The major difference between social entrepreneurs and nonprofit professionals is that social entrepreneurs aim to help the disadvantaged through business-like strategies while non-profit professionals in many cases profit from the business of helping the poor.

Wikipedia defines a social entrepreneur as someone who "recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change."

Nonprofit professional adopt a professional attitude to executing their work and may no necessarily be motivated by the cause that they are working for.

The meeting point of a social entrepreneur and a non-profit professional is the desire to make a difference to someone's life.

The difference largely lies in the process and approach of how to make the change possible.

Non-profit professionals are mainly involved with the collection of donor funds to use in designing programs to help marginalized people.

Contrarily, social entrepreneurs seek to build social capital utilizing entrepreneurial principles that are potentially more long-lasting, relevant and sustainable that what non-profit professionals may be able to bring on the table.

With social entrepreneurship, there's greater freedom to experiment with ideas that can bring the desired change to the under-served cause or community.

In addition, social entrepreneurial ideas have costs that are supposed to bear profits. With non-profit work, the idea of generating profit is non-existent. Also, non-profit professional can be very un-accountable to the communities that they seek to serve.

A social entrepreneur requires to engage more proactively with the community or cause of choice to ensure that returns on investment can leveraged to reach out to other communities.

Non-profits are severely bound by the desires of the firms or foundations that donate money to them, meaning that non profit professionals have little independence as compared to social entrepreneurs.

In my opinion, nonprofit never really challenge the status quo or the root cause of what creates social disparity. Nonprofit professionals get paid to work within the existing framework, and even if they recognize what works, it may be difficult to channel funding decisions in that direction.

On the other hand, a social entrepreneur is a visionary who develops innovative ways to fundamentally change how societies operate.

As Empowerment Gateway sums it up, social entrepreneurs are dedicated to finding new and innovative solutions to problems rather than merely patching up problems in societies they operate.

"They find what is not working in society and address the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution and persuading entire societies to take new leaps," says Empowerment Gateway.

"Social entrepreneurs are path breakers with powerful new ideas, combined with visionary and "real-world" problem solving creativity, who have strong ethical fiber and who are totally possessed by their vision or idea for change."

As I see it, the world needs more social entrepreneurs than nonprofit professionals.

Learn more about this author, Chief K.Masimba Biriwasha.
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