Each summer Eagle Mount’s Camp Braveheart program brings 10 to 20 kids from throughout the nation to the Bozeman area. All of them are stricken by cancer and many come from families of modest means. While here, they revel in Montana delights: horseback riding, camping, canoeing, etc.

FREE and Curmudgeon friends sponsor a day at our ranch where the kids picnic and fish our spring creek-fed ponds. “May they please use worms?” asked an Eagle Mount volunteer. "Yes," I replied. “These children may use anything but grenades.” Last Friday, each child caught and kept at least one fish. We delight in helping them enjoy what we take for granted.

Eagle Mount’s Camp Braveheart exemplifies social entrepreneurship. America fosters such ventures. How and why do they work? First, let’s unpack the concept of entrepreneurship. Like luggage after an extended trip, it’s often quite jumbled.

An entrepreneur is an essential part of any free and vibrant society. Entrepreneurs are ingenious, risk-taking innovators. All good economists recognize their importance, but most economic texts give them short shrift because they cannot be captured in a formula or model, no matter how complex or sophisticated. It’s like chess with a joker, a piece that is wild and unpredictable. The process will always remain a mystery.

We explored entrepreneurship in FREE’s June seminar, “Entrepreneurship, Telecommunications, and Social Change.” Our discussions focused on the business side of entrepreneurship. However, we noted that the social entrepreneurship as exemplified by Eagle Mount is increasingly important to meeting social challenges.

Social entrepreneurship is especially hard to measure, for it doesn’t focus on traditional profit and loss, the stuff economists measure with precision. But, as Thomas Sowell reminds us, what economists measure best is not what matters most.

Successful social entrepreneurship combines the passion of mission with discipline, innovation, and determination. It must balance thinking and feeling in a socially beneficial and businesslike manner. Those who succeed provide avenues down which people can march their good intentions by contributing time, skills, and money.

Despite the similar qualities of both for-profit and nonprofit entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs face different challenges. The revenue from a social program doesn’t indicate its social value, and thus the financial market is a poor tool for assessing the merit of these ventures. Social entrepreneurs rely on subsidies, grants, donations, and community support.

For business entrepreneurs, profit quantifies the increased value of putting resources to a higher-valued use. For social entrepreneurs, success is measured by personal fulfillment, eliminating injustice, or achieving environmental progress, and by the ability to mobilize support. If its management lacks business skills, it is likely to fail regardless of the value of the ideal promoted. The nonprofit arena is highly competitive; folks face many opportunities to invest time, talent, and funds in good causes.

So what inspires individuals to engage in social entrepreneurship?

America, the wealthiest nation in the world, is also the leader in pioneering social entrepreneurship. The reasons are cultural, economic, and institutional: we want to bring about good, we have the means to do so, and our legal structure fosters such actions.

At America’s income level, the value of increased financial wealth diminishes relative to that of pursuing good intentions. That’s why many well-educated, wealthy folks work for advocacy groups such as Heart of the Valley and the new Liberty House Foundation near the Fort Harrison VA Medical Center. (Hint for volunteers: it doesn’t yet have a web site.) It’s also why successful professionals, upon retiring, establish such world-class community organizations as Eagle Mount.

Eagle Mount mobilizes individual skills, interests, and backgrounds to provide therapeutic recreational opportunities for people with disabilities. Their entrepreneurial feat lies in creating a way to involve the community in providing outdoor recreational activities to handicapped individuals. It is a great example of a risk-taking innovation for social good.

Celebrate Eagle Mount. It enjoys phenomenal growth: new programs, new buildings, and remarkable community support. In mobilizing talented people to do good, it is a stellar example of social entrepreneurship.