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DURHAM -- How do you create change in the world?
Not everyone can be a social entrepreneur on a grand scale, acknowledged Bill Drayton, a social entrepreneur himself and the founder of Ashoka, a global association of the world's leading social entrepreneurs.
But everyone can make a difference, Drayton said Saturday at a discussion of the ethics of global development at Duke University.
"There are some very simple things you can do," Drayton told an overflow audience at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. "You don't have to change the whole system, but you can [make a difference] by being a friend or parent to a 15-year-old.
"When she says something is a mess, you can say, 'Why don't you do something about it? Why don't you get your friends together and fix it?'"
The discussion, with Drayton, Duke President Richard Brodhead and Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard, was the main event of a weekend series of panels that was the centerpiece of Duke's year-long "A World Together" initiative.
The events, which highlighted Duke's role in the developing world, were specifically designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Peace Corps and brought back to campus many former Peace Corps members who had been Duke students.
The panel discussions also coincided with Ashoka's annual Ashoka U Exchange conference on the Duke campus.
The interweaving of the two conferences was not lost on the panel discussion members. The role of the university, and how it can promote social entrepreneurship, was a major theme of the discussion.
Sheppard noted that "every school at the university is getting our students more and more involved in the world," and that, in particular, business school students are becoming increasingly concerned with solving social problems.
"For some reason we had developed the notion that the only purpose [of business school] was to create wealth," he said. But students now realize, that "improving society helps everyone" create wealth.
Brodhead pointed out, however, that there is still more work to be done.
"The day will come when we don't have social entrepreneurship classes in business schools," Brodhead said. "The day will come when social entrepreneurship will be business and business will be social entrepreneurship."
