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forgottengenius · 11 years

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Muhammad Yunus

Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi banker, economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient. As a professor of economics, he developed the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. These loans are given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. In 2006 Yunus and Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts through microcredit to create economic and social development from below".[2] Yunus has received several other national and international honours. He was awarded the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in 2010, and presented with it at a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol on 17 April 2013.[3]In 2008, he was rated #2 in Foreign Policy magazine's list of the 'Top 100 Global Thinkers'.[4]In February 2011, Yunus together with Saskia Bruysten, Sophie Eisenmann and Hans Reitz co-founded Yunus Social Business - Global Initiatives (YSB).

YSB creates and empowers social businesses to address and solve social problems around the world. As the international implementation arm for Yunus’ vision of a new, humane capitalism, YSB manges Incubator Funds for social businesses in developing countries and providing advisory services to companies, governments, foundations and NGOs. In 2012, he became Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland.[5][6] He is a member of the advisory board at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology. Previously, he was a professor of economics at Chittagong University in Bangladesh. He published several books related to his finance work. He is a founding board member of Grameen America and Grameen Foundation, which support microcredit. Yunus also serves on the board of directors of the United Nations Foundation, a public charity created in 1998 by American philanthropist Ted Turner’s $1 billion gift to support UN causes.[7]In March 2011, the Bangladesh government fired Yunus from his position at Grameen Bank, citing legal violations and an age limit on his position.[8] Bangladesh's High Court affirmed the removal on 8 March. Yunus and Grameen Bank are appealing the decision, claiming Yunus' removal was politically motivated.

Early years

The third of nine children,[9] Yunus was born on 28 June 1940 to a Muslim family in the village of Bathua, by the Boxirhat Road in Hathazari, Chittagong, in the British Raj (modern Bangladesh).[10][11] His father was Hazi Dula Mia Shoudagar, a jeweler, and his mother was Sufia Khatun. His early childhood was spent in the village. In 1944, his family moved to the city of Chittagong, and he moved from his village school to Lamabazar Primary School.[10][12] By 1949, his mother was afflicted with psychological illness.[11] Later, he passed the matriculation examination from Chittagong Collegiate School ranking 16th of 39,000 students in East Pakistan.[12] During his school years, he was an active Boy Scout, and travelled to West Pakistan and India in 1952, and to Canada in 1955 to attend Jamborees.[12] Later while Yunus studied at Chittagong College, he became active in cultural activities and won awards for drama.[12] In 1957, he enrolled in the Department of Economics at Dhaka University and completed his BA in 1960 and MA in 1961.

After graduation

After his graduation, Yunus joined the Bureau of Economics as a research assistant to the economics researches of Professor Nurul Islam and Rehman Sobhan.[12] Later, he was appointed lecturer in economics in Chittagong College in 1961.[12] During that time, he also set up a profitable packaging factory on the side.[11] in 1965, he received a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States. He obtained his PhD in economics from the Vanderbilt University Graduate Program in Economic Development (GPED) in 1971.[13] From 1969 to 1972, Yunus was assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro.

During the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, Yunus founded a citizen's committee and ran the Bangladesh Information Center, with other Bangladeshis in the United States, to raise support for liberation.[12] He also published the Bangladesh Newsletter from his home in Nashville. After the War, he returned to Bangladesh and was appointed to the government's Planning Commission headed by Nurul Islam. However, he found the job boring and resigned to join Chittagong University as head of the Economics department.[14] After observing the famine of 1974, he became involved in poverty reduction and established a rural economic program as a research project. In 1975, he developed a Nabajug (New Era) Tebhaga Khamar (three share farm) which the government adopted as the Packaged Input Programme.[12] In order to make the project more effective, Yunus and his associates proposed the Gram Sarkar (the village government) programme.[15] Introduced by president Ziaur Rahman in the late 1970s, the Government formed 40,392 village governments as a fourth layer of government in 2003. On 2 August 2005, in response to a petition by Bangladesh Legal Aids and Services Trust (BLAST) the High Court had declared village governments illegal and unconstitutional.[16]

Early career

In 1976, during visits to the poorest households in the village of Jobra near Chittagong University, Yunus discovered that very small loans could make a disproportionate difference to a poor person. Village women who made bamboo furniture had to take usurious loans to buy bamboo, and repay their profits to the lenders. Traditional banks did not want to make tiny loans at reasonable interest to the poor due to high risk of default.[17] But Yunus believed that, given the chance, the poor will repay the money and hence microcredit was a viable business model.[18] Yunus lent US$27 of his money to 42 women in the village, who made a profit of BDT 0.50 (US$0.02) each on the loan. Thus Yunus is credited with the idea of microcredit alongside Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan, founder of the Pakistan Academy for Rural Development (now Bangladesh Academy for Rural Development), whom Yunus greatly admired.[19]

In December 1976, Yunus finally secured a loan from the government Janata Bank to lend to the poor in Jobra. The institution continued to operate, securing loans from other banks for its projects. By 1982, it had 28,000 members. On 1 October 1983, the pilot project began operation as a full-fledged bank for poor Bangladeshis and was renamed Grameen Bank ("Village Bank"). Yunus and his colleagues encountered everything from violent radical leftists to conservative clergy who told women that they would be denied a Muslim burial if they borrowed money from Grameen.[11] By July 2007, Grameen had issued US$6.38 billion to 7.4 million borrowers.[20] To ensure repayment, the bank uses a system of "solidarity groups". These small informal groups apply together for loans and its members act as co-guarantors of repayment and support one another's efforts at economic self-advancement.[15]

In the late 1980s, Grameen started to diversify by attending to underutilized fishing ponds and irrigation pumps like deep tube wells.[21] In 1989, these diversified interests started growing into separate organizations. The fisheries project became Grameen Motsho ("Grameen Fisheries Foundation") and the irrigation project became Grameen Krishi ("Grameen Agriculture Foundation").[21] In time, the Grameen initiative grew into a multi-faceted group of profitable and non-profit ventures, including major projects like Grameen Trust and Grameen Fund, which runs equity projects like Grameen Software Limited, Grameen CyberNet Limited, and Grameen Knitwear Limited,[22] as well as Grameen Telecom, which has a stake in Grameenphone (GP), the biggest private phone company in Bangladesh.[23] From its start in March 1997 to 2007, GP's Village Phone (Polli Phone) project had brought cell-phone ownership to 260,000 rural poor in over 50,000 villages.[24]

The success of the Grameen microfinance model inspired similar efforts in about 100 developing countries and even in developed countries including the United States.[25] Many microcredit projects retain Grameen's emphasis of lending to women. More than 94% of Grameen loans have gone to women, who suffer disproportionately from poverty and who are more likely than men to devote their earnings to their families.[26]For his work with Grameen, Yunus was named an Ashoka: Innovators for the Public Global Academy Member in 2001.[27] In the book[28] Grameen Social Business Model, [4] Rashidul Bari shows how Grameen's social business model (GSBM)- has gone from being theory to an inspiring practice adopted by leading universities (e.g., Glasgow), entrepreneurs (e.g., Franck Riboud) and corporations (e.g., Danone) across the globe. Through Grameen Bank, Rashidul Bari claims [5] that Yunus demonstrated how Grameen Social Business Model can harness the entrepreneurial spirit to empower poor women and alleviate their poverty. One conclusion from Yunus' concepts is that the poor are like a “bonsai tree”, and they can do big things if they get access to the social business that holds potential to empower them to become self-sufficient.

Recognition

Muhammad Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Grameen Bank, for their efforts to create economic and social development. In the prize announcement The Norwegian Nobel Committee mentioned:[2]

Muhammad Yunus has shown himself to be a leader who has managed to translate visions into practical action for the benefit of millions of people, not only in Bangladesh, but also in many other countries. Loans to poor people without any financial security had appeared to be an impossible idea. From modest beginnings three decades ago, Yunus has, first and foremost through Grameen Bank, developed micro-credit into an ever more important instrument in the struggle against poverty.

Muhammad Yunus was the first Bangladeshi to ever get a Nobel Prize. After receiving the news of the important award, Yunus announced that he would use part of his share of the $1.4 million award money to create a company to make low-cost, high-nutrition food for the poor; while the rest would go toward setting up an eye hospital for the poor in Bangladesh.[29]Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was a vocal advocate for the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Muhammed Yunus. He expressed this in Rolling Stone magazine[30] as well as in his autobiography My Life.[31] In a speech given at University of California, Berkeley in 2002, President Clinton described Dr. Yunus as "a man who long ago should have won the Nobel Prize [and] I’ll keep saying that until they finally give it to him."[32] Conversely, The Economist stated explicitly that Yunus was a poor choice for the award, stating: "...the Nobel committee could have made a braver, more difficult, choice by declaring that there would be no recipient at all."[33]

He is one of only seven persons to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom,[34] and the Congressional Gold Medal.[35] Other notable awards include the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1984,[36] the World Food Prize,[37] the International Simon Bolivar Prize (1996),[38] the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord[39] and the Sydney Peace Prize in 1998,[40] and the Seoul Peace Prize in 2006. Additionally, Dr. Yunus has been awarded 50 honorary doctorate degrees from universities across 20 countries, and 113 international awards from 26 different countries including state honours from 10 countries.[41] Bangladesh government brought out a commemorative stamp to honour his Nobel Award.[42]

Professor Yunus was named by Fortune Magazine in March 2012 as one of 12 greatest entrepreneurs of the current era.[43] In its citation, Fortune Magazine said ″Yunus' idea inspired countless numbers of young people to devote themselves to social causes all over the world.″In January 2012, Professor Yunus featured in "Transformative Entrepreneurs: How Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus and Other Innovators Succeeded" a book by Jeffrey Harris[disambiguation needed].[44]Professor Yunus was named "Nobel-Laureate-in-Residence" at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (National University of Malaysia) on 15 July 2011.[45]

Professor Yunus delivered the Seventh Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture.[46]In January 2008, Houston, Texas declared 14 January as "Muhammad Yunus Day".[47]On 15 May 2010, Yunus gave the commencement speech at Rice University for the graduating class of 2010. On 16 May 2010, Yunus gave the commencement speech at Duke University for the graduating class of 2010. During this ceremony, he was also awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters. Professor Yunus was invited and gave the Wharton School of Business commencement address on 17 May 2009,[48] the MIT commencement address on 6 June 2008,[49] Adam Smith Lecture at Glasgow University on 1 December 2008[50] and Oxford's Romanes Lecture on 2 December 2008.[51]

He received the Dwight D. Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service from the Eisenhower Fellowships at a ceremony in Philadelphia on 21 May 2009. He was also voted 2nd in Prospect Magazine's 2008 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.[52]Yunus was named among the most desired thinkers the world should listen to by the FP 100 (world's most influential elite) in the December 2009 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.[53] On 1 March 2010, Yunus was awarded the prestigious Presidential Award from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. This is the highest honour available from the University.

#Yunus Social Business - Global Initiatives #Yunus #Nobel Peace Prize #Muhammad Yunus #Grameen Bank #Glasgow Caledonian University #Central bank #Bangladesh

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wealthnsociety · 2 years

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What is the Global Wealth And Society Programme?

