Top 5 Websites for Women Social Entrepreneurs

Taken from Forbes.com’s recent article Top 100 Websites for Women, and the Ashoka website’s review of that piece, I give you the top 5 websites out there for women (and men!) social entrepreneurs!

Use this page as a treasure trove of links that you can keep coming back to for inspiration – whether it’s advice on how to get started, how to use social media, or how to market yourself:

1. Women Entrepreneur: Female arm of entrepreneur.com
Helpful article for social entrepreneurs:  Facebook Game Changer: Don’t Miss Out, Success Stories

2. Ladies Who Launch: Resource for female entrepreneurs on how to start and run a new business
Helpful article for social entrepreneurs:  Free startup assistance, Networking communities for entrepreneurs

3. Start Up Princess: Resources and coaching for female entrepreneurs by female entrepreneurs
Helpful article for social entrepreneurs:  Search Engine Marketing Basics: Understanding How to Use Content to Your Advantage

4. She Takes on the World: Marketing and social media blog, with a section for entrepreneurs
Helpful article for social entrepreneurs:  Thirty Women Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter (see “Popular Posts”)

5. Escape from Cubicle Nation:  Career and marketing advice blog, particularly useful for first-time entrepreneurs.
Helpful articles for social entrepreneurs:  How to use social media to create an audience that wants to hear you speak, Sales tip: work a little old school outreach into your new school marketing

A number of other websites listed could serve as useful resources for social entrepreneurs focused on women’s empowerment, including Womens E-News (a source for news about women), Hello Ladies (a forum for news and issues affecting women), and information about feminist issues (Feministe, Ms. Magazine).

Finally, a number of websites provide useful business advice for social entrepreneurs, including but not limited to: Pink Magazine (featuring a section on small businesses), Tech Mamas (useful advice on social media), and Women on Business(note the Businesswomen Bloggers Directory  including ecopreneurist.com focused on social entrepreneurship).

The Top 10 Books on the Economics of Poverty | Stanford Social Innovation Review

If you need some light reading….

The Top 10 Books on the Economics of Poverty | Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Seriously though, this is a great list. The White Man’s Burden by Bill Easterly is a great summary of the remnants of patriarchal post-colonial mindset of much aid-giving, contrasted with The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs on the other side of the argument, which is a call to action for us to invest aid now in key infrastructure to lay the foundation for future economic growth in developing nations.

Watch out for Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo – whilst I am delighted to have an African scholar writing on the topic of aid, Moyo is Western-educated and sides clearly with the Bill Easterly school of thought, but in my opinion her work has some serious intellectual flaws.

Paul Collier is a compelling writer, and his Bottom Billion is an excellent book illustrating Collier’s own view of the intertwined role of conflict and inequality in the aid question.

Have you read any of these? Where do you recommend a beginner to this topic should start?

Social Impact Jobs: January | Echoing Green

From Yes Man at Flikr Creative Commons

Social Impact Jobs: January | Echoing Green.

Check this link for some fantastic new jobs available in the social impact space at the moment. I also love John Coleman’s assertion that its never too late to change course in your career and do something entrepreneurial….even if you only have the seed of an idea.

Why I Hire People Who Fail – Jeff Stibel – Harvard Business Review

Why I Hire People Who Fail – Jeff Stibel – Harvard Business Review.

Jeff Stibel hires people who “cherish failures”. Is he crazy?

The last week I have been helping a non-profit hire their first CEO, and the question that has revealed the most about the candidates has been the question ‘Tell me about a time that you have failed’.

Its a pretty stock-standard interview question, but for some reason all of the candidates struggled with it. They follow every gulping admission of a minor failure with endless excuses and justifications.

Why do we struggle to admit failure? Because all through our lives we are taught that failure is something to be avoided at all costs, and certainly not admitted to.

It’s only when you are failing yourself that others around you feel permission to share their failures.

Whilst struggling to find a fulfilling job in New York City earlier this year, I was shocked to discover how many of the people I looked up to had failed spectacularly at some point in their lives – in business, in their personal lives, and often both.

The truth is that sometimes when you are unwaveringly committed to seeing something through, and you put everything you have into it, and you don’t give up….you will fail.

The truth is the more spectacularly you have failed, the more likely you are to create breakthroughs.

Now there is a difference between failure due to a desire to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and failure due to carelessness.

But I would rather hire a person who has given everything and failed, than one who has stayed safely within the confines of their carefully defined career path.

