Join Ashoka Peace for a Social Entrepreneur Twitter chat (#SocEntChat) this Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 from 4-6pm EST. The topic is Social Innovation in Peace Building. Share your work, thoughts and insights to help us answer the following questions:

1.Why is innovation important in the fields of peace building and conflict resolution?

2.What are the most innovation ideas and solutions you’ve seen to build peace, tolerance and empathy around the world?

3.What patterns or best practices are we beginning to witness in the work of social entrepreneurs in the peace building field?

4.What is (or what should be) the role of business in peace building and conflict resolution?

Leave a comment if you have any more questions or topics you’d like to include, and find instructions on how to join the chat here. We hope to connect with you!

We're looking for writers to contribute to the Ashoka Peace blog. Become one of our official contributors and help grow a movement that believes in the power of social innovation to resolve conflict and build a more peaceful society. You'll have the opportunity to learn about entrepreneurial approaches to building peace and to explore and share your ideas on some of the most innovative ideas out there.

Who's the ideal Peace Blogger?

• A background in social entrepreneurship and/or the peace building/conflict resolution/human rights fields.
• Experience writing, preferably prior blogging experience.
• Interest or experience using social media tools.
• Ability to seek out creative stories and recognize innovations, and write about them in a compelling way.

Time commitment: At a minimum, you'll commit to contributing one blog post per week from now through May.

Application process:  Send your resume and a 250-450 word blog post on peace and social entrepreneurship (or a past blog post you've written) to Sarah Jefferson at sjefferson@ashoka.org.

The United Nations Democracy Fund invites civil society organizations to apply for funding for projects to advance and support democracy. Project proposals may be submitted on-line between 16 November 2009 and 31 December 2009 at www.un.org/democracyfund, where applicants can also find guidelines, FAQs and lessons learned from previous rounds. Only on-line applications in either English or French will be accepted.

This is the Fourth Round of Funding to be launched by UNDEF, which was established by the UN Secretary-General in 2005 as a United Nations General Trust Fund. UNDEF funds projects that strengthen the voice of civil society and help ensure the participation of all groups in democratic processes.

The thematic categories for applications are:

• democratic dialogue and support for constitutional processes;
• civil society empowerment, including the empowerment of women;
• civic education and voter registration; 
• citizen's access to information; 
• participation rights and the rule of law in support of civil society; 
• transparency and integrity.

The selection process is expected to be highly rigorous and competitive, For the Third Round, fewer than 70 project proposals were selected out of more than 2,100 received.

Written by Isha Mehmood, contributor to Ashoka Peace.

A while back Ashoka Peace featured a post from Beyond Profit magazine entitled Can You Be A Social Entrepreneur If You’re Not the Head Honcho? It lead me to think about whether there is indeed something unique about the character traits held by the social entrepreneur - the founder or initiator of the social enterprise, and whether these traits are distinct from those of other employees working for the social enterprise.

Then I came across a recent post on Social Velocity, The Long View of Change, that got me further comtemplating. Social Velocity points to the work of Jon Katzenbach who was thinking about this exact issue over a decade ago, and he wrote about it in his 1995 book entitled Real Change Leaders. According to Katzenbach, Real Change Leaders are not necessarily the CEOs or top echelon of a company, but rather they are the mid-level employees who are drivers of remarkable, but often unrecognized, change within companies.

When faced with sudden conflict, with shocking unexpected violence, how do social entrepreneurs react? What, in fact, is the role of the ordinary citizen in these situations?

Dilip D'Souza brilliantly explores these questions in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November last year - 26/11, as it is colloquially called in India. He meets with three Ashoka Fellows (none of whose work is related to conflict) and finds a shared concern about the psychosocial impact of violence on children. In the wake of the Mumbai attacks, all three social entrepreneurs started new programs to help children understand and process what happened, keeping in mind something all too easy to forget: these are still kids. As Dilip puts it:

AshokaPeace and Beyond Profit have been following the 2009 Global Clinton Initiative, attended by various members of the Ashoka community and other innovators. John Kao (Chairman at the Institute for Large Scale Innovation), Bill Drayton (Ashoka's Founder and CEO), Kathy Eisenhardt (Professor of Strategy and Organization at Stanford) were all panelists on the Approaches to Innovation Plenary Session, where panelists were posed questions such as "How do you define innovation?"; "Are there emerging innovation strategies?"; and "What inputs are needed for innovation to exist and fourish?"

Ashoka Peace is delighted to collaborate with Beyond Profit, a new print and online magazine that is focused on for-profit social enterprise in developing and emerging markets. Beyond Profit explores the stories, ideas and people at the forefront of social enterprise, with the aim of sparking "beyond profit" thinking. The hope is that the reader will make change--either by starting a social enterprise, supporting an entrepreneur, or investing time or capital in fostering new development approaches.

Featuring first-hand insights from social entrepreneurs and expert commentary, Beyond Profit is an exciting new addition to the media community focusing on social entrepreneurship. The magazine is produced in Mumbai, India, a hub for socially entrepreneurial activity, by the social investment advisory firm, Intellecap. You can preview the first issue of Beyond Profit here 

A selection of posts on Ashoka Peace will be cross-posted on Beyond Profit, and vice-versa for relevant Beyond Profit articles. We look forward to growing this partnership further.

In the fall of 2004, 14 Ashoka Fellows from 5 countries in South Asia gathered in New Delhi to explore how they could collaborate to overcome the obstacles to peace in the region. During the meeting, an Ashoka Fellow from northeast India commented that one of his deepest learnings had been that "True peacebuilding means having no enemies, to yield to being kissed by a tiger." 

This quote exemplifies the spirit of the social entrepreneur. With climate change, resource scarcity, and economic turmoil all projected to increase violent conflict in the years ahead, it has never been more critical to live and work together in harmony. Ashoka is embarking on an unprecedented effort to scale up the contribution of social entrepreneurship in meeting these challenges. We invite you to join us.