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When the Shoe Doesn’t Fit: An Investor’s Take on One-for-One Models
There is one model that has grabbed significantly more mainstream attention than the rest: the "one-for-one." TOMS Shoes, the best-known example, gives shoes to the shoeless when you buy a pair for yourself. But as an investor have a new set of concerns about whether and how one-for-one models can become sustainable, scalable organizations.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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From Unite for Sight: Hearing the Pitch
From recycled MP3 players given new life as educational tools to creating health centers at truck stops, to employing women with HIV as craftspeople, one highlight highlight of year’s Unite For Sight Global Health and Innovation Conference was attending social enterprise pitches - ideas in the early implementation or brainstorming stages.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care, Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Unleash Social Impact: Ashoka’s Globalizer and Skoll World Forum
Felix Oldenburg is challenging the mainstream dialogue on social enterprise. I had an insightful conversation with Felix, Ashoka’s Europe and Germany director, and a speaker at the Skoll World Forum. He, along with Konstanze Frischen and Maria Zapata, organized Ashoka’s first-annual Globalizer program that accelerated Ashoka Fellow enterprises.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise
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Why Global Social Enterprise Needs to Become Its Own Asset Class
Ashoka Fellow David Green makes the case that in order for the global social enterprise sector to truly grow, it must become its own asset class. That means taking the form of a pro-profit social entity with the right type of governance to insure fidelity to a social mission, while being supported with the right kind of financing.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Detroit: Emerging from the Ground Up
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a unique social enterprise conference, Revitalization and Business. Its focus was not on a continent, a region, or a nation in need. Rather, it focused on one single American city-Detroit, Michigan, where small projects and individuals are making powerful waves from the ground up.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Participative Innovation: The Transition to a New Model of Social Capitalism
Today, we have a much more complex inter-sector reality. It isn’t unusual to find businesses that act as NGOs, private banks that give donations, development banks that set interest rates above market prices and NGOs implementing profitable projects. One wonders if the sectors are overlapping one another or if they have simply become obsolete.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Connecting the Dots through Social Impact Measurement
Last week, the 2010 Social Enterprise Conference at Columbia Business School presented a panel called Connecting the Dots through Social Impact Measurement, joining the ongoing conversation that has surfaced in recent conferences such as SOCAP10 and ANDE.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Impact Reporting and Investment Standards – Comment Now!
The idea that for-profit investment can have positive social and environmental impact has been talked about for some time, and is increasingly being put to practice. This phenomenon of Impact Investing has the potential to complement philanthropy and government in addressing to some of the planet’s most deeply entrenched challenges...
- Categories
- Impact Assessment