What do you do when hundreds of attendees at social entrepreneurship's flagship event - the Skoll World Forum - find themselves stranded in England due to a volcanic eruption? Social entrepreneurship blogger Nathaniel Whittemore got the idea to throw a conference. He contacted ...
One of the reasons we launched Dowser is because the media over-reports social problems and under-reports potential solutions - and when they do cover solutions, they often do it poorly. Today I’ll look at one issue in particular: journalists who identify superficial conflicts ...
Thirty years ago, microfinance was a crazy idea. The notion that villagers, or slum dwellers, let alone women, could manage loans, and repay them dependably, was considered absurd. When I wrote my first book on the Grameen Bank in the early 1990s, many ...
Civil rights activist and serial social entrepreneur, Van Jones, resigned last September as the White House Special Advisor for Green Jobs in the wake of Glenn Beck's attack on his patriotism. In a recent Grist interview, he reflects on a year in which ...
When I was starting out as a journalist in New York in 1991, I stumbled upon an article on the Grameen Bank, the anti-poverty bank that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Up until then, I had imagined that poverty was unavoidable. ...
Three years ago New York City launched Opportunity NYC, an ambitious experiment to see if low-income, mostly single mothers could effectively be bribed to be more responsible parents. The idea was modeled on a successful Mexican program called Oportunidades, which makes cash payments ...