Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship - Apply Now!

The Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship are worth considering, if only to gage the state of social enterprise around the world.

A bit about the awards:

The Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship support social entrepreneurs whose work has the potential for large-scale influence on critical challenges of our time: environmental sustainability, health, tolerance and human rights, institutional responsibility, economic and social equity, and peace and security. These issues are at the heart of the foundation’s vision of empowering people to create a peaceful, prosperous, sustainable world. Skoll social entrepreneurs are innovators who have tested and proved their approach, are poised to replicate or scale up their work to create equilibrium change and engage others with a message that resonates with individuals whose resources are crucial to advancing these solutions. The Skoll Awards are designed for leaders who contribute value to a peer network committed to continuous learning. By telling their stories, they join in the foundation’s ongoing celebration of the power of social entrepreneurs.

The Skoll Awards provide later-stage, or mezzanine, funding, which is generally structured as a $1 million award paid out over three years, subject to payment limitations described below under Budget Guidance. In most cases, the grant is provided for core support to help organizations expand their programs and capacity to deliver long-term, sustainable equilibrium change. The Skoll Awards are not intended for new or early-stage programs or initiatives. Programs submitted for consideration should have a track record of no less than three years. In addition to core support, the Skoll Foundation supports the participation of Award recipients in the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship.

Interested? Here are the eligibility criteria:

• Be led by a social entrepreneur.


• Have implemented innovative programs that demonstrate effective approaches to critical social and environmental challenges with global implications.
• Organizations developing local or regional models for replication on a national or international scale should show that the location where the model is being tested is central to the issue in question. Examples are peace and security initiatives in conflict regions, biodiversity solutions in species-rich “hot spots,” educational opportunities in inner cities and disease treatments at the source of potential epidemics.


• Be able to describe a clear, long-term path to creating an equilibrium change.


• Demonstrate proof of concept with measurable outcomes.


• Have a clear, compelling plan for reaching scale.


• Demonstrate a track record of at least three years.


• Have a clear plan for long-term financial and operational sustainability.


• Commit to working with peers and the Skoll Foundation to share learning and communicate success strategies.

A list of exclusions can be found here.

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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social entrepreneurs recommend reading.

Tags for information about: for:vsef, Social Economy, Social_Entrepreneur, Skoll

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Heroes from a Small Planet

The PBS programme Frontline/WORLD, has been a great platform for the Skoll Foundation to draw attention to global social entrepreneurs.

The partnership has evolved to create enough material to warrant a film festival this coming Monday, June 25th, from 6-10 PM at the Delancey Street Screening Room - that's in San Francisco.

The film festival has been referenced by enterprise evangelist Guy Kawasaki and Britt Bravo. Just to name drop and convey the scope of audience appeal.

Britt's post offers some juicy details of the live event in San Francisco ...

Not only will they be showing the films, but they will have also have panels with some of the shows' reporters and social entrepreneurs like Trevor Field, co-founder of PlayPumps International (water pumps powered by children's play), Luis Szaran, founder of Sonidos de la Tierra (they use music in their work with impoverished children), Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva (they allow regular people like you and me to make microloans online), Stacey Warner, Program Director of Room to Read (they build libraries in the "emerging" world), and Bart Weetjens, co-founder of APOPO (they use rats to find landmines).

Skoll is also working with PBS NOW to air social enterprise segments as part of Skoll's committment at the 2007 Clinton Global Initiative.
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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social entrepreneurs recommend reading.

Tags for information about: for:vsef, Social Enterprise, Nonprofit, Skoll

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More Blood and Gore

At the 2006 Skoll World Forum, Al Gore and David Blood, Generation Investment Management, shared their ambitious goal.

Here's a video of that session:



This recent McKinsey article, Investing in sustainability: An interview with Al Gore and David Blood, offers an update and some light Q & A ...

