Latest News

12 Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Started Running

Tony Loyd What running advice would you give your younger self? I’ll go first. One day it hits you. “I could be a runner.” Your friends are posting their runs on social media. You are flipping through TV channels when you land on a road race. You see someone effortlessly bouncing down a running path and think, “I could do that.” But how do you start? It happened to me in 2001. A friend of mine was going on daily runs. One day, I asked her if I could tag along. Weeks later, I signed up for my first 5K. Bam! I was smitten. That was 22 years ago. What…

Read More

An Umbrella Made from Ocean-Bound Plastic, with Deirdre Horan, Dri

Deirdre Horan, Founder and CEO of Dri Dri produces durable, fashionable, and environmentally sustainable umbrellas from ocean-bound plastic. As a fifteen year-old, Deirdre Horan left her comfortable home in Acton, Massachusetts to join a youth group traveling to Gulfport, Mississippi. This was two years after Hurricane Katrina, and the community continued to struggle. “What really struck me was the level of devastation that was still there two years later,” Deirdre explains. “It takes much longer than the initial relief to pick lives back up. People will always need assistance if they’ve been impacted. I saw at a young age that something can always be done for somebody.” Deirdre continued to…

Read More

Grants, Challenges, and Incubators (Oh My!) with Shubham Issar of SoaPen

Shubham Issar of SoaPen Shubham Issar and Amanat Anand go from the UNICEF Wearables for Good Challenge to Shark Tank and beyond. Shubham Issar and Amanat Anand grew up in New Delhi but met at Parsons School of Design in New York. They loved working together on hands-on design projects that made a difference. In 2015, they entered the UNICEF Wearables for Good Challenge. While investigating the challenge, they ran into a statistic that shocked them. Hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five die annually from infectious diseases that handwashing can prevent. Shubham and Amanat were determined to do something about that. They returned to India to…

Read More

Can Meta be a Force for Good? An Interview with Emily Dalton Smith

Emily Dalton Smith, Vice President of Product Management at Meta Is it possible for the company formerly known as Facebook to be a force for good? There are some bright spots. If you want to hear bad news about Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, you don’t have to look far. And, there’s plenty of bad news to find. If you’re interested in reading more about that, just Google the phrase Facebook Papers. But, for me, there’s a more interesting question. Can Meta be a force for good? Is it possible? As you know, here at Social Entrepreneur, our motto is “We tell positive stories from underrepresented voices, focused…

Read More

The Many Faces of Service, with Kate Glantz, Luma Legacy

Kate Glantz, Luma Legacy Being of service does not have to look a certain way. Find the way that works for you. Kate Glantz has always been driven to serve. “I wonder if [my sense of service] comes from my culture,” Kate ponders. “I’m Jewish, and there is a deep tradition of service, Tzedakah. I’m not religious, but it was always there. I don’t know if that’s what’s influenced my drive towards service. “I have always been on this mission, and it’s allowed me to say yes to jobs and opportunities that are so seemingly random on paper. But when you’re pretty clear-headed about what you’re trying to do in…

Read More

Katherine Venturo-Conerly and Tom Osborn, Shamiri Institute

Katherine Venturo-Conerly and Tom Osborn, Shamiri Institute Half of the young people in Kenya have elevated depression and anxiety. 45% of the disease burden comes from anxiety and depression. The Shamiri Institute has an answer. Kenya has been described as a young hustle culture. But that hustle takes a toll. According to Tom Osborn of the Shamiri Institute, “Mental health and wellbeing are really important. This is especially true in low income settings like Kenya where I was born and raised. In Kenya, the median age is about 19. There’s evidence that shows this young population is stressed because they have to succeed so early in life.” In Kenya, there…

Read More

Kick-Off Season Four

I’ve been thinking about you. You want to live a life of significance You feel compelled to serve a cause greater than yourself. You see a need in the world that you can’t unsee. There’s a cause that burns in your heart. To make a difference, you have to overcome the status quo. The status quo whispers in your ear, “That’s just the way things are.” The status quo is that you get up every day and act as if nothing is wrong in the world. It’s easy to be lulled into complacency by the status quo. There’s a high price for doing nothing. Unless you take action, the world…

Read More

A Traveler’s Guide To World Peace, with Aziz Abu Sarah, MEJDI Tours

Aziz Abu Sarah, MEJDI Tours MEJDI Tours sees tourism as an opportunity to transform lives through dual narratives and by strengthening local communities. Aziz Abu Sarah is a peace-builder, social entrepreneur, cultural educator, and author of Crossing Boundaries: A Traveler’s Guide To World Peace. But Aziz wasn’t always a peacemaker. “Growing up in Jerusalem as a Palestinian, I was no stranger to injustice,” Aziz explains. “The event that shaped me the most, however, happened when I was nine. Just after dawn, Israeli soldiers stormed into our home. I remember the shouts, the terror, the interrogations. And then they took my 18-year-old brother, Tayseer, away. He was arrested for allegedly throwing…

Read More