The initiative Measuring Wealth to Promote Sustainable Development tries to persuade governments to look for ways to go "beyond GDP" as a primary indicator of societal progress. We aim in building a better world, so we have the Global Wealth And Society Programme which aims to promote the positive impact wealth has on sustainable projects.

Simply said, wealth is the entire value of all of our assets as a society. Wealth is significant because it symbolizes the current resources available to assure the continuation of our social and economic activities in the future.

We seek to identify the important role that the privileged have towards their respective society through the Global Wealth And Society Programme:

1.Muhammad Yunus:-

Muhammad Yunus is a Bangladeshi social entrepreneur, banker, economist, and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. He served quality education, clean water, affordable and clean energy, decent work, and economic growth.

YSB has supported over 3000 Entrepreneurs, completed a revenue of $13 Million per year $ 13 Million of social business financing, helped create over 30,000 jobs, and impacted the lives of over 3 million people in Colombia, Brazil, Haiti, The Balkans, Tunisia, India, and Uganda.

2. Sukanto Tanoto:

Sukanto Tanoto is an Indonesian businessman involved primarily in the lumber industry. Tanoto Foundation is an independent family philanthropy organization founded by Indonesian. Tanoto's business interests are represented by the Royal Golden Eagle (RGE) group of companies (previously known as Raja Garuda Mas).

The Foundation focuses on improving access to knowledge and education, with a specific focus on countries in which Tanoto has a business presence, including Indonesia, Singapore, and China.

Key activities include: Providing access to education through the provision of more than 20,000 scholarships (as of 2018), improving the quality of schools and teaching, and funding medical research into diseases prevalent in Asian populations.

With the Global Wealth And Society Programme, we also give Certification in Corporate Social Responsibility, we provide it with the aim to obtain an independent review of the corporation's or foundation's public claims for the benefit of its high-net-worth clients and partners. It is not intended to meet any legal criteria that are specific to each country and differ from one another.

#Global Wealth And Society Programme #Certification in Corporate Social Responsibility

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jordanianroyals · 6 years

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22/4/2018: The United Nations Foundation is holding its bi-annual spring board meeting in Amman, marking the second time it has convened in the Jordanian capital since October, 2007.

Queen Rania, who has been a UN Foundation board member since 2006, is also attending the meeting.

The United Nations Foundation builds public-private partnerships to address the world’s most pressing problems and broadens support for the United Nations through advocacy and public outreach. Through innovative campaigns and initiatives in issue areas including peace and security, health, climate, women’s and girls’ empowerment, and technology, The Foundation connects people, ideas, and resources to help the UN solve global problems. (Source: Petra)

The Foundation was founded in 1998 as a U.S. public charity by Ted Turner, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and Chairman of Turner Enterprises, Inc. with the mission of supporting the work of the UN. The UN Foundation focuses on issues that can help countries progress, including by tackling infectious and deadly diseases, unlocking more finance for development, improving gender data to advance opportunity for women and girls, and finding ways to help the most vulnerable populations including refugees. This year’s board meeting includes discussions and roundtable meetings with the participation of UN community members and influential Jordanian figures. Led by Jordan’s UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, Anders Pedersen, heads of UN agencies in the country will brief the board on their ongoing programs in Jordan and their future projects. Additionally, prominent Jordanian figures will brief board members on pressing issues pertaining to Jordan and the region. These include Minister of Education Omar Razzaz, former Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs and former UN Special Envoy to Libya, Abdel Elah Al Khatib, former Jordanian Minister of Social Development, Reem Abu Hassan, and Editor-in-Chief of Alghad Newspaper Jumana Ghuneimat. The board will also host a reception with the UN Community and a group of up-and-coming Jordanian social entrepreneurs, who will present their startup businesses and success stories. Finally, the board will visit local community support centers supported by UNHCR that provide services to both Syrian refugees and Jordanian nationals. In addition to Ted Turner, Chairman and Founder of the UN Foundation, and Queen Rania, the board currently has 13 other members, including Kathy Calvin, President and CEO; Valerie Amos, Director of SOAS University of London; Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations; Fabio Colletti Barbosa, former CEO of the Abril Group; Gro Harlem Brundtland, Vice Chair of the board, former Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) and former Prime Minister of Norway; Julio Frenk, President of the University of Miami; Igor Ivanov, President of the Russian International Affairs Council and former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation; N.R. Narayana Murthy, Co-Founder of Infosys Limited; Hisashi Owada, Judge, International Court of Justice; Hans Vestberg, Executive Vice President and President of Network and Technology at Verizon; Timothy E. Wirth, Vice Chair of the board and former U.S. Senator; Yuan Ming, Dean of Yenching Academy at Peking University; and Muhammad Yunus, Founder of Grameen Bank.

#Queen Rania

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adalidda · 3 years

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Illustration Photo: Mapping workshop in Wambio, Kassena Nankana District - Ghana. West Africa Forest-Farm Interface Project. (credits: Axel Fassio/CIFOR / Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0))

Yunus & Youth Global Fellowship Program for Young Social Entrepreneurs

The Yunus & Youth Global Fellowship (Y&Y Fellowship) is a virtual, six-month program that is designed specifically for operating social businesses. The program is free, with no fee or equity stake required, and the application season is now open for the seventh global cohort.

Advantages

We offer Y&Y Fellows a high-quality experience that includes access to our online training platform, interactive projects, mentoring with Fortune 500 professionals, and access to top thinkers and institutions around the world. The experience culminates in a final pitch competition with a panel of impact investors.

The Y&Y Fellowship gives you the skills you need to achieve financial sustainability, plan how to scale your business, and measure your impact.

Long after you graduate, you will be part of the Y&Y community. The relationships you build will transform your social business and ultimately help promote sustainable global development and economic growth for our world.

Eligibility

We welcome applicants between 18 and 30 years of age who hold primary decision-making power in organizations created to solve a social or sustainable challenge in their community. We seek applicants who are committed to building a business strategy that makes your organization scalable, financially sustainable, and able to quantify your impact.

The Y&Y Fellowship supports organizations that are already operational. The program methodology includes hands-on activities. These activities presuppose that you already have tested your assumptions about the solution you created and the problem you wish to solve.

Only a few countries allow organizations to register as social enterprises, so many social entrepreneurs opt to register their initiatives as non-profits or traditional businesses. For Yunus & Youth, it is essential that you are committed to solving a social or sustainability problem, and are dedicated to developing a financial model that does not depend on grants or donations.

This program is free and 100% online.

Application Deadline: Sunday, June 20, 2021 at 11:59 PM (GMT-3)

Check more https://adalidda.com/posts/AuYndaf39HXtPj3oT/yunus-and-youth-global-fellowship-program-for-young-social

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mad4india · 3 years

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Abhishek Banerjee, a 22-year-old Construction Engineering student from Kolkata came up with a Make in India solution to plastic recycling and make use of the plastic waste to make plastic bricks. According to a report, India produces over 25,000 tonnes of plastic waste daily, much of which results in landfills. After immense research and teaming up with his fellow mates, Abhishek started Plastiqube, a construction brick made entirely from plastic waste.

Founder’s Background

Abhishek Banerjee pursued his undergraduate degree in Construction Engineering from Jadavpur University, Kolkata. And he is currently pursuing his M.Sc in Management from Nyenrode Business University, Netherlands. He also completed his global management program from S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai, India.

Abhishek also has work experience of 2 years in the construction industry as a technical consultant driving sales for fire protection products in East India.

An Initiative

During a high school field trip to a brick kiln in West Bengal, the poor working conditions and risks in the brick clay industry caught his attention. He was also surprised by the environmental implications of this industry. For instance, burnt-clay brick production is a high pollution industry using fundamental production technologies that consume 35-40 million tonnes of coal every year.

Both shocked and inspired by the social conditions he came across in this industry, Abhishek decided to set out on a journey to change the world. He set his eyes on plastic recycling and tackle plastic waste.

Plastiqube – Mission to Change the World

Qube, a social enterprise, was started by four budding entrepreneurs named Abhishek Banerjee, Agnimitra Sengupta, Ankan Poddar, and Utsav Bhattacharya. Their primary aim is to change the world, one brick at a time. The major focus of the company is to develop construction bricks made of plastic waste by recycling plastic waste. By doing so, they are addressing the plastic waste disposal issue and empowering the workers subjected to abysmal working conditions in the traditional burnt-clay brick sector in India.

Qube has teamed up with several waste collectors to gather plastic waste from dustbins and junkyards from the locality. After the collection of the plastic waste, the further process such as cleaning, shredding, and heating is done and then compressed into bricks.

Suggested For You Who is Ranjeet Singh Disale? First Indian to win Global Teacher Prize worth $1 Million

Qube is grateful for being supported and endorsed by Jadavpur University as well as India’s Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise. Each Plastiqube brick costs Rs. 5 – 6 which is 8 cents whereas average clay bricks cost around Rs. 10 which is 10 cents. One unique quality of Plastiqube is that they don’t use mortar-like traditional bricks.

The Product

Starting with a mission in mind to change the way we build, Plastiqube started making bricks out of plastic wastes. The best part about these bricks is that they do not need the use of any mortar as it has an interlocking effect. We can interlock it because of the presence of grooves on its surface. The mechanism of these bricks is like that of Lego bricks.

Some additional features of the Plastiqube bricks are:

Light-weight [50% lighter]

High durability [Non-biodegradable]

Plastic agnostic [Recycles all grades of plastic]

Water repellent [No efflorescent]

Thermal and sound insulating properties

Plastiqube requires no plasterwork and uses less cement. They help in faster construction work using fewer workers. As the entire process is done at a comparatively lower cost, which makes it cost-effective and is eco-friendly too. The energy required for making Plastiqube is around 70 percent less than that of traditional bricks.

The Success Story

Abhishek’s praiseworthy hard work and dedication have earned him deserving recognition. He was a regional finalist for the United Nation’s 2018 Young Champions of Earth Awards. All the four founders were named among Forbes “30 under 30” Social Entrepreneurs for Asia. He’s also a part of Yunus and Yunus Global Fellowship, which trains and supports young social entrepreneurs.

To know more about Plastiqube, please check – Website, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

To know more about Abhishek Banerjee, please check – LinkedIn.

If you know more inspirational stories about a person, company, new idea, or social initiative, and want us to write it on mad4india.com, share such information with us on Facebook and LinkedIn.

#young entrepreneur

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creativesage · 5 years

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(via From Social Entrepreneurship to Everyone a Changemaker: 40 Years of Social Innovation Point to What’s Next)

By Diana E. Wells

Summary

Ashoka launched the field of social entrepreneurship in 1980, and today it is the largest global association of social entrepreneurs. This article provides an overview for the journal issue that focuses on insights from Ashoka’s Global Impact Study of its network of social entrepreneurs with the following 10 articles ranging from regional, gender, sector, and subject matter analyses. Over the last decade, new technologies have enabled transformations in communications, media, and financial systems that have accelerated the pace of change and radically opened new means for citizen participation. In this context, social entrepreneurship has become a globally recognized practice, welcoming corporate, university, and government participation in the movement previously dominated by the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. This article summarizes pioneering insights of Ashoka that serve as the foundation for the field, and it updates our thinking on the impact of our Fellows based on evidence from our most comprehensive survey of our global network of 3,500 social entrepreneurs in 92 countries. These data confirm the core framework for Ashoka's current vision of realizing an Everyone a Changemaker world.

