A few years ago, I stumbled across social entrepreneurship and the B Corps movement. Before that, I had been working in the nonprofit world, where I experienced its highs and lows, strong and weak points.

Despite the small victories and successes along the way, I constantly asked myself questions like...

• Why should the people who are working the hardest to make positive change in the world live on shoestring salaries?
• Why should those receiving services have to depend on the whims of fancy, fickle donors or uncertain government grants?
• Why couldn’t we create systems where everyone is working together to move away from the helping mentality to an empowerment one?

Turns out, a lot of people were way ahead of me. The B Corps movement, a push to transform business into a force for good in the world that originated in the US, had already started spread around the world –– including Latin America, where I was headed for my next job in the summer of 2015.

The landscape at the startup B Corporation where I worked looked very different than my previous workplaces. Fast-paced design thinking workshops. Cross-organizational collaboration. Pop-up stands at a few days’ notice. Lean startup principles. Growth mindset and failing forward.

Everyone’s participation and energy for the mission felt so palpable. Something clicked.

Happy and empowered people all around. This was what I was looking for.

While working at that B Corporation and learning about others, I became convinced that social enterprise is the future of business, and more importantly, is the future of solving problems in the world.

To me, it is a win for all involved, and ultimately a better system than what we’ve been working with up until now.

However, social enterprise is not without its detractors or concerns, and rightly so. I want to take a look at a few of the arguments against social entrepreneurship, and think about ways we can address them as social entrepreneurs, or socents, of the future.