Our Purpose
The Gathering of Leaders has a simple purpose - to bring together social entrepreneurs and their partners, supporters, and champions from across sectors who believe that our collective impact will ultimately be greater than the impact any of us can have alone.
Our country faces persistent social problems in education, workforce development, public health, and other areas. Social entrepreneurs and their results-focused organizations are creating social impact across our country, but the environment in which they work typically doesn't enable their innovations to scale. Furthermore, the scope of the problems they are trying to solve is enormous. The impact any one organization can have will not be enough to solve these problems. And so, many social problems persist.
Tackling the Obstacles to Growth
Since the first Gathering in 2005, this community has focused on tackling the most significant obstacles that social entrepreneurs and their organizations face: an ineffective capital market for social innovation; a gap between social entrepreneurs and the policymakers who hold the key to driving change at city, state, and federal levels; and the difficulty of identifying, developing, and retaining exceptional talent. These obstacles are daunting - but for social innovators who aspire to create broad-scale social change, these areas may also encompass some of the most promising opportunities to shape the future.
The Gathering community and a broader network of colleagues, partners, and champions, share a vision - to work together to release the community's potential to drive transformative social change. This community has begun to build partnerships across sectors, develop initiatives to transform public problem solving, and work together to create innovative market-based solutions to our nation's most pressing social problems. Our purpose each year at the Gathering is to learn, share, and challenge each other to find ways to build our organizational and leadership capacity, bridge the gap between social entrepreneurship and government, and develop and nurture an emerging social capital market. By engaging policy and market forces, aligning actors in public problem solving, and strengthening individual organizations, the Gathering community aspires to change the systems in our nation that are broken and give all Americans renewed hope for tomorrow.
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