Two young social entrepreneurs, whose mission is travelling around Europe for 100 days touching 30 cities to raise awareness of social entrepreneurship.
Fanny Havas, 24 years old, from Paris, a Master of Science in entrepreneurship and innovation, and Matteo Tangi, 26 years old, from Turin, sustainable designer and social entrepreneur, are two young, passionate visionaries who have met lots of social entrepreneurs all around Europe in order to help them face their challenges by mobilizing people around them to support them to positively impact society.
The Europe SenseTour is a project of MakeSense which, as Fanny Havas explains, «is a global open network that connects social entrepreneurs with problems and challenges to interested people who have the skills to help solve such problems. Within this community, known as gangs, there are 700 members all around the world, who are called Gangsters, who focus on providing knowledge, creativity, connections and momentum to the movement».
Make Sense started in 2010 with an Asian tour organized by Christian Vanizette and Romain Raguin, two 23 year old French guys. They did this trip attracted by Yunus concept of doing social business. They met a lot of social entrepreneurs, posted their stories and videos on MakeSense blog and facebook page and got a lot of followers. Since that trip more and more people have been joining the project and working with Make Sense.
How does the Europe Sense Tour work? It uses the same online and offline dynamics as Make Sense. Besides the facebook page, the blog and the website, Make Sense organizes different events to help social entrepreneurs solve their challenges. Like Holds-ups, a brainstorm format to work on the challenge of the social entrepreneur, Sense Drinks, informal meetings for social entrepreneurship enthusiasts, and Sense Camps, interactive social entrepreneurship un-conferences to improve Make Sense.
Waste management, social cohesion, unemployment, social integration, elderly care, rural electrification: these are some of the challenges of social entrepreneurs Fanny and Matteo have met in their European tour.
Seeing that the project is sponsored by The European Network (TEN), which is linked to the Clinton Global Initiative, «another objective» – continues Fanny Havas – «is to know more about social entrepreneurship and whether it can help alleviate the economic crisis and youth unemployment. Make Sense is convinced that social entrepreneurship and young generations are linked and that young generations have more power than any other generation before because they can have access to all the knowledge they want through social media ».
The grand finale of the European Tour will be in Paris on Monday the 29th of July. TEN and Make Sense are organizing a Come Back Party to celebrate Fanny and Matteo’s return and to share their stories and experiences. The two backpackers will show examples of the holds-ups that have been held in the 100 days to share what entrepreneurs have been doing in their countries and will make the difficult choice to award an entrepreneur for his or her project.
