A few nights ago, I made the mistake of turning on the TV news. As promised, in 22 minutes I was “given the world” — that is, a world dominated by partisan politics, terrorism and war. I turned off the TV and resolved to stay away.

It’s not that I can’t handle bad news. I turn to the news hoping to gain a faithful rendering of the world. The problem is that the version of the “world” that gets beamed into my home is like a badly doctored photograph: like an image of a forest in which almost all the trees have been edited out.

The desolate landscape left behind, I’m left to believe, is “reality.” To me, this impoverished depiction of the world — omitting vast stretches of human activity — is worse than useless; it is deadening.

But there is a hidden world out there that is very exciting. I have spent the past five years traveling around the globe, getting a glimpse of this world through the eyes of a hundred “social entrepreneurs” who are successfully advancing large-scale social changes in their societies. There is a great deal that is powerful and “newsworthy” that we do not hear about.

In India, for example, a child-protection network called Child-like, founded by a social worker, has provided emergency assistance to hundreds of thousands of street children and spread to 55 cities. In South Africa, an organization called Tateni Home Care Services, founded by a nurse, has trained thousands of unemployed youth as home-care attendants — advancing a simple model for delivering compassionate care to people with HIV / AIDS and orphaned children.

In the United States, a Washington, D.C.-based organization called College Summit, founded by a former divinity student, has helped thousands of low-income students enroll in college (with a 79 percent retention rate) and is now working with the public schools in several cities to rebuild their college guidance systems.

Each of these organizations was founded by an independent citizen; each was built up largely over the past eight years; and each represents a fundamentally new approach — a new model — for solving a particular social problem in a given context. In fact, judging from the millions of new organizations founded in recent years by citizens around the world seeking to address social problems, there are vastly more social entrepreneurs out there than terrorists, and their impact is both wider and deeper. But we rarely hear about their work. What I have seen following around social entrepreneurs for five years, I don’t think I would have seen if I had watched the TV news or read the newspapers every day for 50.

Social entrepreneurs serve the same functions vis-a-vis social change as business entrepreneurs do vis-a-vis economic change: They seize opportunities, gather resources, build organizations, overcome resistance — and, through a multi-decade process of marketing and continual adjustment, they change patterns in their industries and open up new opportunities for others.

From a global perspective, the emergence of the field of social entrepreneurship represents a fundamental reorganization of society and therefore presents widespread opportunities. What has happened is that the sector of society concerned with “social value” — a sector that for centuries has been dominated by top-down, command-and-control thinking — is beginning to resemble a bottom-up market economy, comprised of many emerging, decentralized, flexible institutions founded by entrepreneurs in response to felt needs. The result is a kind of “organized chaos” — like a global bazaar of self-motivated citizens connecting with one another, as well as with businesses and governments, and working together to co-create responsive and adaptive solutions.

This story has a personal relevance for everybody. People across the world share similar desires: They love to build things; they enjoy working with inspiring colleagues; they seek to use their talents in ways that bring security and recognition; and they want to have some fun and feel that their work is meaningful. Of course, not everyone would want to be a social entrepreneur, just as not everyone wants to start a business. But today almost everyone has the option to craft a new career in this field. Because social entrepreunership is growing so fast and in so many directions, the opportunities are wide open for people with diverse interests and skills. So if you are the kind of person who would like to align what you are good at, what you enjoy doing and what you care about — and have real a impact — this is news worth watching.

To view more, go to http://solutionsmag.stanford.edu. More information about David Bornstein is available at: http://www.howtochangetheworld.org. This column is a project of the student group FUSION (Future Social Innovators Network) and Solutions Magazine. Send questions to senior Lija McHugh (lmchugh@stanford.edu) and co-term Adam Stone (astone@stanford.edu).