Authors Cheryl L. Dorsey and Lara Galinsky open their new book, Be Bold: Create a Career with Impact, with this fact: "62 percent of graduating college seniors are interested in careers related to public service, yet only 9 percent know a great deal [about] how to go about finding a job in the nonprofit sector."

In the pages that follow, Dorsey and Galinsky — president and vice president, respectively, at Echoing Green, an innovative nonprofit that provides first-stage funding and support in the form of two-year fellowships to visionary leaders with bold ideas for social change — relate how twelve Echoing Green fellows were moved to create nonprofit organizations that fill the unmet needs of society.

Some of the individuals profiled in the book are well-known. Wendy Kopp was a college student working on her senior thesis when she had the inspired insight that led to the creation of Teach for America. Today, the organization has an annual budget of $55 million and every year places 4,000 college graduates-turned-teachers in public schools in mostly low-income neighborhoods. Elsewhere, Dorsey and Galinsky explain how former Echoing Green fellows Michael Brown and Alan Khazei founded City Year, a communty-service organization whose red-jacketed members are a familiar sight in many American cities (and which served as the model for President Clinton's AmeriCorps program).

Be Bold also offers stories of less-famous individuals doing incredible things. David Lewis went from being a heroin addict and drug dealer to founding an organization that helps people deal with their substance abuse. Lewis's organization has been credited with not only ending drug addiction for thousands but for reducing crime in East Palo Alto, California.

Regardless of their particular passion, Dorsey and Galinsky see the individuals they feature as having four characteristics in common. Almost every Echoing Green fellow, they write, experienced a crucial a "moment of obligation" in which they felt they must do something to address a particular social problem. In response to that moment, each of them then followed a similar path: they had the "gall to think big"; were capable of "seeing possibilities" where others only saw obstacles; and were willing to try "new and untested" approaches to change the status quo. Be Bold was written to inspire more individuals to follow the same path in response to their "moment of obligation."

After reading Dorsey and Galinsky's book, however, one can be forgiven for wondering whether brief case studies of visionary leaders who started organizations to fill unmet social needs is really what college graduates interested in working in the nonprofit sector need. While Be Bold tries to be a career guide, it comes up short in terms of providing concrete guidance for people interested in a nonprofit career. Nor will every college graduate want or be able to start his or her own nonprofit. And even if that were feasible, would it be desirable? Teach for America succeeds as an organization because it has 4,000 teachers, not 4,000 founders. The same could be said of all the organizations founded by Echoing Green fellows.

Be Bold is an uplifting book filled with heart-warming (and often tragic) stories that merit telling (and re-telling) because they encapsulate the best and worst of human nature. But the book works best, in this reviewer's opinion, as a companion read to more nuts-and-bolts-focused career guides. And while it will remind most readers why they want (or decided) to work in the nonprofit sector, one can also hope that, for a few, it will inspire them to stop looking for a job in the sector and, instead, go out and start their own paradigm-shifting organization. As Dorsey and Galinsky might (and Goethe did) say:

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute
 What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it;
 Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.