Youth Social Enterprise Initiative
When “changing the world” seemed like a lofty ideal that brought about a cringe and an inner yearning among the young folk, a bunch of people stepped up and showed us a sustainable way of doing it.
The Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) is a high-engagement social venture program for emerging young social entrepreneurs in developing countries. Idea!s is one of the projects it supported through its inaugural batch of fellows in 2006. At that time, incubation programs for young social entrepreneurs were scarce, and the experience in cultivating them was documented by S. Dev Appannah and Sunit Shrestha, then the Principal and Director respectively of what was known as Thai Rural Net or TRN (now Changefusion). Seeing the value of their pioneering efforts, they got support for a publication that documented their learnings from YSEI, entitled “Startup and Change the World”.
TRN wanted to show the world that the field of development had a “cooler” facet to it, and that young social entrepreneurs were part of what they termed as “Development 2.0” in reference to a newer, more interactive and participative form of making the world a better place. They wanted young people to seek and read the publication, and be guided by it into the first steps to making their proverbial marks on the planet.
