Breakthroughs happen when visionary leaders come together. In February 2005 New Profit convened 30 social entrepreneurs and more than 50 other leaders from the private sector, philanthropy, academia, and government to explore new approaches to building stronger nonprofit organizations and creating systemic change. The Gathering, designed with extensive input from an advisory board of social entrepreneurs and our colleagues at Monitor Institute, featured working sessions, powerful speakers, and time for community building. Participants explored major factors affecting the potential for social entrepreneurs to achieve scale, including nonprofit capital markets, technology as a platform for movement building, and long-term scenarios for the forces that shape the potential of social entrepreneurship.

Gathering participants created an Action Agenda for Social Entrepreneurship, consisting of a set of initiatives designed to create a more favorable environment for social entrepreneurs by generating systems change in the capital markets, policy, nonprofit, and philanthropic arenas. New Profit and other Gathering participants are now in the process of launching several Action Agenda initiatives aimed at engaging social entrepreneurs more effectively with policy makers, building social capital markets, meeting the demand for talent, and reaching out to philanthropists.

Gathering Highlights

The Gathering session with Jim Collins (author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't) generated advances in framing questions about scale. Participants debated how social entrepreneurs can grow high-impact innovations in a sector where funding is not systematically linked to superior performance. Pushing to the next level, the group examined the tension between strategies for scaling organizations and for scaling impact through use of powerful organizational models as demonstrations to drive systemic change—also known as "action tanking."

Political commentator and former presidential advisor David Gergen, provided the Gathering's most electrifying moment when he challenged participants to lift their gaze and make sure that in doing what social entrepreneurs do best—relentlessly growing innovative solutions to social problems—they don't miss opportunities to engage with political forces that may hold the greatest potential of all to advance, or hinder, social progress.