ABSTRACT
People have been engaged in the types of activities that today we include under the umbrella we call “social entrepreneurship” for centuries: ministering to the sick, feeding the hungry, teaching the illiterate to read, and so forth. Economic and social phenomena such as the spread of capitalism, the rise of the welfare state, and the decline of the traditional family support structure have served to make these activities more necessary and caused them to grow in scale and level of sophistication. As was suggested in Chapter 1, the problems at which these activities are targeted
Chapter 2
have also grown in intensity and scale to the point where existing governmental and private-sector institutions are no longer able to solve them, requiring a new approach to their alleviation which has taken on a life of its own.
