![](https://realizeimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Impact-Entrepreneur.png)
2011 was the year the “impact entrepreneur” was born.
Until that time, social entrepreneurship had rarely been placed within a context of systems change. As an entrepreneur, I had experienced first-hand the sense of dislocation and frustration that came from trying to build a triple bottom line company (one of the first B Corporations) in the conventional, single bottom line-dominated business world. It wasn’t easy, nor pretty. Furthermore, as a career professional in the sustainability field, well-versed in the major social and environmental challenges of the time, I felt a real sense of urgency about the need to transform the way we do business in the world — that our business needed to be the “business of change.”
Coining the term “impact entrepreneur”, characterizing impact entrepreneurship as a “systems-minded approach to social and environmental innovation”, and defining the word “impact” as “the rigorous application of blended value” and “transformation,” I believed that changemakers needed to be as focused on collaboratively building a supportive business paradigm and ecosystem — an “impact economy” — that can hold mission-driven businesses as they are on building the businesses themselves. Impact Entrepreneur was launched as the first international network of its kind in the world.
![](https://realizeimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Impact-Entrepreneurs-sample-content.jpg)
Realize Impact is Impact Entrepreneurs’s “fiscal sponsor“, a service where donors can provide donations to organizations that do work similar to a 501c3 nonprofit, but which themselves are not organized as a 501c3 nonprofit.