Social entrepreneurship has a long history of practice worldwide. However, the concept has become widely popular among researchers over the last two decades. Despite this popularity, less is known about the process, which leads to becoming a social entrepreneur. Barendsen and Gardner's study shows that many social entrepreneurs have traumatic experience in their early lives; however, there are no supporting studies investigating the impact of the background of founders on the founding decision of their entities. Because of that we utilized the models of theory of planned behavior as well as the concept of imprinting to explain the process that leads to entrepreneurial behavior. The purpose of our study is to investigate the life stories of some Turkish social entrepreneurs, and to explore which factors in these people's backgrounds may have contributed to their decisions to establish their foundations.

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Founders of social enterprises become the initiators of their institutions by prioritizing their missions, and dedicating their efforts and time. Their goals become real as a result of hard work of a group of people, who unite around their missions. Based on the literature of authenticity and authentic leadership (AL), and social entrepreneurial intention formation; it was realized that there is a high degree of intersection between some of the authenticity concepts and the previously proposed antecedents of social entrepreneurial intention. The purpose of this paper is to conceptually merge the relevant dimensions of AL with a previously suggested social entrepreneurial intention (SEI) model. The strength of SEs is often based on their values, resilience, and personal experiences of solving problems. Based on the Constructivist Self Development Theory, it is suggested in this paper that a reason why these people do their best to solve others’ – often similar- problems, may be their increased levels of authenticity throughout their challenging life experiences.