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Social entrepreneurship has come to be synonymous with the individual visionary-the risk taker who goes against the tide to start a new organization to create dramatic social change. The problem with focusing so much attention on the individual entrepreneur is that it neglects to recognize and support thousands of other individuals, groups, and organizations that are crafting solutions to troubles around the globe.
Social entrepreneurship is one of the most popular terms in the nonprofit sector, and also one of the most misunderstood. It has been almost three decades since the Surdna Foundation's executive director Edward Skloot first used the term "nonprofit venture" and Ashoka's founder Bill Drayton adopted the term "social entrepreneurship," yet there is still considerable debate about when and where the term applies.
Some use the term social entrepreneurship to describe any form of moneymaking enterprise with a social mission. Others use it to describe any type of nonprofit organization that is new to them. Still others use the term to make a new case for an old idea.
The most prevalent use of the term social entrepreneurship, however, focuses on the role of the risk-taking individual who, against all odds, creates social change. In this view, social entrepreneurship is not so much about pattern-breaking change, but about pattern-breaking individuals.
Advocates of this approach argue that this tight definition prevents the expansion of the term to cover every conceivable nonprofit venture, including copying ideas from the nonprofit next door. Hence the search for people who embody Ashoka's definition of social entrepreneurs as individuals with "the committed vision and inexhaustible determination to persist until they have transformed an entire system," who "go beyond the immediate problem to fundamentally change communities, societies, and the world."
The problem with such an exclusive definition is that most nonprofits simply do not qualify as social entrepreneurs, even if they are engaged in the kind of pattern-breaking change that promises solutions to intractable problems such as poverty hunger, and disease. They have the visionary mission Ashoka and others rightly admire, but not the visionary leader. By focusing so much on visionary change agents, prominent advocates of social entrepreneurship have excluded large numbers of organizations that deserve the financial support, networking, and training now reserved for individuals who...