Dreams InDeed founders, David Haskell and Janice Hayashi Haskell, took a 2005-06 sabbatical to reflect on their two decades in hard places of the Middle East and Africa. Their development experience had ranged from street children, marginalized women, the mentally challenged, garbage recyclers, subsistence farmers, and AIDS orphans, to disaster casualties of earthquake, sectarian violence, and all-out war.
Against the backdrop of international development and management literature, they considered the outcomes of what had brought about sustained change, and what had fallen short. At Harvard, David researched social entrepreneurship and leadership development; at Tufts Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Janice concentrated on the role of values in human development.
A values-driven theory of change and operating model emerged, presented first at Harvard, Tufts, and Oxford in 2006 and 2007, and then at the first International Conference on Complexity, Systems Thinking and Social Entrepreneurship at Adelphi University School of Business in 2008. In summary, that model indicates that at the edge of chaos in hard places, the right insider with the right values and the right vision needs the right minimal support to leverage sustained change with the poor.
Adelphi and ISCE Publishing invited the Haskells and Dreams InDeed board member Jennifer Kwong, to publish their findings in Complexity Science & Social Entrepreneurship: Adding Social Value Through Systems Thinking. The authors wish to thank ISCE Publishing and volume editors Jeffrey A. Goldstein, James K. Hazy and Joyce Silberstang for permission to make this chapter available for download on this website.
Downloadable PDF File:
A Values-Driven Social Entrepreneurship Theory of Change
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