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A Formula for Social Innovation?: Reflections from the UN Social Innovation Summit, 2012.
At last week’s United Nations Social Innovation Summit in New York, all manner of change agents - from social entrepreneurs, to philanthropists, industry titans, impact investors and celebrities stretched the confines of a term that, admittedly, gets thrown around haphazardly and can mean different things to different people. What exactly is “social innovation?”
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- Impact Assessment, Technology
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NexThought Monday: Mindful Metrics – A Conversation With GBF’s Metrics Officer
This guest post from the Grassroots Business Fund is part of a short series on approaches to metrics, leading to the upcoming Metrics Conference from the Ground Up Conference later this month hosted by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs. Allison Basile joined the Grassroots Business Fund (GBF) in 2009 and serves as its metrics officer, a role in which she oversees the organization’s metrics and environmental and social management
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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Catchafire matches talented volunteers with opportunities to serve
Tom D’Eri needed some help. In September of last year, he co-founded a small social enterprise that helps people with autism find employment. He quickly realized that he needed some outside assistance with things like branding and website development, topics that he didn’t have much experience with himself.
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- Impact Assessment
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How Financial Innovation Can Save the World
Financial innovation got a bad rep in the financial crisis. But inside the well-barricaded Federal Reserve Bank in downtown San Francisco last month, the financial engineers were at it again.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact investing
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Bottoms Up: A Thought Experiment on Designing for Social Impact
I have been a participant in several student-led communities lately that demonstrated some of the social principles of biomomicry: The Social Enterprise Boot Camp (a collaboration between Columbia, NYU and SVA Design for Social Innovation), GES (Global Engagement Summit at Northwestern) and the NYC Creative Interns. While they still may not have cracked the code for how we will evolve to become a sustainable species, they provide enough hope to keep us all working at it.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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What Exactly Is Social Entrepreneurship?
We’re talking about success and social value. Today many people lump this in a special category: social entrepreneurship. We’re not sure exactly what that is, so we’re interested in learning more. As it turns out, so were two Tuck class of 2013 students, Christopher Halstedt and Brad Callow. This past spring they did an independent study Senior Associate Dean Bob Hansen and Gregg on exactly this topic. They set out to see if they could understand what exactly is social entrepreneurship and how it creates social value. Here are some excerpts from what they found:
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- Impact Assessment
- Region
- Europe & Eurasia
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FXB International Releases Graduate Tracer Study
(New York, NY) – Today FXB International released a Graduate Tracer Study. Among the exciting results include findings that, from their starting point as the poorest households in their communities, FXB-Village participants in Rwanda and Uganda show greatly increased income and savings. Additionally, the study shows that FXB-Village participants have vastly improved access to clean drinking water and are more likely to own their homes, and children are much more likely to be enrolled in school than they were at the beginning of the program. In each of the three study areas, the results show that the FXB-Village program significantly improves the lives of these participants.
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- Impact Assessment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Brazil’s historically poor northeast finally gets its boom
RECIFE, Brazil — The Brazilian state of Pernambuco was once known for its vast plains of parched dirt and roving bandits called cangacos, who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. For later generations, escaping the widespread poverty of the northeast customarily meant moving to livelier southeastern cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, though many migrants still ended up living in favelas, or slums.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Region
- Latin America