Description: Throw out your notions of “It will never change.” As long as we see solutions to major social challenges as inconceivable and unimaginable, we reinforce our own failures of imagination.  This preconference session is about creating paths to shift the seeming unshiftable. Using micro-finance and micro-enterprise as a model to end poverty, improve the economy and rebuild the lives of those often written off by society, this session exposes our preconceived ideas of what can be done and what can’t and presents a sustainable model for inconceivable development.

Target Audience: Changemakers of all stripes.

Organizational Issues: Getting Stuck 1) It’s How We’ve Always Done Things 2) I Hate Change 3) Not my job  4) Being Willing to Venture Together Beyond Common Ground.

Objectives: To provide a means to seek new ways of thinking and not get stuck in our ideas about what new thinking is.

Materials Needed: None

Date: Thursday, April 19th

Length: 3 hours (1:15-4:15pm)

Location: Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne - 6633 Canoga Avenue, Canoga Park

Cost: None

Handouts: Available for download after the Forum

Biography: Ron Schultz is the founder and President of the microfinance/micro-enterprise program, Entrepreneurs4Change and its lending arm, Lending4Change, founded in 2006. The program works with disadvantaged and disenfranchised populations, as well as veterans and green and social businesses to create new micro-enterprises and provide them with access to capital. Ron has been recognized internationally as a thought leader within the social entrepreneurial community and will soon be compiling and editing the Social Entrepreneurship Industry Bible, Creating Good Work – 35 of the World’s Leading Social Entrepreneurs Help You Get It Done, to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012. In addition, he has written or co-written and had published 22 books - 14 of which are on business, innovation, and American competitiveness. His 22nd book, Coherence in the Midst of Complexity, written with Hugo Letiche and Michael Lissack, will be published December 6th 2011 also by Palgrave-Macmillan. Others books include: Adjacent Opportunities – Sparking Emergent Social Action (Emergent Publications, Impact Books, 2010) Unconventional Wisdom (HarperCollins, 1994); Open Boundaries: Creating Business Innovation through Complexity, (with Howard Sherman) (Perseus Books, 1998); and The Mindful Corporation: Liberating the Human Spirit at Work, (with Paul Nakai) (Leadership Press, 2000).

Contact: Ron can be reached by e-mail at rschultz@lending4change.com for additional information about this Pre-Conference session.

Website: www.lending4change.com/online/

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/pub/ron-schultz/0/46/540