Giving Compass' Take:

• Samasource founder and CEO Leila Janah discusses how impact sourcing can become a business model for social justice. Impact sourcing is hiring low-skilled labor through the digital economy. 

• What makes impact sourcing a sustainable practice? 

• Read more about models that combine business and philanthropy.

Since 2008, nonprofit social enterprise Samasource has provided over $10 million in direct income to tens of thousands of the world’s most marginalized citizens, including refugees, orphans, and slum dwellers in Haiti, India, Kenya, and Uganda by connecting them to work in the globalized digital economy. Now, through her new book, Give Work: Reversing Poverty One Job at a Time, Samasource founder and CEO Leila Janah is sharing her personal path to success as a social entrepreneur and making the case for a new solution to global poverty.

Give Work is part origin story, part defense of Janah’s thesis on why “impact sourcing” — designing a business model around intentionally hiring low-skilled labor through the digital economy — has been the missing link in poverty alleviation efforts in both the international aid community and corporate social responsibility work.

As a first-generation American woman of color, Janah was not a traditional tech entrepreneur. After years traveling the world and developing connections with some of the leading minds in microfinance and impact investing, she experienced the same disillusionment with the international aid movement that struck many students and scholars in the early 2000s: Charitable giving was making donors feel good and offering short-term relief but wasn’t doing much to address deep, underlying systemic flaws that perpetuated poverty in most parts of the world.

Janah’s direct ask of readers is to examine how they can incorporate impact sourcing into their businesses. But after reading about the uphill battle she faced getting Samasource off the ground, the book indirectly begs the question of why start-up capital is not more readily available in the regions Samasource serves. Overall a worthy read, Give Work will leave you thinking hard about the big picture and optimistic in the power of social enterprise to shift global tides.

Read the full article about impact sourcing by Kate Herrmann at B the Change.