Filling the Void

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 entrepreneurs you'll meet in this story are responding to a different sort of void. It could be the absence of medical diagnostic labs in the developing world, which is driving one organization to create a portable, disposable lab that fits on a plastic card. Or it's the empty shelves of a Nepalese children's library, which inspired another man to start an education juggernaut, building nearly as many new libraries each week as Starbucks opens latte-slinging storefronts.

These problems might exist outside the traditionally defined realm of business, but the solutions are elegant, creative, and entrepreneurial to their core. They're at the heart of the third annual Social Capitalist Awards, a joint effort by Fast Company and Monitor Group, the global consulting firm, to seek out and evaluate 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.

Phalen, an African-American born into the state's foster-care system, decided to do something about it. With a grant of $12,500 and a promise from his adoptive parents to cover his rent if he went broke, he launched BELL, a rigorous after-school and summer program for kindergarten through sixth grade, out of his Boston living room in 1992. Today, the organization serves about 7,000 kids in four cities. Eighty-two percent of them read at grade level or better, despite having started the program typically more than a year behind in reading skills. Phalen's key insight--the need for a tightly knit web of volunteer mentors, parents, tutors, and teachers to support kids--was derived from his own experience. "That drives me," he says. "To know that somebody [supported] me, and all of a sudden, it took my life from going to jail to going to Yale."

Our winners live in that opportunity gap, in the liminal space between jail and Yale. They know that they are always just one investor, or one good idea, or one great execution plan away from making a difference in a world measured in lives changed. (And they measure that difference with a rigor that would make a bean-counter proud.)

What follows is a look at the compelling solutions that organizations like BELL have invented, refined, and scaled to stunning effect, and the impact they produce on the ground for individuals and communities. Ultimately, these Social Capitalists offer a different model for harnessing creativity. They also offer a seed of hope that the world's most intractable social problems will yet find their match in the inexorable drive of the entrepreneur.

Fixing Failed Markets

Some of the world's direst needs for technological invention go unmet because the people who would benefit are poor. PATH, based in Seattle, confronts that market failure by driving low-cost technology for the developing world through partnerships with companies, governments, and other nonprofits. Not only a Social Capitalist winner, PATH was also selected by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a partner in our competition, as an Outstanding Social Entrepreneur.

PATH's simple, life-saving solutions, such as clean birthing kits and disposable vaccination syringes that prevent reuse, belie the diligence and expertise required to produce these sorts of solutions routinely. In Zambia, where malaria causes 40% of deaths among children under age 5, PATH is part of a $35 million partnership to broaden use of simple malaria-prevention techniques such as insecticide-treated bed nets. "We think that if we can take the existing malaria-prevention tools to scale, we could reduce deaths by as much as 75% in the next three to five years," says PATH president Christopher Elias.