Introducing the 2006 Social Capitalist Award winners--25 entrepreneurs solving the world's toughest problems with creativity, ingenuity, and passion. Because they can't stand a vacuum.The entrepreneurial mind abhors a vacuum. Market failures, unmet demand, even the maddening lure of a blank napkin--all beckon as explicit invitations to invent. What defines an entrepreneur (as well as an entrepreneurial organization) is that relentless problem-solving approach, not the specifics of the problem itself.
We typically associate such ingenuity with the transformation of problems into lucrative, shareholder-enriching companies. But the winners and nominees of the Social Capitalist Award 2006, a joint effort by
Fast Company and
Monitor Group, the global consulting firm, belong to the cream of entrepreneurial organizations in the social sector.
Like their counterparts in the profit-driven world, our 25 winning organizations--winnowed from 278 nominations with the help of 43 experts--are masters at envisioning products and services that don't yet exist, marshaling resources, and crafting solutions that deeply affect their customers. The results these nonprofit organizations deliver hinge on business acumen and often reflect strategies that their for-profit brethren would do well to imitate.
Earl Martin Phalen, the founder of winner BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), came face-to-face with his inspiring vacuum while still a student at Harvard Law School. Phalen and several classmates volunteered for a mentoring program in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He remembers telling the kids, most of them from low-income African-American and Latino families, that anything was possible, including going to college. But when he and his law-school buddies sat down to help the students with homework, they realized the kids were years behind academically. "We left there really devastated," he says.
Read on to know what he and others made out of such insipring vacuums.
Where Capital meets Conscience
