Once a financial hub and still a nationally renowned legal and creative center, Greater Richmond is quickly becoming known as a hotspot for social entrepreneurs. And that is a good thing for all of us.

The job of a social entrepreneur is to identify myopic parts of our world and to create new ways of moving them forward by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire communities to take new strides.

Firms like Impact Makers, a healthcare management and consulting company based in Richmond, are leading the way. This ownership-free company gives 100% of its profits to the free clinic systems in Virginia, which serves 85,000 uninsured residents of the Commonwealth each year. To earn revenue, employees work with medical management companies and health plans to build disease management programs, as well as to perform IT work, systems consulting, and program audits.

And Impact Makers is just the beginning. Firms like PlanG and Virginia Community Capital are changing paradigms, solving problems, and creating new jobs in Greater Richmond.

The past two decades have seen an explosion of entrepreneurship in the social space, which has quickly discovered what the business sector learned a long time ago: identifying and solving large-scale social problems requires a committed person with vision, zest and determination — and lucky for us, there are many Richmonders, both new and established, who fit that bill.