Some thoughts...

Expectation setting: Don't expect a coherent blogpost!

International President's Meeting

Yesterday I came back from AIESEC International President's Meeting (IPM), which took place in Tunisia. It was a very emotional and empowering experience, as I had the opportunity to meet all the current and all the elect national leaders of AIESEC around the world. That amounts to around 200 people, scattered across the planet. Truly a global network of high-potential youth leaders.

Being in any leadership role can be a lonely and troubling experience for anyone. What made IPM very special is that being put together with around 100 people (leaders elected to take over from the summer onwards) makes you feel safe. All of a sudden you are not at all alone anymore. There are loads of people who are amazingly smart, dedicated, passionate and talented, who feel just as scared and confused as you. That is nice. Together with them anything can be shared, anything can be accomplished, and the openness is incredible.

AIESEC as a social enterprise

A thought that started occupying me quite a bit was the idea of AIESEC's business model and what we are. A session at IPM, which pointed out the obvious, but which still was very good, was about the bottom line for an MCP-CEO. Basically any company has 3 concepts which it needs to understand and develop to succeed. 1. It has a product. 2. It has customers. 3. It has HR to deliver.

In AIESEC Product=Customer=HR, as our members are our product through their AIESEC Experiences, they are also the main customer and they are the one's providing it from an HR perspective.

This led me into the thinking that in reality AIESEC is not a student organization at all. I mean, it happens to be that the "product=customer=HR" are students, but that is not really relevant in terms of description of the organization. In fact, we are not so much an organization as we are a business. So what kind of business are we? In my opinion AIESEC is really a Social Enterprise. With this I mean that we are run like a business but that our bottom line has a social purpose. The only difference from a regular business is that the bottom line is not money in the end, but that money is only a temporary means to achieve the social impact. Like any social enterprise, start-up and operational cash for the projects in which we are involved is crucial for our success and survival, however.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_enterprise

So what's the "point" in making a difference between a social enterprise and a student run organization? The difference is that enterprises have a very clear purpose and a clear strategy to get there. Student run organizations usually don't. AIESEC, unfortunately, often doesn't. Basically the only thing that makes us a student organization is that the actual people working AND we want to impact in AIESEC are current students and graduates. This is defined because we see these as the people in the world that we can really impact to achieve our social purpose - developing leaders for positive impact.

What are key points which makes it differ from a student organization?

Economic:

• continuous activity of the production and/or sale of goods and services (rather than predominantly advisory or grant-giving functions)
• a high level of autonomy: social enterprises are created voluntarily by groups of citizens and are managed by them, and not directly or indirectly by public authorities or private companies, even if they may benefit from grants and donations. Their shareholders have the right to participate ('voice') and to leave the organisation ('exit').
• a significant economic risk: the financial viability of social enterprises depends on the efforts of their members, who have the responsibility of ensuring adequate financial resources, unlike most public institutions.
• social enterprises' activities require a minimum number of paid workers, although, like traditional non-profit organisations, social enterprises may combine financial and non-financial resources, voluntary and paid work

Social:

• an explicit aim of community benefit: one of the principal aims of social enterprises is to serve the community or a specific group of people. To the same end, they also promote a sense of social responsibility at local level
• citizen initiative: social enterprises are the result of collective dynamics involving people belonging to a community or to a group that shares a certain need or aim. They must maintain this dimension in one form or another
• decision making not based on capital ownership: this generally means the principle of 'one member, one vote', or at least a voting power not based on capital shares. Although capital owners in social enterprises play an important role, decision-making rights are shared with other shareholders
• participatory character, involving those affected by the activity: the users of social enterprises' services are represented and participate in their structures. In many cases one of the objectives is to strengthen democracy at local level through economic activit
• limited distribution of profit: social enterprises include organisations that totally prohibit profit distribution as well as organisations such as co-operatives, which may distribute their profit only to a limited degree, thus avoiding profit maximising behaviour

This should radically change how we run our organization. F. ex. the way we look at membership needs to be redefined. Now, we talk in theory about high quality attraction and selection, but in reality this can vary significantly. "Membership" is easy, to be an in-kind compensated employee is entirely different. "Leadership" to run a student organization is one thing, entrepreneurship to run a social enterprise is something else. "Impact" starts having a clearer meaning as well. Social Enterprises don't settle for "still a little bit of crap in my local community".