Why do we need mental health social entrepreneurship?
A business that can pay for itself can expand as rapidly as the infrastructure can be created. This would mean a mental health system so cheap that folks in emotional distress could pay for all of their own help back to a life of their own choosing. As Paul Polak points out in Out of Poverty, having people as customers instead of charity recipients makes a difference in many ways – people can choose between competing services, people can sell product and work in the business, and the business is more likely to have a product designed specifically for the needs of the customer. The most important difference is that being a charity recipient is disempowering, takes away choice, and makes people not want to create their own solutions to problems because they instead wait on further charity. Many of the homeless folks I worked with told me, “I can’t get a job, I’m waiting on my disability determination.”
via corinnawest.com