Global Social Venture Finals are today. Check out www.socialvc.net for details.

Here’s the page if you want to see the teams in the finals

Bio Power Technology- Prasetiya Mulya Business School, Indonesia

BioVolt- MIT Sloan School of Management

Build Your Own Village- Gordon Institute of Business Science, South Africa

Defen Safety Syringe- National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Fair Planet Brasil- ESSEC Business School, France

Greenlight Organic- University of California, Davis

Husk Power Systems- Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia

Market for Change- Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

MicroEnergy Credit Corporation- Columbia Business School

Wine with a Passion- Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

Development Marketplace is a competitive grant program of the World Bank that funds creative, small-scale development projects that deliver results and have the potential to be expanded or replicated.

The Marketplace is currently underway (May 22-23 2007) but if you can’t attend, you can follow the new Development Marketplace blog.

“Registration is now open for the 5th annual Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards, which identify and celebrate the top social entrepreneurs in the nation. This year, we’re introducing an experiment: we’re accepting applications from some for-profit businesses as well as non-profits. Registration takes two minutes; just go here before June 4.”

Read more here.

This is a day late but I just wanted to blog about this new series that aired yesterday night on HDNet.

Free Market incentives are spectacularly changing lives and entire economies over much of the world. In the last 25 years, hundreds of millions of people– 400 million in China alone– have climbed out of the dire poverty of living on less than $1 per day. It is the largest movement out of poverty in human history.

Yet, two thirds of the world’s population– four billion people– still does not have the tools to thrive in free markets. Forced to operate outside the rule of law, they have little education, no legal identity, no fungible property, no credit, no capital, and thus few ways to prosper.

However, when given the incentives and the tools, these people are proving they can apply their free choice, intelligence, imagination and spirit to dramatically advance their well-being and that of their families and communities.

The documentary features Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Hernando de Soto, founder of The Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, James Tooley, British professor of education policy, and Johan Norberg, Swedish author and scholar.

Thanks to the Marginal Revolution blog for putting this on our radar.

Another excellent piece for this weekend’s reading– Venturebeat, a blog about new technology ventures, publishes a piece on social capitalism, its two basic models, and why some companies are likely to succeed while others are not. The post is written by Jay Parkhill, who is an attorney that works in the technology sector. Keep in mind that most Venturebeat readers are technology investors so Jay is writing for that audience.

According to Jay, the two basic models are:

1. Companies that seek to do good by capitalizing on our existing shopping patterns. Example: Ethos water.

2. Businesses that encourage consumers to spend money in ways they would not otherwise in order to create a social and/or environmental impact. Example: Terrapass, Kiva.

Read the article for the complete analysis and the pros and cons of each model.

Check out this story in the current Businessweek on the Acumen Fund–
Designing Change: How venture philanthropy fund Acumen uses design thinking to help solve real-world problems

Here’s some text from an email by founder Jacqueline Novogratz:

We wanted to share with you an article on Acumen Fund that just appeared in BusinessWeek’s “Inside Innovation” supplement (the March 12 issue, now on newsstands). The story, an extension and update of what was featured in their online magazine last fall, is also up on their website – along with a few web-only features, including slide shows on our investment in drip irrigation and about the Acumen Fund Fellows.

We’re excited, of course, to be able to share the Acumen Fund message, but more so about the growing interest there seems to be in market-based models for addressing problems of poverty.

Lots of great job/internship opportunities coming through the pipeline. Here is one for an organization called Summer Search.

I am the founder of the NYC office of Summer Search, a transformative leadership development program for disadvantaged young people who strive to break cycles of persistent poverty, make the transition into productive adulthood, and become the positive role models that their communities so critically need. We’re currently looking to hire two positions in New York: a Program Associate and a Development and Operations Assistant. For detailed job descriptions, go here.

