Lloyd Nimetz on "Activism" vs. "Social Entrepreneurship" - live from the Momentum Conference

We are swimming in the fog of historic change in the social-change arena.  At the core of this transition -- or at least a symptom of it -- is the shift in language.  Obama's ability to recognize and unify a latent progressive movement in America depended on his effective use of language.  There are lots of new words floating around.  For example, I just co-authored a paper with the UNDP on what we called "Open-replication investing".  People like me are inventing terminology right and left partly because we can't find the right terms that fit and partly because we like making things up. 

The most important words that I want to focus on are those that change-agents identify with: those words that define who you are.  If somebody asks you at a cocktail party "what do you do?", what title do you answer with?  Am I an activist or a social entrepreneur?  Identity is one of the principal motivators behind people in general and especially in civil society, philanthropy and volunteerism so this is not just a matter of semantics. Understanding the decline of the title 'activist' and the rise of the 'social entrepreneur' unearths what is happening around us today and gives us a glimpse of what the social-change arena will look like tomorrow.

Read more at http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/the-edge/archive/2009/09/08/the-fog-of-activism