By Brittney Gathen
A program that started in a Teach for America instructor’s classroom as a way to challenge his students to impact their community, has morphed into a program that includes over 2,000 students from 25 different schools in Memphis.
Hardy Farrow, the founder of LITE (Let’s Innovate through Education) Memphis, established his entrepreneurial-based nonprofit after witnessing the challenging lives his students led.
“I realized that the problems my students faced went beyond the confines of my classroom,” Farrow, a former Power City Academy High teacher, said. “There wasn’t one defining moment. It was more of a gradual process where I observed a lot of the different obstacles that my students faced.”
So, in 2013, he launched LITE as a way to challenge students to dream of innovative ways to change their community through entrepreneurial ideas. LITE aims to help African-American and Latino students close the racial wealth gap by becoming entrepreneurs and securing high-wage jobs. The program tackles the three fundamental challenges to starting a business: experience, networks and skills. LITE uses a multi-year model, where it will work with students from the time they’re 17 up until they turn 25.
Farrow is an example of a social entrepreneur, which Investopedia defines as “a person who pursues an innovative idea with the potential to solve a community problem.” Social entrepreneurs are more concerned with making a social impact and social improvements than making a profit.
Some who work in the Memphis entrepreneurial field believe that the Bluff City is ripe with opportunities for aspiring social entrepreneurs.
graphic elements: Brittney Gathen; photo:
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Memphis as a social entrepreneurial environment
Farrow said that Memphis is an “amazing place” to be a social entrepreneur.
“There is a high demand for social services, people are willing to take risks on new startups and there isn’t a high barrier to entry in our market,” Farrow said. “Memphis is also a small enough town that new people can network fairly easily.”
However, Farrow said that social entrepreneurship in Memphis is also challenging.
“The cons are discouragement of scaling beyond Memphis, the high rate of poverty that affects program participants, the lack of government involvement and the lack of national narratives that are connected to the city,” he said.
Mike Hoffmeyer, director of the Crews Center for Entrepreneurship, said that Memphis is a great but challenging environment for social entrepreneurship.
“There is great need here; we have massive social issues that have remained unsolved for decades,” Hoffmeyer said. “I’m not suggesting that our existing nonprofits are ineffective, to be clear. The problems are massive in scale and in many cases require generational changes, which are tough to address when funding requires organizations to demonstrate impact in a much shorter time. However, greater self-sustainability results in less reliance on external funders, which gives more latitude to address longer-term strategies for moving the needle on some of these big social issues.”
Hoffmeyer said that some of the key social entrepreneurial opportunities/causes that social entrepreneurs should consider are: hunger, poverty and criminal justice reform.
“They are all significant problems here that are very difficult to solve,” Hoffmeyer said.
Dr. Sarah Petschonek, founder of Volunteer Odyssey, said that Memphis is a “growing hotbed” of all kinds of entrepreneurship.
Petschonek established her organization after recognizing that there was a problem with volunteerism in Memphis.
“Despite being known as one of the most giving cities in the country, Memphis has one of the lowest volunteer rates,” Petschonek said. “When you couple this with the high number of nonprofits, it becomes obvious that we have a tremendous gap and not enough volunteers.”
According to 2015 data from the Corporation for National & Community Service, Memphis ranks 27 (on a list of 51) for volunteerism, with a volunteer rate of 25.8 percent.
Volunteer Odyssey, which was established in 2013, provides pathways to volunteering through its Volunteer Compass search tool-which has filters for date, cause, skill or area of town-as well as Volio, the country’s first virtual volunteer fair. Volunteer Odyssey has partnered with approximately 60 Memphis nonprofits, including MIFA and Clean Memphis.
Petschonek said that more social entrepreneurs are needed. “Memphis is missing a key component - and that's more social entrepreneurs,” she said. “As the community grows, it strengthens into a network to help others build for the future.”
Advice
Farrow advises social entrepreneurs to thoroughly examine their motives for starting their endeavors and to be aware of what’s already offered.
“Be sure that your idea doesn’t already exist in Memphis and that there is community support for your idea—financially and (in terms of) partnerships,” Farrow said. “Don’t start something to start something. Sometimes the best solution is to work with an existing organization and help them pivot their service.”
Petschonek encourages social entrepreneurs to “start by learning: do your research, meet with experts. Travel. Read. Observe. Question. Draw in as much information as you can so you fully understand the problem (you want to address).”
Impact Farrow knows firsthand how impactful social entrepreneurship can be.
According to litememphis.com, 90 percent of students involved in LITE show extreme growth in career skills, 90 percent have launched entrepreneurial projects since 2014 and 85 percent are on track to graduate college.
An increase in social entrepreneurship could significantly change the perception of Memphis, according to Farrow.
“An increase in social entrepreneurship in Memphis can change what people think is possible for this city,” Farrow said. “Social entrepreneurs have the ability to create new narratives and implement new solutions to problems that have existed for decades.”
Petschonek said that increased social entrepreneurship can transform Memphis.
“We have families going hungry, veterans sleeping on the streets and kids who need help,” Petschonek said. “A social entrepreneur looks at these problems with a unique lens and seeks creative solutions that may not have been tried in the past. When you take a new approach and develop a robust revenue stream, it allows you the freedom of resources and opportunities to tackle some of our largest and most urgent issues. ”