Just starting the second week or fifth full day of my one month internship here at the London SSE, I have been given the assignment to research and blog about a wonderful opportunity open to social entrepreneurs around the globe who are looking for growth in their social ventures. The opportunity is called the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI), and is a program provided by the Skoll Foundation.
As a young social entrepreneur myself, I see this opportunity as a dream program that is designed for any social entrepreneur wanting to re-adjust, polish, and develop their social enterprise with the assistance of experts.
You may be thinking this is a sales pitch, not a blog post, but I have yet to explain what the opportunity entails. Within the first five minutes of applying, I think you will begin to see how you will benefit.

The application is founded on three business planning exercises that are designed to assist the applicant in defining their organization’s value proposition, target market, and “social business” model. It is true that most social entrepreneurs have already defined their enterprises in these areas, but the GSBI application takes the applicant step-by-step through a mentored process with a variety of notes, examples and templates, which I believe, prove beneficial for any entrepreneur.From the applicant pool, twenty scholarship winners (US$25,000 value) will undergo a four month online, two week in-residence “action learning” and mentoring program. This program will develop the know-how in critical areas of business including: focussed mission/vision, target market segmentation, business models, finance, organizational capacity building, and metrics, teaching the aspiring social entrepreneur the "hard tools" behind entrepreneurial success.

Although young and so far unaccomplished within world of social  entrepreneurs, I will go through the application process as a learning tool. Not only will it allow me to help better  define the goals for my very own youth initiative program based out of Canada, but it will help shape my future ideas of creating a youth-led national social enterprise in Canada. Thus, regardless of how experienced you are as a social entrepreneur, I highly recommend that you do the same: use the application as a lesson and a tool. It is a win-win situation, and you never know how big the “win” will be.