Emprendimiento Social Juvenil - The current state in Spain

Last week the Observatori del Tercer Sector (An independent and non-profit research center specialized in the third sector. Its aim is to increase and extend the knowledge on the sector and to work for the improvement of the non-profit organizations management) and the Bertelsmann Foundation organized a seminar about Young Social Entrepreneurs. They invited AIESEC to represent the voice of young people who are interested in social issues and who are entrepreneurial.

It was very interesting to hear the different participants views on what's the current situation of Young Social Entrepreneurs in Spain, and what their ideas are to foster Social Entrepreneurship amongst young people. The other participants were representatives of youth councils (Consejos/Institutos de Juventud), university representatives that are providing support for entrepreneurs in their schools, representatives of different NGOs that integrate young people in the society and also an Ashoka Fellow, Jean Claude Rodriguez who founded the NGO "Desarollo Comunitario". Jean Claude is also an AIESEC Alumni from Barcelona and has participated before in AIESEC Events, hopefully you will be able to meet him once personally because his passion for his work is definitely inspiring. (In the video below from Ashoka he tells more about his organisation)

Some of the ideas that came out of the discussion were the following:
- What's missing is a culture of participation, or of contribution to society amongst young people, and people aren't encouraged to be entrepreneurial either. So both entrepreneurial initiative and social engagement should be encouraged more.
- Entrepreneurial characteristics and awareness about social issues should be more included in the education of young people.
- Existing projects and entrepreneurs should be better known, so as to motivate young people to engage themselves
- There's a general confusion around the definition of Social Entrepreneurship: is it only social engagement? Is it making NGOs more professional? Is it creating more companies that care about society?