Resources For You
This section is designed to steer those interested in the field of social entrepreneurship to organizations you might turn to in order to better understand the needs to be addressed, fund your initiative, identify other initiatives and possible partners in your area of interest, undertake studies at graduate schools on the topic, and read magazines and other books pertinent to the topic.
Grants, Support, Fellowships and Awards
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Ashoka (www.ashoka.org), founded in 1980 by Bill Drayton, is continuously building an infrastructure that supports the growth and expansion of the field of social entrepreneurship, including seed financing and capital, bridges to the business and academic sectors, and strategic partnerships that deliver social and financial value. Ashoka Fellows receive a living stipend for an average of three years, allowing them to focus full-time on building their institutions and spreading their ideas. Ashoka has long recognized the importance of collaboration with other sectors, particularly business, whose models of competition and innovation provide critical lessons for citizen organizations. Work in this area is focused specifically on closing the historical gap between the business sector and civil society, creating important avenues for integration and synergy between both communities. In order to succeed and become sustainable, social entrepreneurs—much like business entrepreneurs—require support structures tailored to their needs.
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The Skoll Foundation (www.skollfoundation.org), founded in 1999, celebrates, connects, funds and gives visibility to select social entrepreneurs. The Skoll Foundation invests in social entrepreneurs through its flagship award program, the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. These three-year awards support the continuation, replication or extension of programs that have proved successful in addressing a broad array of critical social issues: tolerance and human rights, health, environmental sustainability, economic and social equity, institutional responsibility, and peace and security. The Skoll Awards are generally structured as a $1 million award paid out over three years, and in most cases the grant is provided to help organizations expand their programs and capacity to deliver long-term, sustainable equilibrium change. The Skoll Awards are formally presented each April at the Skoll World Forum, a major gathering of social entrepreneurs and others in the field that takes place at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School in England. A number of the social entrepreneurs featured in this book have received a Skoll award.
- Echoing Green (www.echoinggreen.org) was founded in 1987 by the senior leadership of General Atlantic LLC and the Atlantic Philanthropies, a leading global private equity firm. Its mission is “to spark social change by identifying, investing, and supporting the world’s most exceptional emerging leaders and the organizations they launch.” Through its two-year fellowship program, Echoing Green helps its network of 450 entrepreneurs with technical assistance, consulting, and growth management. Echoing Green invests mostly in younger social entrepreneurs who have a promising vision.
- The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship (www.schwabfound.org) was cofounded in 1998 by Klaus Schwab, the president and founder of the World Economic Forum, and his wife Hilde. The Schwab Foundation does not give grants or invest financially in the organizations of its selected social entrepreneurs; rather, it uses its resources to create lateral partnership, internship, and fellowship opportunities for its chosen social entrepreneurs who have successfully implemented and scaled their transformational idea. The foundation thus seeks to further the legitimacy of social entrepreneurs’ work, giving them access to high-level networks and contacts in finance, business, academia and policy-making, and enabling them to strengthen and expand their core strategy and mission
- The Acumen Fund (www.acumenfund.org), founded by Jacqueline Novogratz in 2001, seeks to prove, in its own words, that “small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor.” The fund provides extraordinary young professionals with fellowship opportunities to use their skills to effect real social change through the organization’s market-based approaches in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, India and Pakistan, encouraging collaboration with local entrepreneurs on price performance, logistics, distribution systems, scaling and technology.
- The Draper Richards Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship (www.draperrichards.org), founded by Bill Draper and Robin Richards Donahoe in 2001, provides funding and business mentoring to social entrepreneurs who are just getting started. As the offshoot of its venture capital partner firm, Draper Richards LP, the foundation brings its financial success to a nonprofit portfolio, demonstrating the new kind of hybrid model for venture philanthropy adopted by many philanthropreneurs mentioned in Chapter 10. The organization awards six new grants a year, each for a three-year period.
- Civic Ventures (www.civicventures.org), founded by Marc Freedman and John Gardner in the late 1990s, celebrates and funds individuals over sixty who have taken on an “encore career” using their professional career skills to be of service to the community in innovative ways. As noted in Chapter 2, a pilot initiative of Civic Ventures, the Purpose Prize, is one of several programs designed to reframe the debate as to what “retirees” may accomplish in the second half of their lives.
- Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE) (www.sageglobal.org), founded by accounting professor Curt DeBurg, helps high school–age youth form the belief that it is possible for them to make the world a better place, not only for themselves but for their fellow peers and familial communities. SAGE has created both local and global competitions for high school teams from all over the world to create and present their business and social enterprises. While identifying high school communities to invest in, SAGE believes that education curricula in the twenty-first century should work with students to form ethical understandings of self-reliance, creative business, and global citizenship.
