Many of us want to change the world,some in small ways, others in large.The thoughts and example of Gandhi or Martin Luther King remain a powerful force for struggling communities. Social movements focused on the right to land, to food, to water are making a difference in the lives of countless people. Political gures such as Mikhail Gorbachev or Nelson Mandela have ignited profound social change.Yet for many activists,the world of business has remained separate, sometimes hostile, often suspect.

In this important book, journalist David Bornstein sees social entrepreneurs as a new and major global force for change, describing their activity through case studies from Bangladesh,Brazil, Hungary, India, Poland, South Africa and the United States. Social innovators are much more than nonprofit organizations with busi- ness skills: They are “transformative forces: people with new ideas to address major problems who are relent- less in the pursuit of their visions, people who simply will not take ‘no’ for an answer, who will not give up until they have spread their ideas as far as they possibly can.”

How to Change the World moves between describing particular projects and discerning the elements of the social entrepreneur in each of these. The projects include social entrepreneurs spreading rural electrification in Brazil, founding Childline to protect distressed children in India and caring for AIDS patients in South Africa.As important are the descriptions of how the social entrepreneurs arrived at their breakthroughs.

Bornstein ends his book with suggestions on how this new sector of social entrepreneurship could spread further “to resemble a market economy of social ideas,” could be studied in academia, promoted by governments, funded by foundations and business and reported on by the media. Bornstein describes a process by which such model programs could bring major social change.

Despite these and other ground-breaking examples of public-private partnerships that unleash the entrepreneurial spirit, in my work I also see a deep suspicion of growing corporate power, of the United Nations’ expanding partnerships with business, and strong opposition to government policies that privatize water and dismantle social services in the name of efficiency. How to Change the World reconfigures the connections among civil society, government and busi- ness, but much remains to be done.

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