Entries For: January 2008
2008-01-29
Struggling with Comfort
As people who work for the well-being of the world, we as social entrepreneurs generally want to make people feel comfortable. We often equate comfort with happiness, and happiness is at the root of what we are working for.
I, like most people, don’t enjoy making people feel uncomfortable. Talking about difficult issues, soliciting donations, and asking for assistance are all things that give me pause. “Might I be putting this person in an uncomfortable position?” I ask myself. “Might they not like me as much?”
While these fears continue to plague me, I’ve become decidedly less caught up on comfort over the past years. I’ve come to recognize that the whole motivation behind my work is to alleviate the pains that people experience...pains that are beyond what the average American ever sees. Do you think that my friend Paul was comfortable as he ran thousands of miles through the bush from Sudan, separated from his family, tortured in Congo on the way? Do you think that my friend Thom was comfortable when he lost his 5 year-old son to the highly-curable disease of malaria? And do you think that any of DR Congo’s 62 million people are comfortable, having lost 5.4 million of their compatriots in the past decade to the war, with another 3.4 million becoming refugees?
The truth is, this world we live in is not comfortable for most, and is extremely uncomfortable for at least a billion people. As social entpreneurs, our job is to change that. And how will we do that? Only if we can reverse the maddening inequality and systematic imbalance of our world. And newsflash! this will only happen if we, as people committed to change, put our blood, sweat, and tears into it…and ask others to as well.
Given the choice, would you rather see one middle-class American feel slightly uncomfortable when asked to make a moderate-sized contribution (which they have the free will to turn down), or would you rather see a mother go without the funds to feed her family or the chance to send her children to school (which all the will in the world cannot change)? The answer is obvious, right? Then why is it that so many of us in the social world are so taken aback at the idea of fundraising, at the idea of standing up for what they believe in?!? How did fundraising become such a dirty word?
We may call ourselves ‘social entrepreneurs’, but this is not a battle we can fight alone. If we have even a slight chance of winning, the game will turn on how many people we can convince to fight with us. Everyone can give in different ways – for some it is time, for others money, for other connections, and for still others, their time to give will come in the future. But we are shooting ourselves in the feet if we shy away from asking for the sake of not making anyone the slightest bit uncomfortable. Because ironically, if we dont take that risk, we’ll never succeed at making the world a more comfortable place.
-Kjerstin Erickson
Founder and Executive Director, FORGE
