We met Ron Bruder in Lesson 11 when I shared the story of his remarkable entrepreneurial and philanthropic career. Ron’s daughter worked near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It wasn’t until the end of that nightmarish day that Ron got word that she was safe. Before the relief had worn off, he decided to devote his entrepreneurial talent—and $10 million of his own money—to creating an organization that would become Education for Employment, or EFE (www.efe.org), which could “foster hope, stability, and prosperity in the Middle East and North Africa” and just maybe prevent the next 9/11, or something even worse.

But how? Ron spent much of the next four years traveling, searching for an answer. With the help of some of the region’s top thinkers and leaders, he identified youth unemployment as the biggest problem. (The region has the highest unemployment rate in the world.) So Ron, a Jew from Brooklyn who had made a fortune building retail malls and cleaning up and developing brownfields, set out to change the economies of the Middle East and North Africa. Job training would be the key.

“Initially, I went to Washington,” he recalls. “People laughed at me.”¹ But it wasn’t the first time that experts had waved off one of Ron’s innovative ideas. Patiently and strategically, he began to piece together relationships with business and social leaders from Morocco to Yemen. He cajoled, networked, and occasionally used his money. And then in 2006 he disengaged from all his business activities to devote his financial and operational resources to what he considered his “new business.”

Since 2006, EFE has trained more than 40,000 disadvantaged young Arabs, teaching job skills and how to search for employment, placing more than 10,500 of them with the organization’s 2,100-plus employment partners, including Fortune 500 companies as well as small and medium-sized local businesses. In 2011, millions of young people took to the streets in the region’s capitals during the Arab Spring, confirming Ron’s vision that unemployment was a central problem in the region. Time magazine named him one of its 100 most influential people in the world. In 2012, he was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“When I go to a graduation and look at a young girl’s eyes,” says Ron, “and I see how she’s been empowered, or her life has been transformed, I see how her family has been transformed, I say, ‘Yesss! This is why I love what I’m doing.’ This is the most exciting thing I’ve done in my life.”

Ron will not lack for graduations to attend. Structured as a social franchise, EFE was built for long-term impact, establishing local EFE nonprofit affiliates in eight countries to date, including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria, backed up by support hubs in the United States, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates.

Ron and Gary Mendell (Lesson 38) followed in the footsteps of America’s great entrepreneur philanthropists—from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates—who transferred their business skills and passion to building large nonprofit organizations with a mission to improve the world. They are making a huge difference.