Empowering the target of benefits

One of the goals of your enterprise may be

to empower your target of benefits, as in

the example of Principia (see the sidebar,

“Principia’s mutual healthcare,” at the end

of this chapter). Professor Marie Lisa M.

Dacanay is Program Director of Social and

Development Entrepreneurship at the Asian

Institute of Management (AIM) Asian Center

for Entrepreneurship. One of the goals of AIM

is to encourage practitioner-oriented research

that produces practical and easily applicable

results.

Dacanay’s work at AIM concentrates on

empowering the poor and other marginalized

people to benefit from their own social enter-

prises. She works with them to help them start

and successfully run these organizations.

Dacanay points out that the communities where

the enterprises operate often experience posi-

tive social change, stemming from the fact of

created jobs and an increased sense of well-

being among employers and employees.

As always, at their best, social enterprises

become a catalyst for broader changes in

the community. For more information about

the goals and accomplishments of AIM, go to

www.aim.edu.ph.

What does empowering the target of benefits

have to do with teams in social enterprises?

Well, the goal of teams is often just that — to

produce results that empower those targets.

The Principia example shows how this can be

done in the field of healthcare. But empowering

a target doesn’t always need to be reached by

way of a team in a social enterprise. Dacanay’s

work suggests that her enterprises foster

empowerment of their targets through efforts

of the ent