Social Entrepreneurship is Transformative: Scaling it to Address New Challenges Requires an Everyone a Changemaker world

By any measure, the idea of social entrepreneurship as a way to spread effective social change for the good of all, and to address the world’s most pressing problems, has been successful. It is not an overstatement to say that, since Bill Drayton coined the phrase in the early 1980’s, social entrepreneurship as a movement has been deeply influential in philanthropy, academia, major global corporations, government, and other institutions. Consider:

Entire publications such as this journal and Stanford Social Innovation Review, among others, are devoted to social entrepreneurs’ solutions that are working. The New York Times’ weekly on-line column “Fixes” by David Bornstein, and the organization he founded, Solutions Journalism, continue to engage journalists and practitioners to report on systems-changing solutions that are working to move the needle on previously entrenched social problems. And social entrepreneurs themselves are writing books each year to tell their inspiring stories of how change happens.

Governments are looking to social entrepreneurs for new policy ideas and for transformational leadership. In the United States, we saw the establishment of the White House Office of Social Innovation and the Social Innovation Fund. In the European Union the Social Impact Fund was created, and the United Kingdom led the way in the developing the concept of social impact bonds.

The World Economic Forum and the Skoll World Forum regularly feature social entrepreneurs and their ideas. More corporate CEOs are finding that working with social entrepreneurs and young changemakers fuels their ability to see the future differently (See Mourot in this issue.)

In the last 15 years, universities have moved from offering courses in social entrepreneurship and innovation to degree programs and Centers of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. In addition, university presidents, provosts, and donors understand that these programs offer critical opportunities to prepare the next generation of leaders. Students gain a competitive edge in participating in these offerings, and universities are adding them as a means to recruit the best and brightest.

Finally, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohammed Yunus has been followed by subsequent Nobel awards to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi in 2014 -- all three social entrepreneurs with systems-changing ideas. Many other prizes, including the MacArthur, Goldman Environmental Prize, Skoll, Echoing Green, and Schwab all feature social entrepreneurs. Foundations large and small, including MasterCard, Gates, Ford, MacArthur, and Rockefeller, have all given awards or grants to social entrepreneurs.

Early on Ashoka estimated that only one in 10 million individuals has a systems-changing vision and the lifetime personal commitment to realize that vision. Meanwhile, the rate of change in the world is simply increasing too fast for the relatively few numbers of social entrepreneurs to tackle alone the challenges we are facing and the ones we will be facing soon. The old world is crumbling, and we need to quickly retool for what is coming. Rapid technological change, in creating mistrust of our national and global institutions, fraying (and in many cases tearing) of the postwar consensus on overarching social values such as tolerance, rule of law, liberalism, and even truth itself, the exponential rise of artificial intelligence, ethnic, and other nationalisms -- not to mention the growing existential threat to the human race of climate change -- will soon create a world characterized by a “new inequality.” The long-standing inequalities of wealth, race, gender, geography, education, and social status will persist, but they will be overlaid by a new inequality between individuals, institutions, communities, and nations that have the ability to drive the changes that are coming and those that will be steamrollered over by it. If we under-stand its dimensions and seize the opportunities it creates, this new framework can be a vital tool for addressing these long-standing inequalities in a transformative way.

Therefore, we need to build the specific skillset of every individual to be able to function in a world of constant change, what Ashoka calls the Everyone a Changemaker world -- a world where every young person masters the skills of empathy, leadership, teamwork, and changemaking, and where every individual has the ability to identify social problems and create positive change.

In the pages that follow, we glean key insights and themes that have emerged based on the experience of Ashoka Fellows, our network of social entrepreneurs, over the past 40 years. The articles in this volume plumb the data gathered in an extensive study comprised of survey and interviews conducted by Ashoka over the past several months and validated by LUISS University in Rome. The results present a rich portrait of the ways in which Ashoka Fellows have learned what it takes to thrive and succeed in rapidly changing contexts. More importantly, the data show us how they act as role models to inspire others to see that change is possible, and how they grow others’ changemaking skills by offering a myriad of roles for many more to participate in the change process.

Social entrepreneurs are the critical ingredient in the changemaking ecosystem. Their experience and their example are precisely what informs the conclusion that we need to build an Everyone a Changemaker world. In every field and geographic context, their innovations chart the how-to steps for stakeholders ranging from policymakers to social activists and university faculty. Their continued participation is vital to achieving that goal and once again to help us see what comes next. Accordingly, I want to focus briefly on Ashoka’s history and the evolution of our movement to further set the context for the results of this study.

Building the Field of Social Entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurs are the driving force of Ashoka’s past, present, and future. Yet, their role in Ashoka’s journey has evolved over time. Ashoka’s pathway for building the social entrepreneur-ship movement is comprised of four main stages. In the first stage, in the 1980’s, Ashoka focused on defining the qualities of truly leading social entrepreneurs and proving the concept that investing in them was an efficient way to generate large-scale impact. At the time, the term “social entrepreneur” did not even exist in the public lexicon. Ashoka demonstrated with example after example that social entrepreneurs have existed across history, cultures, and geography, and therefore that the concept had resonance globally. The name “social entrepreneur” offered an identity and the community we call “The Ashoka Fellowship” -- the world’s first professional association of social entrepreneurs -- was designed to support these individuals’ ability to persist in their changemaking for the good of all.1 It is in this stage that Greg Dees pioneered the academic field first at Yale School of Management then with the first known course on social entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Dees later launched the Center at Stanford Business School and then the Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Duke Business School in 2001. In this same period Jed Emerson began writing on social enterprise, a different endeavor. Even today social enterprise gets confused with social entrepreneurship -- see Ganz, et al 2018.2 (Osberg and Martin’s article from 20073 is the definitive discussion which Zakaras adds to in his 2018 response to Ganz,’ et al.4 Zakaras agrees with Ganz that social enterprise is not necessarily social change, then makes the important distinction that social entrepreneurship is not the same as social enterprise.)

In the second stage, new proven solutions created demand for new philanthropic models to spread what works. Ashoka’s work inspired other organizations and investors. In the 1990’s, Ashoka spread from its initial work in South and Southeast Asia to Latin America, Africa, and Central Europe. We shared our learning with Echoing Green, Omidyar, Skoll, and Schwab, all of whom were looking for highly leveraged ways to invest in big change. They, along with others, listened and added enormous fuel to the movement in the form of ideas, funding, and visibility through numerous collaborations and touch points with Ashoka’s team, its Fellows, and its broader network contributing to an ecosystem of support for social entrepreneurs. This phase of knowledge sharing spurred a kind of “wholesale” replication of the concept of social entrepreneurship where many organizations began independently replicating both financial and non-financial support to social entrepreneurs. Within Ashoka’s network, it was very early 1990 that we first recognized how social entrepreneurs were offering new roles to young people and others as changemakers5 and that doing so was key to spreading their ideas and social change efforts. And we built ties to the Corporate sector to bring added resources and ideas, as well as to expose this sector to the commitment and creativity of social entrepreneurs.

By the early to mid-2000’s, stage three was underway. We continued to expand geographically to new regions including Western Europe and the Middle East. Social entrepreneurship as a field was catapulted into a new level of awareness in the world by David Bornstein’s seminal book, How to Change the World, which featured the work of Ashoka and many of its Fellows and has been translated into more than 30 languages. Ashoka’s recognition that our social entrepreneurs offer roles to young people and others to grow their changemaking muscles inspired Ashoka to launch our Youth Venture and Changemakers competitions as new ways to spread these ideas globally with partners on multiple continents and representing a wide variety of fields. And new geographies brought new innovations to our network that then spread globally. For instance, the Ashoka Support Network founded by an Ashoka staff member in the United Kingdom now has members from around the global who engage directly with social entrepreneurs to support their work. And university professors and administrators asked for advice to answer demand from students asking for resources which we answered with Ashoka’s network of Changemaker Universities and Ashoka U.

By the late 2000’s, Ashoka built a robust global network of leading social entrepreneurs. Follow-ing our Fellows’ examples, Ashoka invited other changemakers to join us. We could see how social entrepreneurs practice a new style of leadership that enables everyone to lead -- that their constant iterative engagement with the people involved in the issues they seek to solve puts “beneficiaries” in the role of co-creator and collaborators. Ashoka Fellows serve not only as role models for those who want to make positive change in the world, but also actively recruit changemakers to get the work done and ensure it endures. Through the lens of our Fellows, we saw the world differently: one where each and every person has the power to drive change. And the way they do so is by practicing empathy, new leadership, teamwork, and changemaking. This is what an Everyone a Changemaker world looks like.

Today, social entrepreneurs have both a name and a recognized place in society. Ashoka’s pioneering role in building the field and creating the largest association of social entrepreneurs --Ashoka Fellows -- has directly served millions around the world. But beyond that, countless more have spread their ideas thanks to the numerous pathways Ashoka’s ideas and work has created for investors, partners, and influencers to contribute to the broader social good. In this fourth stage Ashoka continues to invest in finding and supporting a growing number of Ashoka Fellows, adding more than 100 per year and bringing them into our expanded network of change leaders. Ashoka benefits from the opportunity to constantly be looking for the cutting edge social innovations globally, with teams on the ground in 38 countries whose role is to do just this. As a result, Ashoka has a unique bird’s-eye view not of problems but solutions -- a sort of epidemiologist for solutions sets. Across fields and geographies, we see a common pattern: Social entrepreneurs close inequality gaps by cultivating changemakers to continue to advance a world in which everyone is a changemaker. (See Wells and Sankaran 2016 for examples of our social entrepreneurs employing and building these skills in their own institutions and movements).6

Measuring Impact

From its beginning Ashoka has sought to understand the what and how of its Fellows’ impact and how Ashoka can best support them and change for the good of all more broadly. In 1998, Ashoka launched a periodic study of our social entrepreneurs’ impact to see if those in our network were having the quality of impact our selection process was designed to produce. We also sought to understand what kind of impact Ashoka’s efforts had on their work. Doing so required designing a study to measure systems change. We began to track independent replication; policy change, and persistence as approximate measures of systems change and to test how our network was faring against these measures. In 2006 we published an article in ARNOVA about this re-porting system and the pattern that our findings over several years revealed.7 A lot has happened over the last two decades since we started: social entrepreneurship has become a globally recognized practice, and we have seen radical changes in new technology fueling revolutions in finance and communications-media which have accelerated the pace of change as well as enabled broad citizen participation. New sectors have joined the movement. Our own network of Fellows has more than doubled since 2006, and as a result we continue to learn about the how-to of social change across 92 countries and all fields of social need. Based on what we have learned over this time, our strategy has evolved and while consistent measures do offer an important perspective on patterns over time, our understanding of impact has also evolved as we learn what members of our network are doing.

