we saw was that, for many employees, all the progress they made when it came to work, employment, training and everything else actually had an almost counter-productive effect, because their situation in terms of housing and health hadn't improved. So they were starting to look forward, to say to themselves: look, I'm working hard, I can go and work for a business, but I'm still living in a homeless centre where there are ten of us
sleeping. I'm still carrying around my old demons. And they freaked out again. So we realised that our approach, where we thought that after the business integration project it would be fine, was actually not enough. We realised we needed to think about doing it differently, and so we developed a programme called Convergence, which aims to rethink the way we interact with social services to act in concert, to ensure that when someone needs care, when someone is ready to access housing...we're able to respond better. " To better illustrate the theoretical model I've just presented, I've picked two examples: Babyloan and Dialogue in the Dark. Let's start with Babyloan, a microcredit business. Babyloan has a broad social mission, similar to that of Muhammad Yunus' Grameen Bank. In a nutshell, their social mission is to reduce poverty in the world through an approach based on economic development. What are the services or products they use to fulfil that social mission? They realised that microcredit was a way to combat poverty. To bring supply and demand together, they use a crowdfunding platform. It enables people who want to give money, to go online and choose a project developed by someone living in poverty. Ultimately, it's a way of providing microloans to entrepreneurs who need them, without asking for interest. That's remarkable in the world of microcredit, which was criticised for the high rates of interest charged. So this is a unique product, that Babyloan uses to fulfil its social mission. Let's look now at the impact of Babyloan. If you visit their website, you'll see over 20,000 projects financed in a number of countries. Microloans enable the people who receive them to go from an informal economy, often with unacceptable and dangerous loan terms, to a formal economy with much more favourable conditions That provides more security for families and helps improve access to education and healthcare. Our second example is Dialogue in the Dark. The social mission of this business, is a world in which people with disabilities can communicate on an equal footing with the rest of society. Dialogue in the Dark runs a restaurant in which customers are made aware of the lives of blind people. Visitors are led by blind guides in total darkness. But when you get to your table, you're on your own. This experience lets you understand straight away the challenges faced by blind people and the enormous adaptation techniques they demand. But what is the impact of Dialogue in the Dark? First of all, it provides blind people with jobs suited to their skills in Dialogue in the Dark's restaurants. Every customer who experiences eating in total darkness is made a little bit more aware of this disability. I'm just one of the eight million customers who have eaten there. I can confirm that I saw the world of people with disabilities very differently after my experience in the pitch darkness. That's exactly what Dialogue in the Dark's own surveys have found about the impact on so-called "able-bodied" customers. Now, I propose we have a five-minute brainstorming session on your social mission. Try to put one, two or three phrases down on paper that define your mission. Think back to the examples I have shown you. The aim is really to define a broad mission, without going into too much detail. We'll develop the details further in our next video on generating ideas, to flesh out your social mission. It's entirely possible that you might change missions during this MOOC. However, as soon as you feel that you've found the mission that motivates you, it must stay the same throughout your project. Good luck with the brainstorming to define your social mission.