- The Manhattan Institute (www.manhattan-institute.org), founded in 1978, sponsors the Award for Social Entrepreneurship to honor “non-profit leaders who have found innovative, private solutions for America’s most pressing social problems,” and those organizations whose guiding purpose and function stem from private individuals doing public good.
- The National Center for Social Entrepreneurs (www.missionmoneymatters.org) is a nonprofit consulting company founded in 1985. Its mission is to increase the effectiveness and financial self-sufficiency of the nonprofit sector by helping individual nonprofits act in a more businesslike and entrepreneurial manner. The National Center offers seminars, consulting and business services to social entrepreneurs, and offers an extensive collection of resources and learning materials on their website.
- The Institute for Social Entrepreneurs (www.socialent.org) provides education and training for social entrepreneurs in the United States and abroad, drawing upon a virtual community of social entrepreneurs and others to collaborate on specific projects.
- Social Enterprise Alliance, (www.se-alliance.org), a membership organization devoted to building nonprofits through earned income strategies, is the product of two organizations merging, the National Gathering for Social Entrepreneurs and SeaChange.
Schools
In many respects, academic institutions are taking the lead to provide a more systemic understanding of social entrepreneurship and its technical terminology. Greg Dees of Duke University, David Bornstein at New York University, Alex Nicholls at Oxford University, and Pamela Hartigan who has taught at the University of Geneva and is now helping to lead the Schwab Foundation mentioned above, have all been particularly instrumental in this process. As these individuals have brought about groundbreaking programs at their respective academic institutions, many more are increasingly forward thinking in their desire to integrate new curricula to do the same. Internationally, it is growing to be widely recognized that students are no longer content simply to study international challenges; they want to help discover solutions.
Among the leading educational institutions in social entrepreneurship are the following:
- Stanford University – Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SIE) Program (www.ssireview.org )
- The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley (www.haas.berkeley.edu)
- Columbia University – Research Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship (RISE) (www.riseproject.org)
- Duke University – Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) (www.fuqua.duke.edu)
- Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Sustainable Business
(www.bgieu.edu)
- New York University – Catherine B. Reynolds Program for Social Entrepreneurship (www.cbrf.org)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – Center for Sustainable Enterprise (www.cse.unc.edu)
- Oxford University – Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship (www.skollfoundation.org)
- University of Geneva – Entrepreneurial Solutions for Social Challenges Program
- Presidio Business School in Sustainable Management (www.presidiomba.org)
- University of California Davis – Graduate School of Business
Books
- Strategic Tools for Social Entrepreneurs: Enhancing the Performance of Your Enterprising Nonprofit. By Greg Dees, Jed Emerson, and Peter Economy
- Enterprising Nonprofits: A Toolkit for Social Entrepreneurs. By Greg Dees, Jed Emerson, and Peter Economy
- Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector. By Jane Wei-Skillern, James Austin, Herman Leonard and Howard Stevenson
- How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. By David Bornstein
- Social Entrepreneurship, New Models of Sustainable Social Change. Edited by Alex Nicholls
- The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World. By John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan
- Blessed Unrest. By Paul Hawken
- Unbowed. By Wangari Maathai
- Creating a World Without Poverty. By Muhammad Yunus
- Giving – How Each of Us Can Change the World. By Bill Clinton
Magazines
Online Social Entrepreneur Networks
There is an increasing number of online social networks that champion social entrepreneurs and in some cases, provide consulting services. They are all very different in their look and feel, but equally committed to building an infrastructure to help online visitors, and in some cases clients, access useful information. Some of the most notable social networks include the following:
- WiserEarth.org: “A collaborative tool and a comprehensive directory to link and empower the largest and fastest growing movement in the world.”
- SocialEdge.org: “By Social Entrepreneurs, For Social Entrepreneurs.”
- TakingITGlobal.org: “The world’s most popular online community for young people interested in making a difference . . . a platform for expression, connection to opportunities and support for action.”
- NetImpact.org: “A global network of 7,000 emerging leaders changing the world through business.”
- Omidyar.net: “Committed to unleashing human potential.”
- UniversityNetwork.org: “A resource hub and an action-oriented discussion forum to expand social entrepreneurship education and participation around the world.”
- YouthVenture.org: “Building a Global Movement of Young Change-Makers.”
- TacticsofHope.org: A companion website to this book designed to help all individuals, including emerging entrepreneurs, turn their concerns and passion into concrete actions. It also provides access to additional resources. The graphic below is a key feature of the website, enabling visitors to take action to turn their concerns into their own Tactics of Hope.
