During what has been the rise of social entrepreneurship, a time of exponential growth in nonprofits beginning in the 1990s ... one thing that cannot escape notice is how some social entrepreneurs have been granted well-deserved “rock star” status. Geoffrey Canada is a good example. President of the Harlem Children’s Zone, he transformed a New York City antipoverty organization into what today focuses on the academic careers of youth in a 97-block area of one of that city’s poorest neighborhoods and that spurred a nationwide movement. Big-time magazine profiles, a book, and becoming one U.S. News and World Report’s “America’s Best Leaders” followed. That ascendancy of his status has helped shine a light on what our sector does, is capable of, and the pressing needs he has confronted well and we seek to fulfill.

Yet, as the business and social sectors increasingly intersected, an underlying tension revealed itself to me more and more as we all pursued improving lives: scale versus life outcomes.

As I see it, scale won — and that is part of why we have gotten distracted from the core reasons we all got into this work in the first place: to make the right kind of sustained difference in people’s lives that can ultimately lead to population-level change.

Read the full article about the right kind of difference by Andrew Wolk at Medium.