If you want to change the world—whether locally or globally, big or small—you’ve probably thought about starting up your own social enterprise or nonprofit. Think again. Author and Columbia University instructor Brian Reich says that too many organizations impede progress toward solving the ...
Journalist Kevin Fagan spent months immersed in the homeless community in San Francisco for his “Shame of the City” series, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003. The series not only documents the daily lives and personal struggles of homeless people ...
Mark Newberg is a one-man balancing act who has taken on three positions with a common thread: impact. Previously, he was the Senior Policy Advisor to the US Small Business Administration. Now, he dons three different roles while pushing for business approaches that ...
The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs, commonly referred to as ANDE, targets the often-overlooked sector of small businesses in emerging markets. By working through intermediary organizations, such as Ashoka, Skoll, Endeavor, Accion, Inveneo, and more, ANDE hopes that more investors, multinationals, and international ...
Steve Rothschild’s recent book, The Non-Nonprofit, argues that issue-focused non-profits would do well to take some cues from corporate, market-driven approaches. After an extensive career in the corporate world, Rothschild managed several non-profits--including Twin Cities Rise, which focuses on training men from underemployed ...
Beverly Schwartz, the author of Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation throughout the World, serves as Vice President of Social Marketing at Ashoka. We caught up with her just before the launch of her new book. Dowser: In a nutshell, what is the ...
When I first met filmmaker and activist Shekhar Kapur, he asked me about my jeans. Did I know their history? In particular, did I know how much water was used in the process of producing them. I did not. He informed me that ...
Alongside the surge in international attention since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, there has been a sustained criticism of the way outside interventions have operated in the most destitute country in the Western hemisphere. One start-up organization, KOURAJ, is trying to break from ...
Everywhere you look—the Republican primaries, Occupy Wall Street, the media—the spotlight is on fixing the economy. Some critics have charged that the economy, as we know it, never really worked in the first place—and that alternative money systems might be more equitable. You ...
Every year, the UN chooses a social or environmental issue of global importance -- such as biodiversity (2010) or microcredit (2005) or sanitation (2008) -- to bring attention to the issue or issues, and to drive resources toward solving them. This year, 2012, is ...