Every change begins with a vision and a decision to take action.

Much of the criticism of economic globalization has centered on factory labor abuses. But the majority of the world's poor are not employed in factories; they are self-employed -- as peasant farmers, rural peddlers, urban hawkers, and small producers, usually involved in agriculture and small trade in the world's vast "informal" economy ("informal" because economists have difficulty measuring it.).

Why do A students from low-income background enroll in college at the same rate as D students from high-income backgrounds? The answer is that many low-income students who could succeed in college don't grow up in a college-going culture: They don't know how to advocate effectively for themselves, and they don't get the step-by-step guidance that others do. Moreover, colleges don't know how to identify promising students beyond limited measures of grades and test scores. "I don't believe that every low-income student is ready for college," says Schramm. "But the only way you can tell who is capable of going to college and who isn't is by looking at the whole student. It's not rocket science. The talent is out there, but the systems are blind to it."

According to the management expert Peter F. Drucker, the term "entrepreneur" (from the French, meaning "one who takes into hand") was introduced two centuries ago by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say to characterize a special economic actor--not someone who simply opens a business, but someone who "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield." The twentieth-century growth economist Joseph A. Schumpeter characterized the entrepreneur as the source of the "creative destruction" necessary for major economic advances.

Social entrepreneurs have existed throughout history. St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan Order, would qualify as a social entrepreneur -- having built multiple organizations that advanced pattern changes in his "field." Similarly, Florence Nightingale created the first professional school for nurses and established standards for hygiene and hospital care that have shaped norms worldwide. What is different today is that social entrepreneurship is developing into a mainstream vocation, not only in the United States, Canada, and Europe, but increasingly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In fact, the rise of social entrepreneurship represents the leading edge of a remarkable development that has occurred across the world over the past three decades: the emergence of millions of new citizen organizations.

The prosperity of the second half of the twentieth century was both a cause and an effect of social and scientific breakthroughs that have redefined human life. The biggest change is simply that people live longer and have far more freedom to think about things other than staying alive.

The communications revolution has given millions of people both a wider and more detailed understanding of the world. Because of technology, ordinary citizens enjoy access to information that formerly was available only to elites and nation-states. One consequence of this change is that citizens have become acutely conscious of environmental destruction, entrenched poverty, health catastrophes, human rights abuses, failing education systems, and escalating violence. Another consequence is that people possess powerful communication tools to coordinate efforts to attack those problems.