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SEA Change—The Social Enterprise Accelerator—is an organization that supports social entrepreneurs by helping them develop a sustainable business model, access funding and solidify their meaningful impact. In this episode, we talk with Lauren Edwards, the Columbus director of SEA Change and owner and principal of Next Step Business Consulting.What does Lauren do?With Next Step Business Consulting, Lauren helps organizations develop their next step, thus the name, for their social enterprise. This includes program development, streamlining processes and logistics, recognizing areas that may have duplicative efforts and so on. Essentially, she helps with anything where an enterprise can save time, money or both.What’s Lauren’s personal goal in this?Put simply, alleviating poverty.“It’s not just happenstance that [poverty] happened. We as a society made decisions that put people in places where they could not build generational wealth and they could not achieve growth in their careers,” Lauren states. “It’s something that’s so unfortunate and that needs to be undone and there are tools out there.”Supporting social enterprises is one tool in the toolbox for our society to use to help alleviate poverty. Poverty is something that is so ingrained in our society, that it affects a multitude of areas. This is the reason why Lauren does what she does because she can work with all different types of social enterprises and all of them play some sort of role in alleviating poverty.“Last time I checked, [Columbus] is the second most income-segregated community in the country,” she says. “There are some awesome charts put together by the Pew Research Center that show what the government sets as the poverty level and they show what one working parent would have to make or how many hours they’d have to work in order to make that. It’s unreasonable, and it has been for 80 years.”What can young social entrepreneurs do to get going, specifically in Columbus?Once you have an issue you’re passionate about, find other people who are working to solve that same issue. Whether you form a partnership or simply gain valuable insight, that’s a great first step.“You may think of someone as a competitor, but you should at least approach them about a partnership,” Lauren explains. “Ultimately, you’re in this social service sector because you want to help people.”The SEA Change Pitch Day, which showcases local social enterprises that went through the SEA Change programming, is a great place to find inspiration - and possibly an organization with whom you can share your expertise: Every entrepreneur needs help; that’s just part of the business. If you have a passion, find a way to get involved and use your talents.How did Lauren get involved in social entrepreneurship?While working with a Columbus nonprofit called Local Matters, Lauren helped educate individuals about healthful food choices on a budget. They’d have hands-on cooking and gardening classes that taught a range of people from children all the way up to senior citizens. More and more people kept asking her if she would teach these tips at corporate events, and that’s when she had her lightbulb moment. That evolved into a program called Wellness Matters, which not only is helping the companies that pay for it retain and engage their employees, but it’s increasing the health of their employees as well.How did SEA Change get started?The Business of Good Foundation, based in Northeast, Ohio, saw a gap in the ecosystem for social enterprise when it comes to education. They discovered that there was a program that was already running at Brown University called SE Greenhouse, which is a 12-module online curriculum. Brown University agreed to let The Good Business Foundation use the program and eventually they brought it to Columbus, where it was developed into what is now SEA Change.What exac