While speaking to groups I have frequently gotten the question from skeptical audience members asking me to name one social entrepreneur who has “really scaled.” While there are similarities between the business entrepreneur and the social entrepreneur there is also a fundamental difference: The social entrepreneur is motivated to ensure that the solution is in the hands of the people who need it. For them, therefore, success is determined by idea spread, not by size of budget, staff, nor shareholder earnings.8 In our most recent study only 12 percent of those surveyed re-ported that their sole revenue was from the sale of products and services. One can imagine a radically different sized budget number needed to account for return on investment to account for all the resources expended by external entities which independently replicated the idea. My favorite example to illustrate this is Florence Nightingale. Nightingale is largely credited with creating the nursing profession, it was during her work with soldiers in the Crimean war where she recognized soldiers were dying due to infectious disease rather than wounds and introduced radical changes. Nightingale did build a nursing school but had no marketing machinery or branding crediting her with the idea; there were no shareholders whom she made wealthy. And yet her ideas around infectious disease control, hospital epidemiology, and hospice care revolutionized the medical industry and remain relevant today even in the face of radical advances in medicine and the extraordinary rapid changes in technology and social life in the last century since she left us.9

Unlike business, there still is no uniform standard for social impact. David Bonbright’s Keystone concept of “constituent voice” made an important contribution even before the technology and media revolutions which provided the rocket fuel enabling the widespread business practice of today bombarding customers with requests for customer feedback.10 Constituent voice, however, recognizes that customer feedback and program delivery satisfaction are very different from measures of long term social change which may be invisible or horribly uncomfortable for those experiencing needed changes for the good of all.

Ashoka’s latest view of impact has also sharpened and is articulated in the chart below. While many organizations in the sector expend vast resources to count direct service -- relatively few have focused on how to assess system change or framework change.11 Ashoka has been focused on system change since the 1990’s and today, also on measuring framework change.

What Does the Evidence Say?

This journal issue highlights some of the data from our global study, supporting our strategy, our programming and, I hope, the field more generally.

In 2018 more than 850 Ashoka Fellows from 74 countries took part in a Global Fellows Study designed to understand their impact as well as the role Ashoka has had in contributing to that impact. We do not know of a more diverse database of social entrepreneurs in the world.

The paragraphs which follow present a summary of some of the results; please find a more in-depth analysis of our findings in the articles to follow in this issue (referenced below).

The Data Set Represents a Diverse Group of Fellows in Various Sectors and Geographies

Of the 858 responses, 42 percent were women, 57 percent were male, and one percent identified as “other gender identity.” This distribution is representative of Ashoka’s overall network. The respondents focus on a wide variety of population groups including people living in poverty (55 percent), women (48 percent), and people with disabilities (25 percent). The Fellow respondents also represented a variety of business models, with 32 percent reporting that they received no revenue from selling products or services, and 12 percent reporting that they received all of their revenue from selling products or services.

LUISS University’s article in this issue analyzed Fellows’ diverse sectors of work by geography in order to explore whether Fellows’ focus areas were aligned with the priorities set by the World Bank and other international bodies. Their robust framework is easily transferable to other organizations working in the civil society sector.

Fellows Generate Systems Change that Sticks

Ashoka’s view of system change is emergent and context-dependent. It is open to a whole array of system elements as well as how they interact -- including but not limited to public policy, industry norms, changes in market systems, building new professions, how different systems interact, etc. Ashoka learns with each social entrepreneurs’ journey not simply the issues relevant in each geography where that entrepreneur is working, but the how-to’s of strategy as well as the skills required and support needed for building leadership for deep and lasting positive change.

Our metrics to measure systems change have evolved since we first conducted this study in 1998, and include: independent replication, public policy change, market change, and shifting mind-sets. As Sara Wilf details in her article in this issue, 90 percent of Fellows report having seen their idea replicated by independent groups or institutions, 93 percent reporting having changed markets and/or public policy, and 97 percent report that their strategy focuses on mindset shift.

Systems change often necessitates many different strategies targeting a diverse array of stake-holders, demonstrated by Fellows’ reported partnerships. 86 percent of Fellows report partnering with other citizen sector organizations, 72 percent with universities, and 61 percent with for-profit companies. As Arnaud Mourot details in his article, the corporate sector is learning from Fellows’ partnerships with companies by leveraging their work to rethink business to include social benefit long term.

Ashoka is a Powerful Accelerator for Fellows’ Impact

In this study Fellows report that Ashoka has had a substantial impact on their work -- from validating their identity as a social entrepreneur, to providing mission-critical financing, in the early stages of their venture, to offering access to a global network and strategic support.

A core principle which Ashoka got right from the beginning, is the discipline of applying clear criteria to a disciplined selection process. Every Ashoka Fellow elected has passed a five-stage selection process where at each of the five stages the criteria has been met. Ashoka has never been prescriptive of the how-to’s of getting to system change nor prescriptive about the time horizon for getting there. The selection process is designed to be predictive and recognizes that big change does not happen overnight which is why we recognize that we need to assess a life time pattern of persistence. As Alessandro Valera explores in his article, ), 92 percent of Ashoka Fellows reported that the stipend helped them focus full-time on their idea and several Fellows in the interviews confirmed that this early stage funding was “mission critical.” In addition, extremely high percentages of Fellows report that Ashoka had an influence on their thinking and how they practice leadership, and perhaps most importantly, that their strategy or behavior changed as a result. All told, 84 percent of Fellows agreed that Ashoka had helped increase their impact.

Maria Clara Pinheiro and Dina Sheriff detail in their article how Ashoka creates an ecosystem of support for Fellows and our entire network of partners. Fellows in the study reported that they gained a wide variety of ecosystem supports from Ashoka staff, partners, and other Fellows -- from strategic guidance and mentorship to new funding connections and wellbeing support.

Beyond interactions with Ashoka staff, Fellows report high rates of collaboration with other Fellows and partners. This is no surprise as we have heard for decades that Ashoka’s Fellowship (the global network of Fellows) has been a key source of support in allowing social entrepreneurs to persist through times of challenge. The data shows that 74 percent of Fellows have collaborated with at least one other Fellow, with an average of four peer collaborations per Fellow globally. Reem Rahman’s article reviews Fellows’ collaboration habits through case studies and explores how collaboration is key to systems change. It also speaks to a view of leadership that builds social capital and trust.13

The Study Has Surfaced Insights That Point to New Opportunities Moving Forward

Claire Fallender and Ross Hall explore how findings from this study around Fellows’ young changemaking experiences and influences in childhood are critical to Ashoka’s LeadYoung strategy and our Everyone a Changemaker mission. We see in this data that exercising a muscle of changemaking while young lays a foundation for life. It enables young people to gain more comfort with being uncomfortable -- a critical survival skill in this rapidly changing world. With new evidence validating our strategy (such as half of surveyed Fellows report leading a changemaking initiative under the age of 21), Fallender and Hall explain the incredible opportunity to create a world in which every young person has mastered changemaking skills for the social good.

Using data from this study on Fellows’ young changemaking experiences, Michael Gordon and Sara Wilf’s article create a comparison with a non-Fellow group to examine any differences. They find that there is a substantial difference both in Fellows’ first changemaking experience and childhood influences and express the need for more research into how changemaking experiences in childhood may affect adult outcomes and achievements.

Irene Wu supplements these results with a case study on young changemaking in the East Asian context. She demonstrates how East Asian Fellows’ young changemaking experiences and strategies to promote youth changemaking in their ventures differs from Fellows in other geographies. Kenny Clewett’s article is also a case study, albeit on a new trend emerging from Fellows’ work around migration and refugees. While his case study focuses on migration in the European context, he provides recommendations and insights that can be applied in other geographies as well.

Finally, Iman Bibars’ analyzes the Fellows’ impact results by gender to identify and examine a complex web of factors that may lead to impact differences for male and female Fellows. We see social entrepreneurship has created a remarkable space for women to lead -- what other sector can boast women leading institutions they founded and pursuing ideas they authored at a rate of 40 percent? Her article is a powerful call to redefine “success” in scaling asking us to examine the merits of scaling deep.

A Note on Methodology

The 2018 Global Fellows Study used a "mixed-methods" approach which incorporated both quantitative and qualitative research methodology. Of the 50 questions in the survey 47 were close-ended, enabling a purely quantitative analysis. We piloted the survey with a small group of Fellows in April. The survey was modified according to their suggestions, and any additional questions were incorporated into the qualitative interviews. LUISS University in Rome conduct-ed an audit of our data and fully validated the data and methodology.

The online survey was available to all Fellows for five weeks from May through June 2018. It was distributed to 3,363 Fellows through a combination of automated emails from Qualtrics and Dotmailer, as well as personal communications from Ashoka staff across the globe. No survey question was a force-response, and all Fellows were given the option to remain anonymous. The survey was available in 12 languages corresponding with the linguistic diversity of Ashoka’s Fellowship. In terms of accessibility, we offered Fellows without reliable internet connection in their area or other physical constraints (such as blindness) to take the survey by phone.

Overall, the survey received 858 unique respondents (26 percent of our Fellowship population) representing input from Fellows in 74 countries. The highest response rate came from Europe, with 34 percent of their Fellows, and the lowest from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which represents 17 percent of their Fellows. 62 percent of surveys were completed in half an hour or less, and 79 percent were completed in 1 hour or less.

43 Fellows were selected for one-hour qualitative interviews from a randomized sample of respondents to the survey. This sample was also representative in terms of gender and geographic location. The interviews were scheduled and conducted from June through August 2018.

Limitations of the study include potential selection bias, the survey emails going to Fellows’ spam, and the self-reported nature of the study. We did attempt to validate certain aspects of Fellows’ response (such as policy/legislative change) and verified the authenticity of any outlier response to numerical questions. In order to determine the extent of any potential “extreme opinion” bias we ran a test comparing Fellows who responded to the survey in the beginning and the end of the distribution period. We found no significant difference in these two groups’ opinions towards Ashoka in the survey, and concluded that extreme opinion bias was likely not an influencing factor in survey response.

Conclusion

It is increasingly clear that governments, corporations, philanthropy, and individual citizens alone cannot solve the world’s most pressing problems. In a world where the rate of change is ever increasing, we need more people with big ideas and the tools and competencies to work effectively across fields and sectors to realize answers together. Ashoka finds our social entrepreneurs and the patterns across our broad network to be predictive of future trends charting a path-way to where the world is going. Ashoka sees a new generation of young people who want to create change for good as part of their professional lives. 40 years ago, this professional pathway simply did not exist. It took Ashoka years to develop a way to find and bring to light those entrepreneurial innovators who were putting positive impact for the good of all before everything else. By definition, these social entrepreneurs were living the problem so deeply that they came to understand both the systems driving the problem and the key levers to solve it. And they were perceived by many, including their own families, to be either crazy, dangerous, or both. And in many countries today, this is still the case.

In those early years of building the profession, these systems-changing social entrepreneurs were the vanguards for social change. Not because of an idea alone but in the way they achieved their impact. When looking at the network of Ashoka Fellows in aggregate, Ashoka sees that what matters most in how well and how far impact is achieved is not the size of one’s budget, nor the number of those directly served. Rather it is idea spread: how many people are collectively en-gaged in achieving that impact through independent replication of the ideas, insights, and how to’s. Success in terms of impact also hinges on how well these social entrepreneurs attract and build teams with other entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial leaders across sectors. In other words, the most effective social entrepreneurs are those whose models help everyone be problem-solvers. This is the insight which has led to Everyone a Changemaker and enabled Ashoka to develop a road map to getting there.

