Walk the Talk -- Please!

Nancy Lublin, CEO of the youth empowerment nonprofit, Do Something, says we have gone too far as a society lauding social entrepreneurs and other leaders -- and not far enough celebrating the people who follow them.

"All movements are led by the people in the middle," Lublin told a Dec. 12 gathering of social innovators at the TEDx Silicon Valley conference at Stanford University. Lublin, who founded Dress for Success in 1997, has since helped to evolve Do Something, a New York City-based youth empowerment nonprofit, from a debt-ridden, stodgy group into a high-profile magnet for teens. Lublin says 90 percent of teens say they want to make a difference but only 23 percent actively volunteer. Do Something, she says, works to transform talk into action; the nonprofit draws more than 1 million hits each month to its Web site while spending millions in grant money to support young people with good ideas ready to launch or to scale.

Lublin told TEDx conferees that the social enterprise sector "spends most of its time and money on helping the 1 percent" of change-makers. Meanwhile, she says, most of the work that is impacting those in need is actually being done by the less-heralded or less-privileged 90 percent.

"We are now obsessed with creating the new at the expense of creating impact," she said. "We have been told that social enterprise will change the world but no -- impact will change the world. Changing something is what really matters, not simply that we have created something new. We don't need another new cancer organization; we need the 300 new cancer organizations [that already exist] to learn how to work together."

Lublin told attendees that "scale is not necessarily religion. It ought to be impact." She urged social enterprise leaders to "give permission to people to join something" rather than to create something new. "Nothing happens in social enterprise without smart, talented, innovative followers."

What do you think? Is she right? Does the social enterprise movement pay too much attention to entrepreneurial leaders rather than the teams that empower them? Do social enterprise leaders do enough to measure impact?