2005 Gathering of Leaders
The inaugural Gathering of Leaders launched with a central question—is it possible to build a community that can generate and support a collective agenda for accelerating social change?
Traveling from across the country to the historic Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York, 30 social entrepreneurs and 80 other leaders from across sectors explored the forces and factors that constrain social entrepreneurs' ability to drive broad-scale change. Participants confirmed across three days that the greatest challenges to scaling social innovation arise in the areas of talent, capital markets, and policy.
Session Highlights
Management author and educator Jim Collins led an interactive session applying his Good to Great framework to the social sector. Collins asserted that the goal isn't for nonprofits to become more business-like. Rather, the qualities of great organizations—superior performance, distinctive impact, and sustainability over time—hold across sectors, offering a common standard for organizational greatness. Participants then debated how social entrepreneurs can grow high-impact innovations in a sector where funding is often not linked systematically to high performance.
Political commentator and former presidential advisor David Gergen provided one of the Gathering's most electrifying moments when he called on social entrepreneurs to lift their gaze from the day-to-day demands of running their organizations and engage politically with forces that hold the greatest potential of all to advance, or hinder, social progress.
Action Agenda
Throughout the event, participants brainstormed ideas for the action agenda—a compilation of ideas that provided the beginning of a structure for the Gathering community's collective efforts. Ideas included the concepts of action tanking and opening government to social entrepreneurship, ways to create a social capital market, and building a more inclusive community for change.
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