Falling in love: the reductive seduction of social entrepreneurship

Or is it the seductive reduction of social entrepreneurship? I’ve seen Courtney Martin’s essay circulating for the past few days; I read it amongst a slew of development articles popping up in my Twitter timeline. The point of the essay appears to be: don’t go to work on development/social change projects in other countries simply because it sounds like their problems are more interesting and easier to solve than the ones in your own backyard. She provides this (and several other nuggets of) pithy advice for aspiring social entrepreneurs and aid types:

• … don’t go because you’ve fallen in love with solvability. Go because you’ve fallen in love with complexity.
• Don’t go because you want to do something virtuous. Go because you want to do something difficult.
• Don’t go because you want to talk. Go because you want to listen.

Perhaps by design, the essay manages to reduce social entrepreneurship to its core virtues and values: a story featuring “you” as an agent of change, who, above all, travels (“go”), falls in love (“is passionate”), acts (“does something”), talks (“engages in conversations”) and solves (“complex”) problems.

It seems that the underlying premise is that if you expect the work to be difficult and complex and you at least act like you don’t have the answers, then … the work you set out to do will be successful? In some ways, it’s circular logic. Why go if you don’t have a “project” or business in mind? What are you listening to (and to whom), if not just for a place to slot in your idea? Why assume that there’s something for YOU to do and to FALL IN LOVE with?

There’s a lot more to say about the essay, including the Tostan case study (which raises questions of temporality vis-a-vis development-type projects and whiteness), the notion of the “unexotic” and her insistence that “reduction” isn’t malicious, but there is other writing to be done.