Who’s a Social Entrepreneur: A Conversation with Ida Cheinman

Newt Fowler’s interview with Ida Cheinman for his Citybislist Baltimore column.

There’s a lot of noise these days, in Baltimore and beyond, around the “social entrepreneur” movement. For some it’s an alchemic promise, marrying money and mission to solve intractable societal issues that others failed to solve. The more cynical might see it as a movement that allows the palliative warmth of talking a good game about changing the world while earning a comfortable hybrid and a LEED-designed home. Social enterprise is a confusing movement that’s hard to understand.

So I sat down with Ida Cheinman, who has been in Baltimore’s conversation on social enterprise for a while. We worked past the labels to gain a better understanding of what makes an organization a social enterprise and its leadership a social entrepreneur.

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