.... executives around the world increasingly recognize that the creation of long-term shareholder value depends on a corporation’s ability to understand and respond to increasingly intense demands from society. No surprise, then, that the topic of socially responsible investing has been gaining ground as investors seek to incorporate concepts like sustainability and responsible corporate behavior into their assessments of a company’s long-term value.

Yet socially responsible investing has always been an awkward science. Early approaches simplistically screened out “sin sectors” such as tobacco. Subsequent evolutions tilted toward rewarding good performers, largely in the extraction industries, on the basis of often fuzzy criteria promulgated by the corporate social-responsibility movement. These early approaches tended to force an unacceptable trade-off between social criteria and investment returns.

Three years ago, former US Vice President Al Gore and David Blood, previously the head of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, set out to put sustainability investing firmly in the mainstream of equity analysis. Their firm, Generation Investment Management, engages in primary research that integrates sustainability with fundamental equity analysis. Based in London and Washington, DC, Generation has 23 employees, 12 of them investment professionals, and a single portfolio invested, at any given time, in 30 to 50 publicly listed global companies.

• What do you mean by the term “sustainability,” and how does it influence your investment philosophy?




David Blood: Sustainability investing is the explicit recognition that social, economic, environmental, and ethical factors directly affect business strategy—for example, how companies attract and retain employees, how they manage the risks and create opportunities from climate change, a company’s culture, corporate-governance standards, stakeholder-engagement strategies, philanthropy, reputation, and brand management. These factors are particularly important today given the widening of societal expectations of corporate responsibility.





Al Gore: When, several years ago, David and I were separately looking for ways to integrate sustainability into investing, mutual friends told each of us of the other’s search. We discovered immediately that we had a common goal, and that led to a series of meetings and a friendship and, ultimately, to a decision to form a partnership. We researched the history of sustainable investing under its various names and decided to start a new partnership in order to design it, from the ground up, according to the architecture that we believed was essential to address the challenges in the investment-management industry.




• What principles drive your approach?




David Blood: The first principle, categorically, is that it is best practice to take a long-term approach to investing. We think that the focus on “short termism” in the marketplace is detrimental to economies, detrimental to value creation, detrimental to capital markets, and a bad investment strategy. It’s common corporate-finance knowledge that something on the order of 60 to 80 percent of the value of a business lies in its long-term cash flows. And if you’re investing with a short-term horizon you’re giving up the value creation of a business.

The second principle is that the context of business is clearly changing. We are now confronting the limits of our ecological system, and at the same time societal expectations of business are widening. On top of that, multinational businesses are oftentimes better positioned than governments to deal with some of the most complicated global challenges, such as climate change, HIV/AIDS, water scarcity, and poverty. Technology and communications have changed, and we’ve reached a point where civil society is now demanding a response from business.

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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social entrepreneurs recommend reading.

Tags for information about: for:vsef, Social Enterprise, Sustainability, Triple Bottom Line

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[Recommended Read] SustainAbility - Growing Opportunity: Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems

SustainAbility and the Skoll Foundation have just published Entrepreneurial Solutions to Insoluble Problems.

More later ...


[Heads Up Credit: Joel Makower]
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Interested in learning more about social enterprise? Take a browse through the Vancouver Social Enterprise Book Store (Vancouver | United Kingdom | United States) and see what other social entrepreneurs recommend reading.

Tags for information about: for:vsef, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneur, SustainAbility

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Skoll Foundation | Guidelines for Skoll Awards Now Available

Applications are now being accepted for the 2007 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, which support social entrepreneurs whose work has the potential for large-scale influence on critical challenges of our time: environmental sustainability, health, tolerance and human rights, institutional responsibility, social and economic equality, and peace and security.

Initial letters of inquiries may be submitted through September 18. To read the guidelines and view a list of frequently asked questions about the awards, click here.

The awards will be presented at the 2007 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University in England.

You can link here to read about each of the 2006 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship recipients. The list inlcudes:

Room to Read
Benetech
Riders for Health
Child Savings International

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Tags for information about: for:vsef, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneur, SocialEntrepreneurship, Skoll

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