We all sat around the living room this afternoon and spoke about social enterprise in the sense of cooperatives and capitalism. One of the volunteers presented in English while there was a director translating in Spanish in order for everyone to understand and contribute. It is meant to help the people from different backgrounds to discuss on a personal level how different government systems affect our growth. It is all based on ideas, not facts, but it was stressed that everyone has to think for him or herself. It is our responsibility to critically analyze the world around us. There are positive and negative elements to every economical system. Capitalism is based on incentives that influence growth – which the presenter believed was different from development. In a competitive environment, it is obvious that someone may gain money but not necessarily a fair way; thus the person is not developing. Imagine a multinational company creates a branch in a developing country.

The fact is that people have more jobs and income, which is positive, but it is not the right way to think about development. The working conditions and rights of the workers are not necessarily “fair”, and in practice the people may not be improving their standards of living. Productivity and incentive of innovation allows for growth, however, productivity and efficiency are not the same as well. Efficiency is different, for we produce in a short-term perspective, with many elements ignored such as the environmental repercussions of our actions. In order to be efficient, we need to be aware of how our production impacts the future. Social enterprises are business that trade to tackle social problems, improve communities, people’s life changes, or the environment. They make their money from selling goods and services in the open market, but they reinvest their profits back to the business or the local community.

And so when they profit, society profits. They set out aims at the beginning of they year which they try to complete, and they work toward completing those goals despite their profits. The idea is of a never-ending progress (democracy and capitalism). People must identify the good and bad of a system and work to improve it. If school is something important, in a ranking system, that would be valued as something to improve. Should schools be something that the government funds and monitors, or should they be run based on a means of making money for private organizations? Also, are schools better based on the competition between institutions offering them?

These are some of the questions we discussed as a group, and were relevant to many of the volunteers working with child education while in Argentina. An argument is that people will become lazy with their education if it is free, for people may not take their studies seriously if they do not have thousands of dollars on the line. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, many organizations worked post-hurricane, many of the schools did not re-open. There is not centralized city government running schools in New Orleans anymore. This was based on one of the volunteers’ observations from Louisiana. The students go to charter schools and do not need to pay for their education and it is working better for the students without the government involved. I still find it amazing that we are all young adults, from various areas of the world, coming together to not just volunteer, but think critically about the areas we come from. We do not discuss this to fulfill a General Education class for our major, but because we want to understand where we live.