Doing Well by Doing Good

For Wesleyan University student Shingo Umehara, the entry point into global social entrepreneurship wasn’t a business plan or a world-changing invention, but dance. 

A course offered by a visiting artist from his native Japan inspired Umehara to think about how dance could encourage others to speak out about issues like the nuclear accident in Fukushima. “You have to talk to discuss their pain,” he says of its victims. “We will discuss the people who cannot speak for themselves.” 

Working with two alumni, Umehara created a nonprofit initiative, Move and Connect, which offered weekend workshops at the University of Tokyo to train Japanese educators to use dance, movement, and conversation to break the silence in a culture that traditionally shuns open discussion of challenging issues.

No high-tech tool, no first-mover solution—instead Umehara “understood the problem and found a way to work in the service of that model,” says Makaela Kingsley, director of the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Wesleyan.

If this doesn’t sound like the innovative change-the-world inventions that drew attention to earlier social entrepreneurship efforts, that’s entirely by design. As social entrepreneurship has become a well-defined movement in higher education, there’s been a marked shift away from lionizing “heropreneurs”—lone students whose innovative business ideas scale and singlehandedly change the world. Brilliant ideas and businesses still are coming into the marketplace: everything from microbusinesses operating pay toilets in slums whose waste is resold as fertilizer to smartphone-powered microemployment systems for refugees. But today’s social entrepreneurs are increasingly focused on system change