Summer Search employs an original youth leadership development model called “RAP” that selects and cultivates low-income high school students who show potential for resiliency in the face of significant adversity, who are altruistic in their aspirations and actions, and who are performing well in some area of their lives. We accomplish our mission through a combination of intensive, weekly mentoring that focuses on personal accountability and self-examination, access to two life-changing summer experiential education programs (like Outward Bound, NOLS and AFS), tailored college and financial aid advising services, and extended support services for alumni in college and beyond, including professional development and networking resources. We have seven offices in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle and Philadelphia, in addition to New York.

Through collaborative partnerships with high schools, summer experiential education programs, colleges, and corporate employers, Summer Search provides students with the developmental tools to change their own lives and become leaders who are invested in helping others. This intervention has proved very successful: 93% of seniors have matriculated to college and those enrolled have a college graduation rate of 89%. By earning a college degree, these students are doing something only 21% of low-income young people nationally achieve and are literally ending the cycle of poverty and changing the future for their families and communities.

Summer Search is an amazing program that I’ve worked with for ten years (since graduating from Yale!) and I hope anyone interesting in truly changing the lives of disadvantaged, young New Yorkers will take a look at this great career opportunity.

Eden Werring, National Director of Strategic Partnerships
eden@summersearch.org

This sounds like an excellent opportunity for college students interested in social enterprise–

Students Will Make a Difference and Gain Critical Management Skills While Helping Boston-Based Non-Profit Organizations

BOSTON, MASS, February 23, 2007 – Experience, Inc., the leading provider of career services for college students and alumni, today announced a unique Summer Fellowship program that will provide college sophomores extensive management training and work experience with Boston-area non-profit organizations. Responding to the marked and growing interest in social enterprise, Experience is partnering with New Sector Alliance, a nonprofit strategy consulting firm in Boston, to create exciting opportunities for
students to build transferable skills while making a positive impact on the community. Support from Experience, AmeriCorps and the Massachusetts Service Alliance will enable 45 students to participate in the program this summer.

Through this partnership, talented undergraduates will be chosen to work with nonprofit organizations to achieve critical goals: expand programs, measure outreach impact, strengthen operating procedures and increase stakeholder base.
New Sector Alliance will pre-screen each project to ensure that it will make a substantive impact on the organization and give Fellows the opportunity to learn new skills and build their resumes with rewarding, real-world social enterprise experiences.

Fellows will also participate in world-class trainings and workshops designed to give students a well-rounded experience. Trainings will focus on skills relevant to all industries - project management, persuasive communication, basic finance – as well as non-profit-specific topics such as theories of change and introduction to the non-profit sector.

“The most critical obstacle to economic growth is the increasing scarcity of high-caliber talent,” said Jennifer Floren, founder and CEO of Experience, Inc. “This Summer Fellowship program will demonstrate that young talent can master the skills needed to lead global organizations, while at the same time having a positive impact on society.”

In addition to training, another key component of the program is interaction with role models. Each Fellow will be matched with a mentor from top management consulting firms such as Accenture, Bain, BCG, Bridgespan, McKinsey and Mercer. Mentors provide real-time guidance and help Fellows accomplish project and personal goals.

Application deadline for interested students is March 1, 2007. The Summer Fellowship program begins in late May and runs through the summer, depending on the project and host site. For additional information or to apply for the Summer Fellows program, please visit www.experience.com.

Fast company has listed the 43 Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing The World in the annual Fast Company/ Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards.

The amazing organizations that received the Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards have found a better way to do good: They’re using the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems. In our second exclusive ranking, we used a similarly hard-nosed approach to find the 43 best social entrepreneurs.

Check out the website for the winners’ statements and information on how to donate or get involved. Of course you can always pick up the Fast Company Dec/Jan 2006 issue at the newsstand if you want a hard copy of the article.

The news about Warren Buffett giving away most of his fortune to charity his the wires over the weekend. Here is an article from Yahoo News:

Warren Buffett, the world’s second-richest person, is donating about $37 billion — more than 80 percent of his fortune — to foundations run by his friend
Bill Gates and by the Buffett family.

Everyone is connecting this story to Bill Gates’ announcement last week that he will be stepping out of his role at Microsoft to run his Gates Foundation. However, Buffett assured that there was no real connection between the two announcements.