Sometimes you have to put two stories side by side to highlight the strange tradeoffs we make every day in a complex world. Today, in the New York Times, for example, we find one story that chronicles how Transocean and BP have long ...
The field of social entrepreneurship is still in its infancy, so naturally writers on the subject find plenty to disagree about, right down to basic definitions. Case in point: Carl Schramm, the CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, wrote an article this spring for ...
“Capitalism used to be easy,” writes R. Paul Herman in the opening line of his new book, The HIP (Human Impact+Profit) Investor: Make Bigger Profits by Building a Better World. Businesses, he argues, used to get away with jeopardizing the long-term health and ...
The idea of microfinance took 30 years to spread from one village to global recognition. I often wonder how much that process could have been accelerated with today's communications technologies. And I wonder: What are the key principles and the strategies that work ...
Several years ago, I was at my mother-in-law’s home for a social gathering and I got into a conversation with one of her guests, a woman in her 70s. She asked what I did for work. I told her I had just completed ...
One of the reasons we launched Dowser was to counter a pervasive bias in the news—a bias against the future. Too often journalists report on yesterday's events without giving readers a sense of the implications—and possibilities—for tomorrow. The New York Times recently ran ...
Last November, student activists won what the New York Times called the “biggest victory by far” in the history of the anti-sweatshop movement. Ten months earlier, Russell Athletic, the sportswear company, closed a factory in Honduras shortly after the workers unionized. In response, ...
Forty years ago, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson created Earth Day to call attention to impending ecological crises. Today, over 192 countries will observe it. To capture the day's meaning, we asked three leading environmentalists - Gillian Caldwell, Majora Carter, and Peter Goldmark - ...
What's the only natural resource that's increasing today? People over sixty! Each year, three million Americans turn sixty. Together, they represent a vast supply of experience, energy, capital and, yes, idealism. As our thoughts turn to the environment on Thursday, it's easy to ...
One of the limitations of the term 'social entrepreneurship' is that it conjures up images of business schools and spreadsheets. With so much focus today on impact and accountability, it's easy to forget that for many the pursuit of social change remains a ...