Social Business- from practical point of view

My last post touched upon issues related to social business and microfounds. As I mentioned, these are the issues that recently have been keeping my mind busy :) Althought I read about these concepts, have seen films about it I have never actually seen and experienced this idea in practice. I hoped to do so while in India, but working for TCS kept me busy pretty much all day, all evening and sometimes during a part of the night.
However now, being in Bogota, Colombia I decided to finally give it a try and get engaged with an NGO that is helping people by 'teaching them how to fish instead of giving them fish to eat'. After an extensive reseach (btw, do you know that there are many companies that charge foreginers for volunteering? Yes, you need to pay if you want to work for free and contribute..how crazy is that?)I found Ahmsa (http://www.ahmsa.org/?lang=en), met with people who volunteer with this organisation and yesterday I got an amazing opportunity to see their work.
To do so we travelled to very South of Bogota where according to some of my friends is not smart to be once it gets dark.After around half an hour I found myself in one of the poorest parts of Bogota. Judging on the information that many local people spread about this area I was expecting at least armed gangs strolling the streets...to my surprise what I saw was a normal life: guys hanging around, couples romancing, kids playing in the streets, women gossiping in front of their houses. Don;t missunderstand me- I'm not naive to think that there is no violence and very heavy social problems over there, but what I want to start with is that demonising such places, spreading the 'red alert' sort of thinking of part A and part B of society leads to hudge exagurations and deepens division in society leading to extremelly dangerous social exclusion...

Having said this, I finally had a chance to see how this sort of NGO work. I visited for example the textiles company where people produce items of clothing. What organisation helps them with is financial support for machines that tailors need to do their job, training, getting vendors and ideas on how to improve the process to make it more productive, to employ more people and increase thei incomes. This help may involve for example writting professions business proposal for a clothing company to get their interest and sing a contract that will bring more job fr people and improve their lifes. The other business is an internet caffee run by very young boys who wante to do something different in their neighbourhood. Ahmsa helped them to get the computers, to get experts who would teach them how to use and maintan them ec...These are only few exaples of how social business works to help people sustain themselves. I hope to get involved with the organisation and should this happen I will share more ideas that I find inspiring.