How Social Entrepreneurs are Changing the World

social entrepreneurship

Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Libraries, public sanitation projects, Spellman and Morehouse Colleges, Riverside Church, malaria treatment… Grand philanthropic endeavors by the likes of Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, and more recently by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet deliver the world some remarkable gifts and benefits. However, in the past two decades we’ve seen a rise in the social entrepreneur, wherein businesses can engage in delivering social benefit on different scales, but with a much more targeted impact.

The New Heroes

A recent PBS special “The New Heroes” describes as, “social entrepreneurs act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss in order to improve systems, invent and disseminate new approaches and advance sustainable solutions that create social value.” The New York Times’ David Bornstein said of the new class of businesses, “Social entrepreneurs identify resources where people only see problems. They view the villagers as the solution, not the passive beneficiary. They begin with the assumption of competence and unleash resources in the communities they’re serving.”

Rise of the New Social Entrepreneur

One of the most famous examples of social entrepreneurship is the Grameen Bank, directed by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus to deliver micro-enterprise loans to the poor in Bangladesh. It has inspired an array of analogous organizations like Malawi’s PizzaKiva and Tom’s shoes

How We Help

CrownBuyers is operated as a for-profit, social entrepreneurial organization whose mission is to take the organizations’ experience with precious metals and deliver a portion of the proceeds to improve the smiles of young children. We connected with America’s Tooth Fairy to be the vehicle for delivering the benefit. 

We receive gold crowns through the mail from hundreds of people a week, evaluate each crown for the gold content and then assign a refined value based on what we can recover at the current market price. We then send a check to the crown’s owner and the crown to the refinery. CrownBuyers then sends funds to America’s Tooth Fairy to support their expanding impact on children’s smiles. 

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