Most Popular Social Entrepreneurship Posts
504Ward launches $100,000 NOLA business plan competition
Published October 21, 2008 @ 08:55AM PT
Post-Katrina New Orleans is absolutely one of the emergent hubs of creative social entrepreneurship, and The Idea Village's 504Ward project has recently launched a $100,000 business plan competition designed to keep young talent living in and working to improve New Orleans. Check out the preview video:
Money quote: "This place is inspired." I'll be writing about New Orleans regularly on this blog - its simply one of the most interesting places in the world for social innovation.
Competition Deadline: December 4th.
Benetech Bookshare.org awarded $32 million
Published October 21, 2008 @ 07:38AM PT
Jim Fruchterman, the founder of Benetech, is one of the real god-fathers of the social entrepreneurship movement. Benetech focuses on using innovative and creative technologies to solve some of humanities pressing problems.
In an announcement posted on his Beneblog today, Fruchterman shared the good news that the US Office of Special Education Programs had just awarded Benetech's Bookshare.org project a $32 million contract to dramatically scale up its services which provide "print disabled people in the United States with legal access to over 41,000 books and 150 periodicals that are converted to Braille, large print or digital formats for text to speech audio."
The five year award will allow them to increase the number of students they serve by a factor of ten, as well as help them bring more than 100,000 new books into their system. Congrats Benetech!
Big Ideas: Volunteer now! via mobile
Published October 20, 2008 @ 04:26PM PT
One of the cool ideas that social entrepreneurs are beginning to experiment with is using technology to help people harness little amounts of down-time to volunteer on small but important tasks. Check out the video below, a preview of TheExtraordinaries.org, a project launched by the founders of MobileVoter.org and launched as "Volunteer Now!" at the NetSquared Mashup Challenge earlier this year.
I'm interested to see what people think:
Would you use this? What are the types of things you'd be most interested in doing? Would this augment or replace your current volunteerism? Could such a short engagement ever mirror the feeling of more hands-on volunteering?
Innovation Watch: viral marketing and a New York Times best sell
Published October 20, 2008 @ 02:30PM PT
If you read the New York Times bestseller list regularly, you may have noticed "The Green Collar Economy," by Van Jones at #12. You also may have realized that you hadn't seen the book in any of the normal places that you find out about bestsellers (Barnes and Noble display telling you what to buy anyone?).
That's because the success of the book is a success of innovative viral marketing, a testament to the creative possibilities that entrepreneurial strategies open up. This Huffington Post article has some juicy specifics and is worth a read for anyone social entrepreneur looking to build support by tapping into networks.
Wisdom Nugget: Small businesses at the core of the "sustainability ecosystem"
Published October 20, 2008 @ 10:13AM PT
With this blog, we're hoping to expand the conversation of social entrepreneurship from where it's been - largely focused on the individual stories of charistmatic leaders - to a broader systems-level look at new innovative approaches to change.
There is a great little piece on TriplePundit today by the folks at EcoUnit that suggests that small, local 
businesses have an important role at the core of the "sustainability ecosystem." Their assertion is that not only should local businesses have their own green policies, but that they can more dramatically see the on-the-ground impact of social and environmentally friendly (or harmful) businesses and can act both as partners and guardians for local communities.
Another example about people thinking about the problem first and letting the structure of the solution follow, rather than the other way around.
(Social) startups feel the pinch or philanthropy to the rescue?
Published October 20, 2008 @ 07:12AM PT
An important conversation at SoCap08 was whether those of us interested in this emerging space between business and nonprofits should consider traditional, grant-based, no-return philanthropy as a part of the investment spectrum.
I think one of the most compelling reasons to include philanthropic giving in the social enterprise and entrepreneurship discussion is the fact that it doesn't have to deal with "risk" the same way a traditional investor (or even a new social investor) does. Foundations (and for that matter, communities of individuals) can invest in new ideas with unproven business models. And while a lot of little experiments with organizations that may not be able to sustain themselves in the long run might be messy and might not satisfy needs for scale, in some ways creating a new marketplace is about throwing a lot of new ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. Philanthropic organizations are often in a better position to do that than investors who need a return (even if that return is over a longer period of time and at a lower rate than the market might normally demand). It might not be a surprise, then, that the first big wave of funding for social entrepreneurship has come from foundations like Skoll and Echoing Green.
One of the things this blog will be keeping its eyes on is how the economic downturn is impacting funding for social startups and entrepreneurial nonprofits in general. Some smart things to consider include: Lucy Bernholz's feeling that philanthropy is headed for a bit of a downturn, with possible impacts for social entrepreneurs, the GiveWell blog's discussion about whether individuals donate based on their brains or their guts and whether that's changing (important because presumably, if people were just giving "smart", high impact social startups might have a funding advantage).
What do you think, is the economic downturn going to impact funding for social entrepreneurship startups? Why or why not? (Ben, Danny, and the other Change.org leaders who are responsible for passing out the dough, what do you think?)
The Hub and Spaces for Social Change
Published October 19, 2008 @ 01:28PM PT
One of the most remarkable things about working at a university is the ability we have to use physical space and proximity to amplify and accelerate creative social entrepreneurship. With smart students, experts from every field, meeting rooms, white boards, and a sense of the possible galore, its a great space to move from ideas to action.
What's the parallel in the real world? Where do people come together to make big plans? I think the lack of spaces dedicated specifically to big thinking, big action and mutual destiny are exactly why events like Skoll World Forum and the Clinton Global Initiative are in such high demand. But, as all of us who run conferences can attest, keeping and maintaining the sense of community spirit and interaction after the event ends is incredibly difficult.
The Hub has a different take on the problem. The Hub is a social enterprise designed to "create places for people who change things." In their own words:
[We create] places with all the tools and trimmings needed to grow and develop new ventures. Places to access experience, knowledge, finance and markets. And above all, places for experience and encounter, full of diverse people doing amazing things.
Practically, The Hub has office and events spaces in 12 cities on four continents where entrepreneurs and innovators work on their big ideas together. While I haven't had the chance to visit any Hub's in person, I first heard about the idea just after having visited a similar space in Cairo called the Townhouse Gallery. 
For about a decade, the Townhouse Gallery has been a space where artists in Cairo could come together, collaborate, put on public exhibitions, lectures, and more. What started as an art space grew into a community hub. I found out about it because my girlfriend was working with Tadamon: The Egyptian Refugee Multicultural Council, which works with Tadamon not only as a space for art projects, but as a space to grow community and diversity between Cairo's local and refugee populations.
My sense is that the energy in spaces like The Hub, and like Townhouse, is the same energy that entrepreneurs seeks to capture and seek to create in their teams.
