Creating social change isn’t easy work, says Cheryl Dorsey.

The status quo too often fights against it.

Social change requires vision, dedication and perseverance, and as Cheryl reflects on the evolution of social entrepreneurship over the course of the last 25 years she sees a new understanding today of the reality that profit and social responsibility in business can co-exist.

The young social-business leaders she sees today through her work as president of Echoing Green, an organization dedicated to providing seed financing to socially-responsible business ventures, are blurring the boundaries between nonprofit and for-profit work.

“You really see this sense that all business should promote double-bottom line, triple-bottom line returns,” she says.

“Prior to 2007, Echoing Green saw, literally we think, maybe one for-profit social enterprise; now, 40 percent of our deals flow are these double-bottom line, triple-bottom line businesses.”

Cheryl first became involved with Echoing Green as a fellow in the early 1990s when she embarked on the path towards social-impact business — a massive divergence from her initial chosen field of medicine.

The fact that she pursued her passion with success — much to the dismay and consternation of the people closest to her — is a great source of pride as she reflects on her career to date.

She’s been honoured this year with a Social Venture Network Hall of Fame Impact Award as a Visionary Social Entrepreneur. She’ll join the leaders of 24 other organizations at an awards celebration in New York on Nov. 13, sharing the stage with fellow pioneers of a movement that she says is changing the world.

As she considers this honour, she looks to the future of the movement as both for-profit and nonprofit organizations compete to recruit and retain the young leaders of tomorrow, those who are determined to make an impact on the world around them in their life purpose.

Her advice to up-and-coming visionaries is to hold firm to the belief that business can be a tool for world benefit, and to feed off the passion they feel in the face of adversity and possible failure.

She agrees that if you aren’t facing resistance then perhaps you aren’t thinking big enough, especially when challenging a status quo that “will use so many tools and weapons in its arsenal to maintain and solidify its existence.”

Nobody told her when she shifted careers two decades ago of how the status quo will shame visionaries into reticence — just one tool in its arsenal.

“I wish someone had told me that instead of being quieted or marginalized when you are shamed into believing that your way of thinking is the wrong way of thinking (you should recognize) that this is exactly what the status quo always does to people who are one step of ahead and can see what tomorrow looks like before anybody else can,” Cheryl says.

“Having enough confidence in your ideas and your values and your beliefs to stand up when nobody else can quite see it yet, that’s something I wish I had known 20 or 25 years ago.

“We’ve got a lot of things to fix out there so we need people to stand up and take on these issues.”

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