According to Jeff Stibel hiring for failure is the key to a thriving, transformational organizational culture where breakthroughs happen.

Give people permission to dream, and to fail. Create a failure wall  in your workspace and start releasing creative potential!

Living life to the fullest step 1: Making commitments

For the first time this weekend I really began to understand the powerful nature of what my friend and mentor Peter calls ‘commitments’. His assertion is that living within commitments is the only way to live. It is a powerful and necessary way of unleashing our creativity and making the impact we wish to see in the world.

Outside of a commitment we will always find barriers that stop us from doing what we want to do. Even something that is simple like taking out the trash is thwarted by barriers and obstacles – ‘Its too late’, ‘I’m too tired’, ‘The ginormous rats in the trash cans scare me!’, ‘The bag always breaks’, etc. However, living inside a commitment to ‘live in a clean household’ unleashes our inner creativity. If there is no way out of our commitment (because we have said it out loud to our roommate, or even just articulated it to ourselves) we will find a way – e.g. switch this chore with our roommate for cleaning the bathroom, buy extra strong garbage bags, etc.

Although taking out the trash is a simplistic example, making commitments can apply to every part of our life, and can help with articulating our true passions and purpose. Do this exercise which Peter gave me and was hugely valuable:

Imagine for a moment that there was nothing standing in your way to achieving what you want to do in your life. Forget all about the failures of your past (for as many great people have shown, this is no predictor of future success) and just dream about what you could do. Every time an obstacle pops into your head either ignore it, or if it keeps bothering you make a note of it to come back to later. Now write down these dreams (or perhaps just one dream) in the format of a commitment (see my examples in bold below).

What moves in you as you look at this commitment written down? Perhaps you realise you are not that committed to it. Or perhaps your heart sings with joy as you contemplate how wonderful it would be to live out that commitment every day. What creative ideas do you come up with for fulfilling your commitment that you never thought of before? Explore your commitments now and feel what the world looks like as you step into it – if it helps, pose the commitment as a question.

If nothing comes, don’t despair! We spend much of our adult lives censoring our thoughts and dreams because we tell ourselves they are “impossible” or “stupid”. It is a new practice to free ourselves from the shackles of fear in alignment with our creativity. Most importantly, enjoy the experience. Do this exercise once a week for a month. Be persistent and patient as you rediscover (or remember) what you are truly committed to in your life.

After two months of soul searching, here are just a couple of commitments I articulated this weekend about what I want to see happen in 2012 (try this in your personal life too -its really powerful):

Business: Am I committed to running my own successful business? (My commitment to this is at an amber right now. I am pretty certain, but I am not yet willing to stake my life on it. At the moment I am acting in alignment with the commitment to start a new business and I’m enjoying it!)

NOTE: Peter said that to test your commitment you need to watch yourself for the next few days/weeks, and see if your actions are in accordance with that commitment. If they are, then you may begin to realise that you do want to be fully committed. If not, then you should ask yourself whether you really are (or want to be) committed to this.

Purpose: Am I committed to empowering women and girls in Africa through education to see an end to extreme poverty? (The answer is ‘yes!’. I have a great desire to be committed to that. This was the greatest revelation of this weekend. I realised I had let the fear of failure stop me, and I had given up looking for a job in this sector because I told myself it was too hard as I kept getting rejections. But when I look back at my actions over the past two years, I realised that empowering women and girls through education was something that I was continually drawn to and loved, and that to some extent I was already acting in accordance with this commitment:

• In 2011 I ran a marathon to raise money for Camfed, even though I was not a runner and had never run more than a mile before
• I worked for Camfed for 6 months for low pay and it was the happiest I have ever been. In order to get that internship, I became incredibly creative and found ways to meet staff working there and get internal recommendations to get them to give me the unpaid internship!
• I wanted to work with my friend Megalyn with her non-profit for women and girls, before I was offered a different job.
• I talk about the power of women and girls education in Africa all the time.
• More broadly, it feeds into my passion for female empowerment, worthiness, self-esteem, body image…and leads into a commitment I also have to do whatever I can to help the women in my society live life to the fullest.

The next question of course is, how am I going to act in accordance with this commitment now?! Especially this last commitment, which I had all but thrown away. If getting a top non-profit to give me a job is not an option because of the current state of the economy, how can I live out this commitment now?

Feel free to share your ideas and thoughts, and what your own results of this exercise were. (One of my dreams and commitments was to write a weekly blog and this is my first post – so I hope you enjoy and I very much welcome feedback!)