We have been hearing a lot about how the world of non-profits are coming to an end. The days of setting up an easy way to make money for self through other people’s tragedy and sad stories is not being bought by corporate and public alike. We have become immune to pictures of famous people holding hungry kids asking for donations. Most of these funds never get to serve any purpose to alleviate the pain of why they were raised. The money seems to line the pockets of those who make a living out of selling this pain through clever spin marketing.

So too the idea of winning any talent reality show because you have a story to tell along with your ability to sing is fast becoming old news and even though the majority still seems caught up in a sad story of a song dedicated to a sick grandmother, the funders and becoming weary and the pockets shallow.

So where to from now? The world is still full of needs and people are hungry, sick and dying all around us. How do we find the resources to fund operations and businesses to assist the human suffering and third world development? Social Entrepreneurship is the answer: non-profits need to go back to the drawing board and find a way to self fund and stop leaching off others to keep themselves employed. We need to learn to develop a way to run sustainable entities through collaboration, exchange systems and developing people empowerment programmes that actually lifts people up out of their situation to a point that they can graduate out of where they find themselves.

You cannot treat entrepreneurship with charity. You need to treat entrepreneurship with entrepreneurship. Giving hand outs breads entitlement and entitlement breeds dependency and poverty. There are a lot of very successful programmes running various programmes that empower, educate and uplift people and make money. Lynn Worsley from All Women Recycling is a find example.

The world needs a wake up and shake up and we need to stop putting money into empty hands and start putting our heads together to work out how to reshape and reestablish the road from poverty to sustainability.

More on this subject from the Buffet foundation here