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Entrepreneurship
Course: Entrepreneurship > Unit 1
Lesson 17: Beth Schmidt - Founder of Wishbone.orgThere better be an authentic need
Created by Kauffman Foundation.
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- Confidence, grit, and persistence... Now how to make people humble, empowered, and have critical thinking... Not important?(4 votes)
- It's a choice, you can guide someone towards the qualities, but they must be the driver and actually acquire them. Also, they're not binary qualities you can have all of them cumulatively to an extent.(5 votes)
- How can one be sure that they've seen an authentic need?(4 votes)
- l doubt if anyone can ever be 100% sure; however l believe if a kid wants (hypothetical situation) to go to a conference on 'Stem Cell Technology' it would be a reasonable assumption to believe that there might be an interest there and therefore approaching an authentic need.(4 votes)
- Inupto the end, she talks about "non-profits coming to a new age" of sustainability... a "new non-profit way." I am curious what she had in mind when she hinted on this. There are of course a lot of non-profits that have a strong fundraising system and donor retention program (where donors commit long term etc.) but was she hinting on something that has never been done before, like a totally new way of funding non-profits? 1:34(3 votes)
- This idea is excellent in religious institutions, where now there is no transperency.(2 votes)
- She says NGOs need a new model of generating funds other than fund raising, but she didnt say what it is.(3 votes)
- There are lots of donors out there who would like to donate to these organizations on a sustainable basis but they need to see tangible results. NPO's should demonstrate clearly how they use funding to promote a cause.(2 votes)
- How can one be sure that i could seen an authentic need?(2 votes)
- Shout out to Sal Khan ! Thank you for KhanAcademy.org ! You're the best !(1 vote)
- Who is the person that determines if there is an authentic need?(1 vote)
- A volunteer who tests out the different varieties of the product such as a prototype of the finished product until it continues to the completed final product and leads to eventually the consumer getting the finsihed and safely checked out product.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- My name is Beth Schmidt, and my organization is
called Wishbone.org. I started Wishbone to actually send low-income students on these after school and summer programs that are otherwise pretty much cost prohibitive for that demographic. I never would have actually thought I would start an organization that wasn't on my to-do list in life. When you see a need and you see a gap, and you experience that gap first hand, there's not really a choice to turn away from it. You have more guts and more ambition and more drive when you see something first hand. And I always tell entrepreneurs who are looking to start something, there better be an
authentic need that you see. Right, you can't just kind of come up with an idea and not test that need. I was a teacher and so the thing that fueled me right away was seeing the faces of my students. But I think the pieces that keep me really engaged are the ways that we track students, seeing their grades go up and seeing their engagement levels go up, and what a game changer
this can be for them. It's interesting to see that a lot of these life long skill sets like confidence and grit and persistence really come from these activities that are pursued outside of school. For a long time even when you win with non-profits, you really don't win. Because you might win it for that year, and then you're doing it all over again the next year. So thinking about sustainability early on in a model I think is imperative. I think non-profits are
coming to a new age, and that age is sustainability. And thinking about non-profits just as any for profit company. I think the pitfall to non-profits is when you know you fundraise and fundraise and fundraise year after year, and nobody wins. Your model is not sustainable, you are constantly looking for new people to fund you, and it's not fun for anyone. The positive piece to this is that we're coming to a new age where people and new leaders are really looking at non-profits as a sustainable market. There are ways that we're looking to kind of remain sustainable, as opposed to continually fundraising. And I think that's
important to think about when you're looking at scale. It's kind of the new non-profit way.