"Once in a very rare while in history there is a fundamental pattern change. We're in one of those right now," says Bill Drayton in this audio lecture. Before our eyes the social sector is transforming to adopt the business sector's entrepreneurial architecture, where productivity and innovation are absolutely essential. Drayton explains how he sees the merging of pieces from both worlds as the way social entrepreneurs will flourish.
"The United States can break its dependency on oil by 2040." So says Amory Lovins, who discusses in this audio lecture the strategy outlined in his book, Winning the Oil Endgame, through which the country can eliminate its use of oil and have a much stronger economy. Most significantly, this plan does not rely on big government programs, but leans primarily on the for-profit business sector to lead the way.
SSIR Academic Editor Jim Phills spoke with Nike’s Hannah Jones about the sportswear giant’s extensive corporate social responsibility programs.
Fazle Abed explains in this audio lecture how the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) is leading grassroots efforts to achieve the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals in Bangladesh. He describes a multipronged strategy aimed at education, gender equality, health, environmental, economic, and political progress.
A growing number of foundations are offering low-interest loans, buying into green business ventures, and investing in other asset classes to advance their missions. To bring about real change, foundations need to make strategic mission investments that complement their grantmaking and leverage market forces.
Funders are calling for more program evaluation, but nonprofits are often collecting dubious data, at great cost to themselves and ultimately to the people they serve.
Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, not the isolated intervention of individual organizations.
For NGOs, impact comes in different forms and to track the cycles of social change work, we must think across the tangibility and the speed of emergence of change.
With an understanding of these 10 funding models, nonprofit leaders can use the for-profit world's valuable practice of engaging in succinct and clear conversations about long-term financial strategy.
Social entrepreneurship is attracting growing amounts of talent, money, and attention, but along with its increasing popularity has come less certainty about what exactly a social entrepreneur is and does.