Even in just the last decade, the world has shifted significantly. The rapid pace of change and the level of connectivity across geographies and diverse groups is unparalleled. Fellows continue to deeply live the problems they address and in order to succeed in big change they must have earned the trust from the communities they serve. Through Ashoka Fellows, Ashoka now has a deeper understanding of what it takes for people to lead and thrive in a world where so much change is happening. Ashoka sees that being able to understand the emotional state of another person (empathy) and change behavior as a result is critical to functioning in a team that is not governed simply by hierarchy and rules. The recipe for success includes practicing empathy and experience working in teams in which all are empowered. Leadership in Ashoka’s Everyone a Changemaker World requires recognizing and enabling agency directed toward the good of all. It is this foundation from which people can change their own lives and the lives of those close to them from an authentic, trust-based way. Trust inspires trust and enables ordinary people to do extraordinary things.

This critical insight is what we have learned from social entrepreneurs themselves and what has guided Ashoka’s strategic shift in the last decade. However effective individual social entrepreneurs are, and however strong our movement of social entrepreneurship may be, it is not enough if we are to avoid the crisis of the new inequality. To really bring our work to scale, to truly have idea spread go viral, we need to give young people command over the changemaking skill set. As friends, parents, aunts, uncles, educators, and caregivers to young people, we can be part of the movement to change what our education systems value. Young people, whether in the U.S. or Brazil or Sri Lanka, need to know and feel what it means to co-lead teams and empower others to address a problem that they are living. They need this just as much as math and reading skills. Having this young experience as a changemaker may not mean a career as a social entrepreneur. But it will enable us to address the challenges emerging from our rapidly changing world and to close the emerging inequality gap. And we do know it is a fundamental skill for anyone to thrive, whether they are going to lead change from within business or government, teach in a classroom, discover a new cure, write computer code, travel in space, succeed as an athlete, or support a social entrepreneur’s organization. And when young people behave this way, they inspire us to do more of the same, so that together we really can realize an Everyone a Change-maker world.

This issue of the Social Innovations Journal was curated by Diana Wells, Alessandro Val-era, Sara Wilf, and Terry Donovan.

Works Cited

1 Bornstein, David. How to change the world: Social entrepreneurs and the power of new ideas. Oxford University Press, 2007.

2 Marshall Ganz, Tamara Kay and Jason Spicer. “Social Enterprise is not Social Change.” Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring 2018).

3 Martin, Roger L., and Sally Osberg. Social entrepreneurship: The case for definition. Vol. 5. No. 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford social innovation review, 2007.

4 Zakaras, Michael. “Is Social Entrepreneurship being Misunderstood?” Medium (April 16, 2018).

5 Barone, Michael. What Does ‘change maker’ mean? Washington Examiner Magazine (July 27, 2016).

6 Wells, Diana and Supriya Sankaran. “New Paradigm for Leadership - Everyone Leads.” Next Billion (December 26, 2016).

7 Leviner, Noga and Leslie Crutchfield, Diana Wells “Understanding the Impact of Social Entrepreneurs: Ashoka’s Answer to the Challenge of Measuring Effectiveness,” Research on Social Entrepreneurship: Understanding and Contributing to an Emerging Field ARNOVA Occasional Paper Series-Volume 1, No 3) Rachel Mosher-Williams ed 2006.

8 McPhedran, Jon and Roshan Paul Scaling Social Impact When Everyone Contributes, Every-body Wins Vol 6, 2.

9 Gill, Christopher and Gillian Gill. “Nightingale in Scutari: Her Legacy Reexamined.” Clinical Infectious Diseases Vol 40: 12, July 15, 2005.

10 Proctor, Andre, and David Bonbright. "Keystone Accountability and Constituent." Harnessing the Power of Collective Learning: Feedback, accountability and constituent voice in rural development(2016): 83.

11 Meadows, Donella Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing 2008

12 Beverly Schwartz shares wonderful, in-depth case studies in: Schwartz, Beverly. Rippling: How social entrepreneurs spread innovation throughout the world. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. See also: Crutchfield, Leslie R. How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don't. John Wiley & Sons, 2018; Martin, Roger and Sally Osberg Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works. Harvard Business Review Press 2015;

13 For more on this see Praskier, Ryzard and Andrzej Nowak Social Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice Cambridge University Press 201.

Author bio

As President of Ashoka for the last twelve years, Diana Wells has led Ashoka's global expansion and significant increase in the number of Fellows, helping to shape overall strategy and operations. She implemented one of the first standard assessment tools for systems change impact. Ms. Wells has a Ph.D in anthropolgy from NYU, and she was named a Fulbright and a Woodrow Wilson Scholar. She received a BA from Brown University, where she now serves as a Trustee of the Brown Corporation.

Issue 52

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Social Innovations Journal.]

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At Creative Sage™, we love to connect corporate leaders and entrepreneurs with good causes, and help companies start genuine Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, Social Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, Impact Investing and/or philanthropy programs that are a win-win for all partners. We’re also researching new developments in the Sharing Economy that include new business models to increase profits, and also support social good.

Please do not hesitate to email us if you would like to discuss your situation and find out more about how we can help your organization move forward to a more innovative and profitable future, strengthening your branding and resonance with customers while helping to do good in the world through appropriate, authentic CSR partnerships with nonprofits, philanthropists, educational institutions and programs, or government agencies and community organizations.

We can also help you connect with celebrities and other notable people who can help amplify your message of social good, or headline entertainment events and concerts for good causes. You can call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley. We look forward to talking with you!

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#ashoka #ashokafellows #everyoneachangemaker #changemakers #socialentrepreneurship #socent #socinn #socialimpact #metrics

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iim-bangalore-blog · 7 years

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‘MAKING MONEY IS HAPPINESS, MAKING OTHER PEOPLE HAPPY IS SUPER HAPPINESS’: MUHAMMAD YUNUS

At NSRCEL-hosted talk at IIMB, the Nobel Laureate describes the challenges and rewards in building and scaling social businesses

09 February 2017, Bengaluru: “When you take off your money-making glasses and wear the social business glasses, you can see much more and make anything happen with your creativity,” declared Nobel Laureate Prof Muhammad Yunus, during his talk on ‘Building Bridges – Social and Capital’ at IIM Bangalore on February 8 (Wednesday), 2017.

The talk was hosted by NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) at IIMB, under its initiative ‘NSRCEL Social’. Through ‘NSRCEL Social’, with the support of the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, NSRCEL is extending support to social impact not-for-profit ventures, to leverage its experience of nurturing early-stage ventures to build successful social ventures.

Describing his own journey as “unplanned”, Prof. Yunus spoke about how he quit his job as an academic in the United States to return to Bangladesh and teach at Chittagong University. He said Bangladesh’s devastating economic condition after its independence in 1971 and the famine in 1974 resulted in utter misery for his countrymen, which made him think that his qualifications in Economics were meaningless if he couldn’t help his countrymen. “Although the country had beautiful land, it was mostly barren.” As water was a problem, he negotiated with the government to set up deep tube wells, then took measures to manage the same. “We had to source fertilizers and seeds. So, we launched the ‘three-share program’, wherein the profits of harvest were divided by the share-croppers, the land owners and a committee formed to facilitate these initiatives.”

When he realized that the poor continued to be at the mercy of loan sharks, he said he started lending money himself until he ran out of funds! He went to the banks, he recalled, but they refused to lend money to the poor as they were not considered credit-worthy. But when he offered to be the guarantor himself, the banks agreed. That was how, in 1983, the idea of Grameen Bank was born, he said. In 2006, Prof. Yunus and the Grameen Bank were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

His next challenge was to bring women on board and he credited his army of women students for achieving the seemingly impossible feat. “Women would say, ‘I have never handled money’. Just know it is not her voice, it is the voice of history. We need to peel off the layers of history”, he told those working with him to involve women.

His bold move made his team unpopular. “We had to calm the men down. We took sessions with the women on how to borrow money, protect money and make it grow, while protecting their family life as well. Today, we have over 9 million borrowers, and 97% of our borrowers are women. Women are on our board and decide policy,” he explained.

When he was told that women would not be entrepreneurs, he had a solution for that too. “From problem-solvers, women had become order-takers, and we aimed to change that. We gave education loans to the first generation of women borrowers so that there could be 100% literacy among the second generation, who then went on to become professionals. When they complained about scarcity of jobs, we told them to become job creators and not job seekers and gave them social business ideas and created social business funds for businesses to solve problems. We became investors for people who came with such business ideas and we have created many such businesses. No business proposal is rejected – they are reviewed, approved and we become partners. Today, there are over 12000 young people running businesses. Grameen Bank is not just a bank, it is a mission-driven social organization.”

Describing, in detail, his dream, to the audience, he said: “I dream of an economy that can be shared by everybody. We need to get out of greed-based civilization and create a society of human capability and caring and sharing. We aspire for action-oriented economics, where capital flows to every part of the society.”

The later part of the evening saw Professor Sourav Mukherji, Dean of Academic Programmes at IIMB, and Santosh Ramdoss, Program Officer, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, joining in the conversation with Prof. Muhammad Yunus.

During the Q&A session, he advised a young entrepreneur who complained that many of her employees, after she thoroughly trained them, left her firm, to take them as partners. He urged the youngsters in the room to unleash their creativity. “You are lucky to be in this day and age, in this great institution and in this city of Bangalore, which is the world capital of technology and unlimited opportunities. You have the power to change the entire world. The point is: are you aware of it?”

About the speaker: Prof. Muhammad Yunus is a globally recognized authority on evolving sustainable social business models. He is a social entrepreneur, banker, economist, and civil society leader who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of microcredit and microfinance. He has received several other national and international honours. He is a member of the Board of the United Nations Foundation. He has also served on the Global Commission of Women's Health, the Advisory Council for Sustainable Economic Development and the UN Expert Group on Women and Finance.

About NSRCEL Social: NSRCEL Social seeks to address the lack of an effective support system for early stage non-profit organizations. The non-profit incubator will select and nurture early-stage organizations over the next two years, helping them become world-class non-profits that deliver impact. The incubator is guided by an advisory committee comprising established non-profit and business leaders and faculty of IIM Bangalore.

Visit @ IIM Bangalore

#PGP #PGPEM #PGPPM #FPM #IIMB #Post Graduate Programme in Management

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cryptswahili · 5 years

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Mega 5-Day Maharashtra Startup Week Concludes: Meet The 24 Winning Startups

The Maharashtra State Innovation Society (MSInS) organises the Maharashtra Startup Week to support the startup ecosystem in the state and gives a platform for budding entrepreneurs to grow by showcasing their innovative solutions to the Government of Maharashtra.

For startups, this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to engage directly with the government and open doors to scale their solutions further and mitigate development challenges.

After four days of intense pitching sessions by the top hundred startups at the Maharashtra Startup Week, 24 startups were crowned winners of the Maharashtra Startup Week from an initial pool of over 1,500 applications. They will receive work orders of up to INR 15 Lakh ($21.3K) each through which they can demonstrate their proofs of concept (PoCs) and pilot their solutions in the state.

