Poor people typically lack useful social connections to people who have greater access to resources and opportunities. Nonetheless, many initiatives to help individuals climb out of poverty largely ignore this lack of bridging social capital. We conducted a qualitative, inductive field study of nine founders attempting to address period poverty in South Africa to understand how and why prosocial founders vary in their efforts to enhance beneficiaries’ bridging social capital. Our process model and the theory we develop help to explain important sources of this variation. Each founder we studied was attempting to address what was ostensibly the same challenge: period poverty among young women. But differences in their empathetic orientations to those they were trying to help led them to enact the beneficiaries’ challenges in different ways and this resulted in distinctly different approaches to how they shaped beneficiaries’ social capital and specifically their connections to people with greater resources and opportunities. Our paper contributes to scholarly understanding of patterned differences in how prosocial founders may shape beneficiaries’ social capital by extending theory about the role of empathy in prosocial entrepreneurship beyond how it motivates venture launch. It also provides new insights into why and how founders differ in whether their work contributes to improving the social capital connecting the poor with people who are positioned to help them. We suggest interesting avenues for future research connecting variations in founder empathy to patterned difference in how they go about try to help others.
