Mel Young, Social Entrepreneur, launched the first homeless football World Cup !

It was such a pleasure to meet Mel again at the World Economic Forum.



Mel is one of the most impressive Social Entrepreneurs I know;

Mel launched 10 years ago The Big Issue in Scotland, a street paper for homeless. Before that he was a journalist and decided to become a Social Entrepreneur. Everything he does is self financed, but the profit never goes out of the company. It is "managed in a business way, with a social outcome". The Big Issue sells 40000 copies in Scotland every week.



With The Big Issue, homeless are self employed, they sell the street paper for a pound and buy it from The Big Issue. It is not about begging anymore, the key thing is that the poor in the street are working, are self employed and beginning to save with the margin they make.



Mel says "the world is changing rapidly, we promote the use of business practices to create social change and it works".



As a "work for profit" entrepreneur, I always thought I was adding value to the Society by creating jobs and pushing other people create companies. Until I met Mel thanks to the World Economic Forum. Now I feel different. I feel I should do more to help improve our world.



I asked Mel how he decided to become a Social Entrepreneur. Mel says: "I have grown inside, I have changed. I could earn much more than I do, but I get so much everyday from homeless people, this is much better than money".



With the success of The Big Issue, Mel thought it should become an international initiative and Mel launched the International Network of Streetpapers (INSP). It is interesting to understand why a great social initiative like this adopts the globalization trends of business. When so many people are against gloablization, here is an example of a global social initiative that just works and would not be that rich without it.



At INSP, that gathers about 60 Streetpapers around the world and growing, the value of being global is permanent. Mel says "We support each other every day, we do all kinds of partnerships.



A great example of a concrete result in INSP is through lobbying. It has been a long time Mel and his friends knew that Russian police was killing homeless people. Three years ago Mel did something concrete about it. All Streetpapers around the world started writing in their front pages that the Russian police was killing the homeless. Thanks to the pressure on the Russian authorities, Mel got an appointment and went to see the police chief in Russia. 50 papers wrote about the story and they stopped.



Mel says "We have power".



The INSP has an international conference every year, the "Davos of the Streetpapers". Mel and his friends in other countries realized they were learning a lot thanks to this conference and Mel thought of a way "to get the poor experience the international conference". In a bar in Cape Town, on the beach, Mel and his friends had a crazy and impossible to execute idea, create the first football World Cup !



They wondered what was the best international language they could use for the homeless to understand each other, Football was perfect. The first World Cup last year was hosted in Austria. They found sponsors to pay the airline tickets to fly the homeless in Austria, from all around the world. The toughest challenged they had was to fly the homeless who were most of the time paperless and had to negociate hard with customs.

4 homeless players were hired by professional football clubs. Most of the others got their dignity back through Football and found jobs after the World Cup. There is going to be a second edition this year, bigger, with incredible media coverage and poor people getting out of the street to become suddenly Football stars and get their dignity back.



Impressive. It makes me think about my own role in the society and puts pressure on me to take Mel as an example. Who said the World Economic Forum is only about business ? Meeting Mel makes me see my life into a different perspective.



It is also an proof that even the craziest and most creative ideas can become reality.



Mel, thank you for what you do and how you inspire all of us. I will be happy to help you as much as I can. Let's talk and meet again soon.