The second edition of the bi-annual, five-day event, organised by the Maharashtra State Innovation Society (MSInS), was held from January 28 to February 1. The winners were selected across seven sectors — agriculture, cleantech, education and skilling fintech, governance, healthcare, infrastructure and mobility, water and waste management and a miscellaneous category by a jury comprising of eminent members such as, Sudhir Srivastava, Chairman, Maharashtra Pollution Control Board; Gunjan Shukla, CFO, Paypal India; Dileep Mangsuli, CTO, GE Healthcare; Aarti Wig, CEO & Co-Founder, Yunus Social Business India; Dr. Surendra kumar Bagde, General Manager, B.E.S.T. and representatives from Intellecap, Bharat Innovation Fund, Omidyar Network, Acumen and more.

The 24 Winners At The Maharashtra Startup Week

Agriculture

SatSure: SatSure’s technology solutions are helping commoditise space data to address the macro challenges in the agriculture sector with a high impact on enabling financial inclusion of farmers and food security for the nation.

Earth Analytics India: This startup provides visibility into risks to nature and infrastructure by aggregating information from space. It helps its clients better manage their risks in agriculture, forestry, and infrastructure through these insights.

Sansaavi Bioresearch: This startup has low-cost livestock diagnostic devices, reducing dependency on rural population centralised laboratories.

Jai Kisan: Jai Kisan’s platform is built to empower the growth of rural Indians, especially farmers. It provides low-cost and timely financing for agricultural equipment, dairy equipment, and other rural yield generational assets that is flexible and transparent.

Healthcare

Impact Guru Technology Ventures: It is a tech-for-good platform that provides complete crowdfunding solutions to empower individuals, NGOs, and social enterprises to raise funds for medical emergencies, personal needs, creative projects, or any other social causes.

Ayu Devices: Ayu Devices is a technology-based healthcare company. Its innovative medical devices and services enable early screening of heart and lung diseases.

NIRAMAI Health Analytix: NIRAMAI Health Analytix is a Bengaluru-based deep-tech startup addressing critical healthcare problems through automated solutions.

Governance

Print2Block: This startup creates truthful Infrastructure for issuing digital documents on private or public blockchain.

CrossForge Solutions: This startup uses Blockchain to stop forgery of student certificates without compromising the privacy of students.

Waste Management

OMiOM Cleantech: It is a green technology company. Its innovations and technologies are dedicated towards producing clean water, air, and energy.

Chakr Innovation: This startup aims to create pioneering, sustainable, and scalable technologies to combat the grave threat posed by pollution. Its product — Chakr Shield — is an innovative emission control device that captures pollution at the source and converts it into something useful.

RECITY Network: RECITY partners with citizens to reflect, identify, and take the onus to resolve urban issues. By collaborating with experts and the government, it builds capacity for academic institutions and NGOs to implement projects developed through collective problem solving.

Water and Waste Management

Urdhvam Environmental Technologies: It provides end-to-end solutions that include consulting, design, execution, and commissioning.

CleanTech

Gorgonian Tech: This design and consultancy firm designs and manufactures custom wind turbines for building wall surfaces. These turbines are made to look like an artwork on the exterior wall, and enable onlookers/pedestrians to see the wind grazing over the wall surfaces. The art lies in the motion of these micro-turbines and hence it can termed as kinetic art rather than a wind turbine.

Smart Infra

WEGoT Utility Solutions: The startup gives access to detailed analytics and gainful insights that help with precision planning and ensure continuous supply and longer life of utilities.

Humble Shit: This is a hardware startup developing a hygiene and usability rating system for public toilets. Through a Toilet Monitoring System installed at toilets, users can rate their experience as good, average, or bad. Supervisors then receive a report based on this data, showing them how their janitorial staff are working.

Planys Technologies: Planys Technologies is an IIT Madras-incubated company that provides submersible robotic inspection and survey solutions using Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs).

FinTech

Minkville Innoventures: This startup is providing digital payment solutions which can help tribals, illiterates and villager go cashless without internet.

Phi Commerce: Phi Commerce is a new-age financial technology company focussed on innovating digital payments. Their solutions optimise efficiency for mature digital champions while taking digitally challenged businesses and consumers up the digital payments curve.

Education

LetsEndorse Development (Project Paathshala): It works towards improving the quality of school education and learning outcomes of children from low-income communities in India.

Ennoble Social Innovations: The company aims to improve the quality of life of people in developing countries through its need-based, low-cost innovative products for solving various day-to-day problems.

Skilling

Tisser Rural Handicraft: At present, Tisser links over 300 products coming from multiple rural clusters encompassing more than a thousand artisans across the country. It is creating a base for skilled, sustainable rural employment and preserving India’s traditional handicrafts in the process.

Miscellaneous

Dimension NXG: The startup, with its revolutionary product Anja, helps build custom work instructions, training modules, and data visualisations for any environment. By applying its development knowledge and technological expertise, along with an individual understanding of everyday challenges, customers can solve problems that earlier required costly customised solutions or were unsolvable.

ScoutMyTrip: ScoutMyTrip is a platform and planner for road trips anywhere in India. It enables people to discover new places or explore known places better on road trips by using a intelligent and intuitive road trip planner.

Highlights of The Maharashtra Startup Week

The Maharashtra Startup Week witnessed participation from industry stalwarts and senior government representatives, apart from the investor and influencer communities of the Indian startup ecosystem. Some of the eminent names at the event were Sambhaji Patil Nilangekar, Minister of Labour and Skill Development, Bharath Visweswariah, director, investments, Omidyar Network; and Ronnie Screwvala, cofounder, UpGrad,Vineet Rai, Founder & Chairman, Intellecap Aavishkaar Group etc.

The agenda of the workshop events was curated keeping in mind the frequently asked questions by startups. Some of the workshops conducted were: ‘Go to Market and Scaling’ by Jay Krishnan, Partner SRI Capital ‘Challenges While Starting up And Leveraging Ecosystem To Grow’, by Bala Girisaballa, president of Techstars, a seed accelerator.

While pitching sessions by startups was the key focus area of the event, there were also learning sessions and workshops by Google on machine learning, by Lexstart on fundraising for startups, and more.

One of the biggest highlights of the event was a panel discussion on ‘Making Maharashtra More Attractive For Startups: Roadmap To The Future’, which comprised panelists such as; Namita Dalmia, Principal Investments, Omidyar Network, Pooja Dhingra, founder, Le 15; Rehan Yar Khan, managing partner, Orios Venture Partners; Pranay Gupta, co-founder, 91 Springboard. The panel was moderated by Aseem Kumar Gupta, IAS, principal secretary, SDED (Skill Development and Entrepreneurship Department ).

The panel discussed how the environment in the state could be made more cohesive and collaborative for startups and the measures that could be taken by the government in terms of policies and initiatives to support the growth of startups. A VC mixer was also organised where close to 40 startups interacted with investors, corporates and senior government officials.

Global Innovation Policy Accelerator Final Conference

As part of the event, the Maharashtra State Innovation Society also hosted the final conference of the Indian iteration of the Global Innovation Policy Accelerator (GIPA). The GIPA is funded by the UK government’s Newton Fund and delivers executive development to national cohorts of senior policymakers, strengthening the implementation capabilities of their teams. In May 2018, two teams of senior policymakers and influencers from India’s central Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY) and the Maharashtra government travelled to London to receive coaching and mentoring support.

Innovation in India is fast becoming central to the dialogue around economic development. Policymakers are looking for effective approaches to foster innovation and develop skills, insights, tools, evidence and networks to help design, implement, evaluate and improve innovation policies. The GIPA is a step in this direction.

As part of the conference, the teams showcased the work they have been doing over the past nine months to a broader group of senior policymakers and thereafter plan for the long-term impact of their work.

Enabling Startups To Be Good Samaritans

The Maharashtra Startup Week has accorded startups loads of traction and much-needed opportunities, was a massive success in its second run as well.

The Maharashtra Startup Week encourages and brings to the fore startups with a view to strengthen the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. It also aims to carve out an important role for the startup ecosystem in socially relevant activities and in the state’s socio-economic development.

The post Mega 5-Day Maharashtra Startup Week Concludes: Meet The 24 Winning Startups appeared first on Inc42 Media.

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swissforextrading · 7 years

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A social impact initiative at EPFL

11.12.17 - Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize and the inventor of microcredit, visited EPFL today where he led a conference. The school took this opportunity to announce a new social impact initiative, which includes the creation of the first Yunus Social Business Center in Switzerland. In a world that sees innovation as a way to grow the bottom line, technology can also be used as a way to resolve society’s most pressing social challenges and improve the lives of millions of people around the globe. This is a natural area of interest for EPFL, a leader in innovation, which is launching the Social Impact Initiative (SII). The aim of the SII is seeks to bridge the gap between technology and innovation to maximize social impact and involve all stakeholder groups, from academia to businesses and start-ups, by bringing them together on a common theme of social impact. The SII is built on three pillars: education, innovation and awareness-raising. In the area of education, the SII is preparing to offer a new course on social impact and social entrepreneurship, including a MOOC called Social Venture. On the innovation front, last week the SII entered into its first partnership. It will team up with Buhler, which has offices at EPFL Innovation Park, to develop an innovative and low-cost crop storage facility for small farmers. Other pioneering projects are in the works as well. Yunus Social Business Center EPFL will also house Switzerland’s only Yunus Social Business Center. The partnership agreement – which was signed at the recent Global Social Business Summit in Paris in the presence of Dr. Yunus and Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris – was announced today at a public talk given by Dr. Yunus to an audience of over 350 students. Dr. Yunus, who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for creating the Grameen Bank, is a Bangladeshi entrepreneur who invented the concept of “social business” in an effort to resolve global problems in healthcare, education and poverty. He has also helped set up Yunus Social Business Centers (YSBC) around the world in order to teach this method. The SII, which will be part of EPFL's Vice Presidency for Innovation, will focus on how technology and innovation can be harnessed to make a social impact. “EPFL is known for its ability to attract some of the world’s most talented students. The Social Impact Initiative was designed to instill principles of social entrepreneurship in those students. It will also support them in completing their own social business projects, helping them to become responsible 21st-century engineers, researchers and leaders,” says Marc Gruber, EPFL’s Vice President for Innovation. During his visit, Professor Yunus said: “I believe that EPFL is at the forefront of innovation and cutting-edge technology and can be a catalyst for the creation of projects that will have a social impact.” Corinne Feuz http://actu.epfl.ch/news/a-social-impact-initiative-at-epfl (Source of the original content)

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aimeedrummond56-blog · 7 years

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Teacher Muhammad Yunus Personal wealth carries out certainly not fascinate me. I don't possess any sort of share in any type of business any type of where. Research has shown due to the fact that the '70s that summer months is actually a time for discovering loss, an opportunity when kids need, an opportunity when children are actually the preys from unlawful act, as well as a time when there is actually notable erosion of social-emotional learning. LSE's 8th annual Literary Festival, in partnership along with the Times Literary Supplement, occurred in February 2016. Actually, Prof Andy Buchanan remained in Arup London a few months ago speaking with Andrew Lawrence about several of the job they've been actually carrying out. Sunlight 6th Nov, Cinema from Battle, Royal Armouries (Second Floor), 14.00-14.35, totally free admittance along with Sunday/Weekend event successfully pass, All Ages, however simply keep in mind: Thought and feelings Bubble carries out not control panel content. It is actually certainly not just like designers have not been actually journeying- however there's a huge distinction between a developer taking place safari and also coming back along with an African Masai themed selection and a designer actually possessing an establishment in Nigeria, and having consumers they need to relate to- recognizing their lifestyles, their cultures and also past-times.

