Márta Bálint: We can give to these people precisely because we have everything

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Social entrepreneur Márta Bálint uses an app, Good People Everywhere to show how helping others, donating and connecting can have a positive impact on individuals and communities.

Social entrepreneurship is not a well-known profession in Hungary today. Márta Bálint, the chief operating officer of Good People Everywhere, founded by Hungarians in London, introduced her idea of social entrepreneurship at a university in England years ago.

Márta studied economics because she thought it was the degree she needed to start her own business. After working as a project manager, she was called to become a director of a company in Zurich that specialised in mergers & acquisitions. For almost four years she worked in Switzerland and around the world – writes Privátbankár.

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But she was exhausted by the fact that most of the meetings and conferences were all about acquisitions and money, so in the countries where she had been on business she joined various foundations to help on a voluntary basis. She also talked about this activity at company conferences and more and more people started to ask her about it. Many people asked the question, “Working in the world of money, where you have everything, why is this work worth it?”

“That’s exactly why we can give to these people: we have everything,” said Márta Bálint, COO of Good People Everywhere.

Márta Bálint also started working in Hungary and found that foundations in this country had no money for marketing, advertising, and often no money to provide basic health care to people in need. Many volunteers worked in these places out of altruism, others for extremely low wages. In the financial sphere, however, where it used to revolve, many wealthy people had built up influential networks of contacts and saw it as something worth putting to good use. For example, to include in this network of contacts people working in foundations who want to help others.

“Once we wanted to collect gifts for children in a hospital and we managed to collect a lot of toys from almost nothing. One friend told another, word of mouth spread, and in the end, we made hundreds of children very happy.”

Making social innovation sustainable

In Márkamonitor’s podcast, Márta also took time to talk about the founding of the social enterprise CoGoodwill in 2015.

“I came across the concept of social enterprise when I was researching how to set a formal framework for voluntary organisations. In Hungary, it was not such a well-known concept in the early 2010s. I applied for a course in social entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge. We were learning about social innovation and how this type of enterprise can be sustainable.”