Fun for A Change is a design competition that encourages youth to come up with fun ways to create positive change. It’s about getting people to “do the right thing” and change behavior by using fun and game-like motivations. It’s about learning and applying game mechanics without necessarily creating a game. It’s about thinking outside the box and rethinking how we can change the world.

As youth go through the challenge, they will learn about game mechanics, why they are powerful and why they are being adopted by entrepreneurs as well as social entrepreneurs. Participants may even win funding (up to US$500) to implement their ideas and share their results with the world.

To take part in the 2011 Online Challenge, youth simply join the 2011 Online group at funforachange.org and they will receive instructions on how to proceed to the next step.

The question I’ve been struggling with for a long time is: “How can we spread best practices so that social entrepreneurs can achieve greater impact?”  After all, most social innovators do not have formal training in changemaking. You basically learn by doing.

What that means is the same mistakes are made over and over again. Even worse, few manage to achieve any significant impact.

At Princeton, I decided to put forward a new framework to learn, teach and practice social entrepreneurship.  The framework centers around six best practices that I think are essential to success.  To make them easy to remember, I made the six correspond to each of the letters in the word, SOCIAL.

From now on, whenever people speak of “social” entrepreneurship, I hope they first think of the six best practices.

To help spread this new framework, I’ve created a new website, socialcreatives.org, and I plan to create all future toolkits, books and other resources under this framework.

Check it out.

This summer, I’m taking some time to work on a personal writing project – The Creative Activist Toolkit, which is designed to guide young people through the process of creating change and sharing their success.

I only have one sample chapter developed so far (see above) but more will be produced in the coming weeks.

Take a look at the Root Cause Analysis chapter. Your feedback is appreciated.