Tuesday came, went by and the same happened with “Meet the Changemakers”. Laura Sgarcitu, Mircea Mocanu, Leslie Hawke, Cristian Ispas and Raed Arafat presented their vision about social entrepreneurship in their speeches. The participants asked a lot of interesting questions and the answers given provided us with a greater insight into the topics presented. Everybody left knowing a lot more about social entrepreneurship while the examples given and the motivational discourses made their faces beam with smile.
Laura Sgarcitu
The International Youth Conference, “Meet the Changemakers” began, as planned, with Laura Sgarcitu. She had a lovely speech in which she touched upon the post-industrial society – our society – in which consumption is not only material: the people are also consuming information or entertainment. Another point she made was that pollution and the disappearance of the social cohesion have become great issues nowadays. Additionally, the weather – a boring topic in the past, which used to be a conversational artifice, is nowadays in the spotlight because of the way in which it manifests.
We are responsible for our own fate
Laura underlined that our fate is completely our responsibility. While in the past a person living in the slums was called “unfortunate”, now the name is “loser”, which is another illustration of the change in people’s perceptions and mentalities. She also touched upon the fact that the first volunteering act has been made after the World War I, in 1920, when a group of soldiers of more nationalities rebuilt a destroyed village.
Coca Cola about Happiness
In the last part of Laura’s presentation, she referred to a marketing study the Coca Cola Company made, which showed that the most important contributors to happiness are family (77%) and friends (15%) for adult population. The situation changes for young people, who seem to consider family and friends equally important. Moreover, Romania was found to be on the 5th place on the ranking of the most happy countries in the world. Another interesting fact presented was that eating is one of the happiest moments for 38% of Romanians, percentage above the world average.
Mircea Mocanu
Private, Public and Social Sector. Business Incubation
After a short break, Mircea Mocanu started his speech. He talked to us about the social and the entrepreneurial sector, about business incubation and also gave us some examples of social enterprises in Romania. The business incubator is the place for start-ups to grow and to find help with accounting, space, or other problems a small business might encounter. Mircea Mocanu said “You need a baby-sitter in the first months of your life as an entrepreneur”. The social businesses he mentioned were a cardboard enterprise, who is currently boxing also for BMW, and a scuba-diving authorised course in Sf. Gheorge. The main point he made was that the social entrepreneur is concerned primarily with the development of the community, trying to invest as much as possible into the business.
Leslie Hawke
Leslie Hawke defined the social entrepreneur as someone who finds a new solution to an old problem. She mentioned George McDonald, a person working in the private sector who got upset about the homeless people in NY. They seemed to be everywhere and George was not the person to stand by and do nothing. He started bringing them sandwiches every night and he continued doing that for two whole years. Although the people were happy to receive the food, they were saying that what they really wanted was to get a job. “A job builds confidence and dignity” said Leslie, also quoting from Jefferson, who said that “I believe in luck and the harder I work, the more I have of it”. Then, George started addressing the problem of the homeless people and, against all odds, he managed to help them integrate into the society. No one thought that the homeless, many of them having been abused, having emotional traumas or drug addictions, could be trusted with a minimum wage job. Nonetheless, they were wrong. George managed to turn around the lives of many homeless people by helping them find a job.
Ovidiu Rom – Keeping Children in School
Leslie started then talking about her own mission as a social entrepreneur. She came to Bacau, Romaina and she was shocked to see children begging in the street. In US, this could have never happened, as there are very strong regulations concerning child protection. One child she had been seeing from the window for three days was begging bare foot in one intersection in Bacau. She took him to a shelter for homeless children, but three days after, the child’s mum appeared and told her that the kid’s begging was the only source of income for their family. Leslie then thought about solving the problem of employment for poor people, since she believed that the mothers would prefer to work themselves and not force their children to beg in the streets. This is how it all started. Now, the association Ovidiu Rom is making an awareness campaign, trying to address the problem of the Roma children begging and also of the decreasing level of literacy in Romania. Besides that, the association came with all sorts of innovative ideas in order to keep the children in school, like giving the mothers food coupons for 100% school attendance of their children.
Cristian Ispas
Cristian Ispas from Motivation presented the path their social enterprise had to conquer from the beginning to where they are now. At first they only had a 5 x 5 meters workshop to produce wheelchairs. Besides having a Peer Group Training Program, where people with disabilities are teaching other people, recently injured, how to deal with practical situations in life or how to use the wheelchair, there are lots of complementary services Motivation provides to their clients. In 2009, Motivation SRL managed to have a 30 000 Euro net profit. They estimate that there are 5000 new wheelchair users every year, Motivation supplying 1000 wheelchair per year. Another astonishing fact Cristian Ispas presented was that officially there are 600 000 people with disabilities in Romania, but the world estimation is that 10 % of the population has disabilities in one way or another.
RAED ARAFAT
The Road to Success
Raed Arafat started his speech by mentioning that in 1990 there were lots of problems in the medical system which made it totally inefficient. Dr Raed cast a spell on the whole conference room and even if I was supposed to jot down some aspects of his speech, he simply hypnotised us with his words. Consequently, the paragraphs below are going to present some of his greatest achievements, in a random order.
First of all, Dr Arafat had to face a lot of resistance while trying to develop the emergency service in Romania. This is why he was saying “believe in what you want, because this is the only way you can defend yourself”. There were many obstacles and hurdles that Raed Arafat encountered while trying to implement his idea. He moved from Cluj to Targu Mures, had lots of fights with medical chiefs but he never stopped the “changemaking”. The emergency service started developing after they became a part of the fire department.
Some of the memorable words Raed Arafat voiced during his presentation were “ the best defense is to attack” or “It is easier to ask forgiveness than ask for permission”. Raed Arafat and his team also started the first resuscitation room in the space where the surgeons were changing their clothes. Their first statistical achievement was the lowering of the mortality rate by 50% in their first year of activity. Some Scottish doctors helped Raed and brought a whole modular building from the UK to Targu Mures, which they managed to build in only one month. Their next step was to buy a fully functional ambulance. They managed to raise 100 000 Dollars from August to December in 1998. When the financial ministry asked them to pay the VAT for the ambulance, saying that otherwise the ministry is going to confiscate it, 60 000 people signed Dr Raed Arafat’s petition for not paying the VAT since the ambulance was bought from money donated by Romanian people. Raed Arafat told us that change can not be brought about without disturbing someone, but with determination and faith in your idea, everything can be surpassed. Just like he illustrated.
These five students from Romania, Russia and Germany form an enthusiastic team with Changemakers spirit! They came to our country especially to meet the social entrepreneurs from here, the beneficiaries of this kind of businesses and to speak with students from Cluj Napoca and Bucharest about how each of us can make a change in our communities.
