So many of us share a palpable hunger to make the world a better place. You can sense it in vigorous retirees still aching to contribute; and in restless baby boomers ready to marry the idealism of the '60s to all their practical skills gained since then. And you can easily detect it in young people. They refuse to inherit such hollow, bankrupt ideas as slavishly working and consuming being either their destiny or patriotic duty.
Without question, many people are ready to roll up their sleeves and dig in to fix, or at least substantially address, the very problems that evade governments and established institutions.
Some folks, David Bornstein shows us, are doing that all over the world already.
This thoughtful, well-researched book serves up plenty of hope replete with case studies from around the globe. Dig in to this book and you will believe that people with imagination and commitment can make substantial contributions. (Though, despite the author's assertion, it still helps, in a major way, to have connections to those with money or power.)
The book makes the case that a few driven people (who, as Bornstein points out, are not selfless) can make a major impact when more powerful players are either not willing or not capable to do what needs doing.
STORIES OF SOCIAL ACTION
The tapestry woven by Mr. Bornstein is mostly a collection of enlightening biographical profiles of social movers (in India, Brazil, South Africa, Hungary...). You'll find chapters on Florence Nightengale (yes, the 19th century British nurse), Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka (the organization that provides much of the foundation for Bornstein's interest and research), and others who've made great contributions with little notice.
Interspersed with the biographical profiles are essays about the phenomenon of social entrepreneuring. There is a chapter describing the "Six Qualities of Successful Social Entrepreneurs" (placed between an account of India's movement to provide access for the disabled, and a profile of former Unicef head James P. Grant).
GRAND MISSIONS, A PRACTICAL OMISSION
Quite surprisingly, what's not to be found in the book is the content promised in its very title: HOW TO. For all the delights to be found in this far-reaching and well-documented work, that's a glaring gap. The title (probably the publisher's fancy) more accurately should have been: "Changing the World" or "People Who Are Making a Difference" or anything else that neither stated nor implied HOW TO.
The book's title is accurate in regard to its reference to changing the world. Bornstein's "How to Change the World" focuses on grand schemes that do demonstrably change parts of the world.
And that's a shortcoming for most of us readers. Profiling extraordinary social entrepreneurs -- whom the book describes as being "possessed" -- is a bit like using the biographies of Ted Turner, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates to make the case that starting a business can make a major impact on the world. You certainly must agree, but you don't really know what to do about it. (Unless the "HOW TO" is to hope and pray that more possessed people step forward to do good works rather than chase more lucrative traditional careers.)
"How to Change the World" definitely is not a primer on how to do good works on a modest scale. In fact, there isn't so much as a sidebar distilling lessons for the aspiring social entrepreneur (something such as "How to Convert Your Own Stirrings Into Social Action"). A quasi-practical-sounding chapter on "Blueprint Copying" essentially says that it's a good idea not to reinvent the wheel if you don't have to.
So I left the book as I started it, still hungry for actionable advice on how to give birth to my own nascent, modestly ambitious, do-gooding idea (creating a tradition -- and mechanism -- whereby every December 26th people donate their unwanted holiday gifts to charities that can redistribute them or otherwise mine them for value. "Gift Back Day" would be a charitable version of England's Boxing Day.)
CONCLUSION
Reading this book, I did come to believe that:
1) Exceptional people with neither high office nor deep pockets (but with unusual drive and maybe some well-placed connections) can accomplish great things -- and are doing that with very impressive results. And
2) The mass media, destructively obsessed with tragedy and failure, has ignored social entrepreneuring while lazily traipsing around the old, familiar bastions of power.
Interestingly, Mr. Bornstein notes in his Conclusion:
"To be sure, some social entrepreneurs seem hard-wired. But countless other people, perhaps less single-minded and obsessive in their focus, share the desire and possess the talent to build and support citizen organizations at all levels."
Yes. And we'll be here waiting for a book that addresses us.
[A related article on the social entrepreneur phenomenon
appeared in the New York Times, December 20, 2003.]
