As the COVID-19 pandemic explodes across the globe, every entrepreneur is affected, including social entrepreneurs. This group, comprised of individuals, organizations and companies that pursue new ways to solve community-based problems, includes many who’ve never before had to pivot in the face of unforeseen forces. Impact investors are heavily invested – financially and with heart – in social entrepreneurs and can play key roles as advisors to investees, says Amit Bouri, CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN).
In an interview this week with Pioneers Post, “the social enterprise magazine,” Bouri noted that because many investors have been through “turmoil” and “financial challenges” in the past, they now can serve as resources to entrepreneurs enduring their first shakeup. “But this is a crisis for which there’s no playbook – because of this combination of a pandemic-induced crisis that has both health and financial impacts,” he said.
U.S. unemployment is likely to reach double digits next month as the unprecedented public health shutdown has ground businesses, companies, nonprofit organizations and schools to a halt. Furloughs, layoffs and business closings are already taking place. And 44 percent of American workers were low-wage workers, before the pandemic began.
Social entrepreneurs are working around the world, including in the U.S. (see some nice examples here in Cause Artist’s 2019 list of “Social Entrepreneurs to Watch”). Wherever you live, work and invest, let’s all lend our favorite social entrepreneurs a hand with strategy and expertise as well as funds.