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barbraclay774918-blog · 7 years

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Hello, as well as thanks for visiting the main site for Idea Bubble - a yearly celebration that celebrates consecutive craft in each its kinds, as well as takes place every Nov in partnership with Leeds International Movie Event. She was actually a 2015/16 Cullman Other at the Nyc Municipal library, and also a seeing professor at Princeton Educational institution. If you have any concerns relating to wherever and how to use visit the next web page, you can contact us at our own web-page. Halton Something to chew on has that's very own soldiers of over 2,000 neighborhood volunteers (featuring 800 students) that nicely contribute their opportunity to supply youngsters. Our company have been satisfied along with the cooperation and also consideration that Dallas ISD as well as Large Idea have revealed in the course of the organizing phase, and also with the area's general commitment to social as well as psychological understanding," stated Can Miller, head of state of The Wallace Structure.

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Our experts also dealt with to weave in a number of the impressive techniques Halton Food for Thought is actually continuing to guarantee our pupils possess access to the healthy and balanced food items they need to fuel their success by introducing the yield from the Tremendous Grind October 26th, 2017, providing party visitors with a sneak peak from (and well-balanced samples off) some of our New Salad Bar Programs and also the unveiling of our Blender Bikes as well as Food processor Bike Video! Now in its 11th year, the event has been extended over a complete week along with a full program of celebrations at an assortment from venues all over the area. The Gallery at Munro Property & Idea Bubble Present ... THE VILLAINOUS + THE DIVINE Introduce// Reside Occasion// 1800. As an example, Amo's doctoral treatise may assist deal with the mind-body concern in psychology coming from an African point of view.

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designforsocialimpact · 7 years

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10 – GSBS, leadership and numerous hold-ups!

Our Social Business weekend frenzy carried on into the beginning of the week. On Monday and Tuesday we had the opportunity to volunteer at the Global Social Business Summit, an annual event which aims to spread awareness about social business, start discussion around the UN Sustainable Development Goals and create collaboration and networking opportunities for those in the field. The event was held in a huge tent on the grounds of Cité Universitaire with many attendees, much different to the MakeSense Room we were part of on Saturday. It was an early start for us and amongst our various volunteering positions we were able to enjoy speakers from all over, including the organiser and founder of social business, Professor Muhammed Yunus. As well as this, upon seeing the leftover catering and feeling compelled to tackle the issue of food waste, Amy, Hanna and our friend Manon took initiative and found an association, Le Chaînon Manquant, to donate the food to. Yay!

Tuesday at GSBS was simultaneously unexpected and incredible for MDES. The night before Hanna and Amy had connected with the son of Hanz Reitz [founder of Grameen Creative Lab and organiser of the GSBS]. He had last minute been tasked with conducting a workshop at the summit and felt unsure about how to go forward with conducting it. Because our program continues refining a skillset around workshop facilitation, Amy and Hanna offered to facilitate. They did a MakeSense creativity workshop condensed into half the time of a standard Hold-Up, with a challenge of “how might we create a restaurant where customers enter and exit with a good conscience about everything they were consuming and engaged in during their restaurant experience.” The process and product of the workshop was inspiring for Hanna and Amy as facilitators. Not only was it great practice, but it also allowed them to see what Design can do in the business world: getting business men and students from around Europe to break out into groups and unleash their creativity. The ending presentations saw the whole group laughing, smiling and testing hilarious prototypes for the restaurant.

On Wednesday, we had a follow-up session on personality traits with Linda, where we analysed our various behavioural habits and how we might improve and adapt. The aim being that self-evaluation and awareness can make you a better leader. That evening, it was Rica and I’s turn to facilitate our very first Hold-Up, centered around solving a challenge for our social entrepreneur, Adriana. The challenge: to build a community around her social business: Honesty, a self-coaching platform for peace.

On Thursday, we got the chance to speak with Thomas Linden, a HR executive with many years of experience in leadership. He was incredibly frank and direct. Delightfully refreshing! Like a good storyteller, he roped us in with his biggest lessons about his own personal leadership journey. I was so ready for a good story.

First, he warned us to be aware that any task when scaled into bigger projects it must be realised through others. You cannot do it alone. In order to do it with others, you need to give people time to understand it, agree with it, buy into it, act on it. Second, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."

His 7 Advices:

1. Don't prescribe, instead probe or ask [avoid manipulating people, let them provide you their knowledge]

2. Ask open-ended questions [open yourself to listening and show your interest]

3. Give your opinion last, listen first [acknowledge that as a leader you are responsible for providing space that is respected and protected so that everyone can fully listen]

4. Don't provide action plan, provide a vision or challenge

5. Be personal [care]

6. Ask/give instant feedback [use situation/behaviour/impact conversation models to give feedback, e.g. When this happened...situation...You did...behaviour...Then, did you see what happened with...impact. This way people can understand and become self-aware of the interaction and self-correct for mistakes]

7. Hire the best team

We've been doing a lot of leadership style surveys and trying to identify with the results. Some of us feel like the answers are contradictory from who we think we are. And some of it feels scarily spot-on. But when Mr. Linden said, "I can't change my personality, but I can be aware of my style and change my behaviour" it starts to make sense that there is no transformation. Only accommodation. All this self-reflection can be a little overwhelming, but I think we are getting stronger through.

Afterwards, during Design Thinking class, we began prototyping ideas for our event which will be held at the beginning of December. The theme: what art can do [for social impact]. We are realising the difficulties of event management and organisation but we’re embracing this process of iteration and experimentation through design, stay tuned!

The end of the week took us back to MakeSense, where Smarti facilitated her second Hold-Up with social entrepreneurs Champerché, who use bioponics to develop intelligent and urban agriculture. The challenge was also based on building community around Champerché, and was again an exciting way of using design methodologies to generate ideas, and help people with exciting and innovative projects. Personally, I feel like facilitating these workshops, along with our leadership classes is allowing for personal development and positive change. So keep watching this space and look out for the big >what art can do< event [coming soon].

Oh, and feel free to follow us on our new Instagram account for the visual DSI story! <dsi.paris>

#pca #designforsocialimpact #gsbs #socialbusiness #mdes

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twylaeastman2-blog · 7 years

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A Talk Along with Gary Vaynerchuk.

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In entrepreneurship, mission is actually often viewed as possibly something comparable to a four-letter-word. In this particular conservation which our team have seven primary 'species,' each having an unique role: financing companies, study teachers, graduating students, scaling business people, venture capitalists, tactical partners as well as very early adopters. Robin Li I don't presume that those which lay out to make firms with nothing in mind besides generating income are apt to do well.

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All 4 Halton Mayors as well as 20 local person of influences, politicians as well as special guests signed up with Halton Food for Thought Board Members, Staff and Trainee Health and nutrition System Volunteers on February 21, 22 and also 23 to prep as well as offer healthy breakfasts to pupils in 16 Halton Schools. Follow #AbiApple, #PierrePear, #OllieOrange, #BrockBroccoli and #CarronCarrot on our website, on Facebook @haltonfoodforthought as well as Twitter @HaltonFFT to find where their summer months adventures are going to take all of them. This cost R28.7 million to make, and also opened in 32 South African display screens, which went down to merely 10 display screens within six full weeks, making merely R2.9 thousand. Prof Juan Méndez Misery is actually specified in global legislation as the grief suffering that is intentionally caused on a person for functions of investigation, penalty or any other purpose- and that is actually extreme sufficient to qualify as torment. He educated frequently at Regent College Vancouver, and also acted as its own Analysis Lecturer of Theology coming from 1993-7. Simon Hix is actually Harold Laski Lecturer from Government in the LSE Team of Authorities. Check out/ summerlearning to read more regarding summertime possibilities within Dallas ISD. Stephen Reicher is Wardlaw Teacher in the College from Psychological science as well as Neuroscience at the College of St Andrews. Sat 15 Nov, Victoria Hall, Leeds Town Hall, off 2030, purely 18+, satisfy carry a legitimate form of photo ID and also your gathering pass to obtain access. Sat 23 Sept, Carriageworks Key Auditorium, 11:00 -11:50, free of cost admittance with Saturday/Weekend event elapsed, All Ages, however please keep in mind: Idea Blister performs certainly not console content.

Scott Situation and also Steve Case, together with their group, have actually performed a superior project at Start-up The United States Collaboration setting in motion broad start-up neighborhood initiatives throughout the USA and also elevating the understanding as well as value from entrepreneurship at a national degree. Keith Maskus, associate administrator from social scientific researches as well as lecturer from economics, chairs the committee however does not elect. Our courses feed students from daycare to senior high school as well as are at no cost, to everybody in an university neighborhood. The UN Safety and security Authorities authorised the Intergovernmental Authorization on Progression (IGAD) and the African Union (AU) to set up a security and also instruction objective in Somalia yet notified neighbouring nations not to deploy soldiers into Somalia.

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After curation shuts, extra exhibitor passes can be acquired as much as 1st August 2017 for the price of ₤ 25 - if you want to carry out this, feel free to contact our team Afterwards day, you will must acquire usual weekend/day elapseds, which will certainly be actually accessible to purchase coming from the standard box office at the convention. Sunshine 24 September, Carriageworks Center Theatre (Fifth Flooring), 11:30 -12:20, free of charge access along with Sunday/Weekend convention pass, All ages, yet please keep in mind: Idea Blister performs not control board content. Programming starts in the summer season as well as extends via elderly year in senior high school. Lecturer Muhammad Yunus An entrepreneur is an initiator, an organizer, a result manufacturer, a risk taker, a coordinator. Sat 14 Nov, Bury Theatre, Royal Armouries, 14:40 - 15:30, cost-free access along with Saturday/Weekend event pass, every ages, however feel free to details: Notion Blister does not control board material. Lecturer Lawrence Lessig That's certainly not corruption from interested-party bias that is actually triggering problems along with media, that's their incapability to concentrate or even existing sustained, informed reporting due to the astonishing competition amongst media. Christoph signed up with charitable organization: water to lead their courses, operate day-to-day procedures, as well as aid optimize our productivity and also impact worldwide. Lecturer Adam Riess The universe offers our team along with a research laboratory to consider as well as understand physics in ways that are actually merely not accessible to our company here on Earth. She was responsible for dealing with and also leading nation programmes attending to a wide scale of progression demands. This could significantly reduce the Urban Heat energy Isle Result (UHIE) within urban areas, which subsequently can decrease the necessity for air conditioning inside the lorries and also the CARBON DIOXIDE exhausts following this, again lowering the overall warmth made.

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deniscollins · 7 years

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Giving Away Billions as Fast as They Can

What is better for society, (1) government increasing taxes on the wealthiest people and deciding which social problems it wants to solve through a democratic process, or (2) huge philanthropic donations from Foundations which are decided by a small group of people, who have made way more money than they need, deciding what issues they care about? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Step aside, Rockefeller. Move over, Carnegie. Out of the way, Ford.

For the better part of a century, a few Gilded Age names dominated the ranks of big philanthropy.

No longer.

In a matter of years, a new crop of ultra-wealthy Americans has eclipsed the old guard of philanthropic titans. With names like Soros, Gates, Bloomberg, Mercer, Koch and Zuckerberg, these new megadonors are upending long-established norms in the staid world of big philanthropy.

They have accumulated vast fortunes early in their lives. They are spending it faster and writing bigger checks. And they are increasingly willing to take on hot-button social and political issues — on the right and left — that thrust them into the center of contentious debates.

Plenty of billionaires are still buying sports teams, building yachts and donating to museums and hospitals. But many new philanthropists appear less interested in naming a business school after themselves than in changing the world.

“They have a problem-solving mentality rather than a stewardship mentality,” said David Callahan, founder of the website Inside Philanthropy and author of “The Givers,” a book about today’s major donors. “They are not saving their money for a rainy day. They want to have impact now.”’

George Soros, the hedge fund billionaire and Democratic donor, recently made public the transfer of some $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations, a sprawling effort to promote democracy and combat intolerance around the world. The gift, which essentially endowed Open Society in perpetuity, made it the second largest foundation by assets in the country. The only philanthropy with more resources is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“We’re seeing a real changing of the guard,” said Mr. Callahan. “The top foundations, especially measured by annual giving, are more and more piloted by people who are alive.”

Having made billions and shaped the world with their companies, this new guard is setting lofty goals as they prepare to give their fortunes away. Take the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, established by the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. It is not looking to merely improve health in the developing world. One of its aspirations is to help “cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.”

That may sound like good news all around. If a handful of billionaires want to spend their fortunes saving lives, why not simply applaud them? But as their ambitions grow, so too does their influence, meaning that for better or worse, a few billionaires are wielding considerable influence over everything from medical research to social policy to politics.

“This isn’t the government collecting taxes and deciding which social problems it wants to solve through a democratic process,” said Eileen Heisman, chief executive of the National Philanthropic Trust, a nonprofit that works with foundations. “This is a small group of people, who have made way more money than they need, deciding what issues they care about. That affects us all.”

Ideas and Ideals

In 2015, at the ripe old age of 31, Mr. Zuckerberg made a momentous decision. He and Ms. Chan had just welcomed their first daughter into the world. Soon after, they pledged to give away 99 percent of their Facebook shares, then valued at some $45 billion, in their lifetime. “Our society has an obligation to invest now to improve the lives of all those coming into this world, not just those already here,” they wrote in a letter addressed to their daughter, posted on Facebook.

Nearly two years later, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is taking shape. Structured as a limited liability corporation rather than a traditional foundation, a move the founders say give them more flexibility, the organization is focused on three main areas: science, education and justice.

Already, the couple has committed more than half a billion dollars to create a nonprofit research center giving unrestricted funding to physicians, scientists and engineers from top California universities. They support an effort to map and identify all the cells in a healthy human body. And late last year, they pledged to spend $3 billion on preventing, curing and managing “all disease by the end of the century.”

In considering how to deploy his billions, Mr. Zuckerberg was no doubt inspired by his friend and mentor, the Microsoft co-founder Mr. Gates. Since its founding 2000, the Gates Foundation has established itself as a force without peer in big philanthropy. Not only does it have the largest endowment of any foundation, some $40 billion, but it also spends more each year, nearly $5.5 billion in 2016 alone.

The Gates’s efforts are sprawling, spanning the globe and crossing fields. Their foundation funds efforts to reduce tobacco use, combat H.I.V. and improve education in Washington state. It has spent billions to reduce the spread of infectious diseases and malaria. And its efforts have already helped a coalition of world health organizations all but eradicate polio.

Mr. Soros’s foundation differs in important ways. Rather than try to solve discrete problems like disease, Open Society aims to promote values like democracy, tolerance and inclusion, which Mr. Soros, a Holocaust survivor, holds dear. In practice, this means that his money is less likely to fund early stage medical research, and more likely to help refugees displaced by conflict.

But while the issues they address are distinct, the broad outline of these billionaire’s efforts have much in common: shaping the world in their moral image. “It is not called the Soros Foundation,” said Patrick Gaspard, the incoming president of the Open Society Foundations. “George approaches this philanthropic effort without an eye toward the preservation of his reputation and legacy, but with a fierce determination around the protection of these ideas and ideals.”

Big foundations have been making an impact since long before Mr. Gates came around, of course. In 1943, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation began working with the Mexican government in hopes of improving the country’s agricultural industry. That work spurred the “Green Revolution,” which has boosted crop yields across the developing world. The Ford Foundation helped establish the microfinance industry, partnering with Muhammad Yunus to launch the Grameen Bank.

And in recent years, some older foundations have refocused their efforts on tackling big issues.

Today, the Ford Foundation is focused on reducing inequality, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is focusing on “big bets” including combating climate change. But those legacy foundations are now largely guided by stewards, not the billionaires with their names on the door. Mr. Gates, Mr. Zuckerberg, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Soros are personally engaged in their foundations, and willing to court controversy.

Polarized Politics

When news of Mr. Soros’s $18 billion transfer of wealth to the Open Society Foundations was announced, reaction from conservatives was swift and predictable. Fox News called him an “Uber-liberal billionaire.” Breitbart News said the gift “makes his organization the biggest player on the American political scene,” adding that “the foundation’s work has supported dogmatic, aggressive left-wing groups that disrupt liberal democracy and stifle opposing voices.”

Mr. Soros became a lightning rod for conservative criticism largely because of his own political contributions rather than his foundation’s spending. He was a major donor to Hillary Clinton, and spent millions of dollars on efforts to defeat Donald J. Trump in last year’s presidential election.

Yet he is equally reviled in certain circles for his philanthropic work. Since the 1990s, Mr. Soros has used the Open Society Foundations to advance causes that are deeply unpopular with many Republicans, including loosening drug laws, promoting gay rights and calling attention to abuses by the police.

Mr. Gaspard of the Open Society Foundations asserts that Mr. Soros is not courting controversy. Rather, he said, Mr. Soros is simply on the right side of history. “The rights of the Jewish community in 1937 in Berlin may have been deemed controversial by some in that society, but we all appreciate today the inherent value in that fight,” he said. “The same is true today, when we are involved in safe needle transfers for drug addicts, or when we’re engaged in supporting the rights of sex workers in Johannesburg, or the Rohingya in Myanmar.”

Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, is also no stranger to criticism. The purpose of his foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, is to “ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people.” In practice, this has meant Mr. Bloomberg spending hundreds of millions of dollars on issues including gun control and obesity prevention, drawing the ire of Republicans who oppose what they see as excessive regulation.

Even the Gates Foundation, which is “dedicated to improving the quality of life for individuals around the world,” sometimes finds itself drawn into the culture wars. Global Justice Now, an advocacy organization based in London, said in a report that the Gates Foundation is “not a neutral, charitable strategy for which the world should be thankful” but “a specific ideological strategy that promotes neo-liberal economic policies.”

This isn’t the first time philanthropy has been politicized. A century ago, Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears Roebuck & Company, emerged as a champion of African Americans. Mr. Rosenwald, a Jewish businessman from Chicago, befriended the black educator Booker T. Washington and began funding the construction of schools for African Americans across the Jim Crow South. When the Ku Klux Klan burned down his schools, he simply rebuilt them. In doing so, Mr. Rosenwald made enemies.

“Julius Rosenwald was the first social justice philanthropist,” said Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. “He upset all of the powers in the South.”

That, in Mr. Walker’s estimation, was a good thing. And today, Mr. Walker is encouraging donors to find their inner Julius Rosenwald. “Philanthropy should not be an expression of only one’s wealth and power,” he said. “It also needs to be an expression of humility and an expression of skepticism about some of the very systems and structures that produced one’s wealth. What I hope for is that more philanthropists in this generation understand the difference between generosity and justice.”

There are equally powerful forces flexing their financial muscles on both sides of the political spectrum. And, like Mr. Soros, conservatives are using both foundations and political donations to achieve their goals.’

Though the brothers Charles and David Koch are best known for their work supporting Republicans, they also fund a network of philanthropies that support efforts to, among other things, question climate change and encourage conservative thinking on college campuses. The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah Mercer, a prominent supporter of President Trump, has bankrolled conservative think tanks including the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute.

“The wealthy have become more polarized along with the rest of America,” said Mr. Callahan. “You have more liberal, progressive wealthy people than ever before. Meanwhile, you have lots of conservative rich people. There’s this escalating arms race among mega donors.”

Impatient Optimists

John D. MacArthur made a fortune in the insurance business. But when he set up his foundation near the end of his life in the 1970s, he didn’t have strong views on what purpose it should serve. “I figured out how to make the money,” he reportedly said to one of his foundation’s original trustees. “You fellows will have to figure out how to spend it.”

For the most part, previous generations of billionaires only got serious about giving away their fortunes late in life and that has been changing. “What we’re seeing these days is people make so much money with an I.P.O. that being a philanthropist becomes an essential part of your identity in your late 20s,” said Benjamin Soskis, who studies the history of philanthropy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington.

So little time, and so much money to dispose of — that is the dilemma for today’s mega philanthropists. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Chan say they are committed to giving away their fortune in their lifetime, which is why they are beginning at such a young age. “Giving, like anything else, takes practice to do effectively,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook. “So if we want to be good at it in 10-15 years, we should start now.”

By starting sooner, Mr. Zuckerberg said his money should go further. “Any good we do will hopefully compound over time,” he wrote. “If we can help children get a better education now then they can grow up and help others too in the time we might have otherwise waited to get started.”

Mr. Gates and the billionaire investor Warren Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, which asks wealthy people to commit to donating at least half of their fortunes to philanthropic causes during their lifetimes or upon their death. They want their fellow billionaires to act with urgency. On their own website, the Gates’ describes themselves as “impatient optimists.”

In June, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com who, with a net worth of $84 billion or so, briefly supplanted Bill Gates as the richest person in the world this year, asked the public for some advice. “I’m thinking I want much of my philanthropic activity to be helping people in the here and now — short term — at the intersection of urgent need and lasting impact,” Mr. Bezos wrote on Twitter. “If you have ideas, just reply to this tweet.”

More than 48,000 replies flooded in. Mr. Bezos has not announced what he will do with his many billions, but his request for proposals was a reminder that there are untold fortunes that remain uncommitted to philanthropic causes. Nearly 200 people with a combined worth approaching $1 trillion have signed the Giving Pledge. New billionaires are beginning to ramp up their giving. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, recently founded the Emerson Collective, which is putting money toward issues including education and immigration.

And as more people commit their fortunes to philanthropy, there will be many more organizations like the Open Society Foundations, and they may be with us for a long time. “The sun never sets on George Soros’s philanthropic empire, and the money is never going to run out,” said Mr. Callahan. “His money could still be affecting public policy 300 years from now.”

It is the dawn of a new era of big philanthropy. As wealth is rapidly created and concentrated, new mega foundations are being born, each reflecting its founder’s priorities. And much as Mr. Soros, Mr. Gates, Mr. Zuckerberg and the others in their cohort have eclipsed the titans of the Gilded Age, they are likely to one day be overtaken by an even newer crop of immensely wealthy and impatient optimists.

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