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January 17, 2013, 9:17 am
Opportunity International Spins Off Insurance Company
Jacob Chikayiko (right), a farmer in Malawi, bought insurance from MicroEnsure to protect against crop failure caused by inclement weather. (Photograph by Opportunity International)
Many people in the developing world are one failed crop, one illness, or one emergency away from financial ruin. In 2008, Opportunity International started MicroEnsure to provide low-cost insurance to the people the microfinance charity serves.
“If something happens and they run into a season where they have a poor crop or they have some unusual weather, they can lose everything in one season,” Vicki Escarra, chief executive of Opportunity International, says of the farmers her group works with in Africa. “Setting up insurance provides them with stability so they don’t lose everything.”
MicroEnsure provides a variety of…
January 11, 2013, 9:53 am
Impact Investors Report Satisfaction—and Cite Challenges
Most foundations and other institutions that make investments that seek both social and financial returns say the approach is meeting their expectations on both counts, according to a new report published by JPMorgan and the Global Impact Investing Network.
In the survey of 99 organizations that each manage at least $10-million in so-called impact investments, 84 percent said that those investments were meeting their expectations when it comes to social and environmental benefits. Fourteen percent said the investments’ social returns were outperforming their expectations, while only 2 percent said they were underperforming.
When it came to financial performance, 68 percent said their impact investments were meeting their expectations and 21 percent said they were exceeding expectations. Eleven percent said the investments failed to meet their financial expectations.
Spectrum of …
December 3, 2012, 9:49 am
10 People Honored for Using Technology to Improve Social Good
The SXSW Interactive Festival has announced the 2013 winners of its Dewey Winburne Community Service Award. Ten social entrepreneurs who are using technology to tackle tough problems like educational inequity, environmental degradation, and poverty will be honored in March at the social-media industry event, in Austin, Tex.
The awards are named after one of the festival’s co-founders, a teacher who was devoted to helping disadvantaged youths learn technology skills.
The winners are:
• Madhura Bhat, who co-founded Health for America, a fellowship program for young people to develop technology solutions to improve health care.
• Elizabeth Davidson, who co-founded ScriptEd, a nonprofit that trains volunteers from the tech industry to teach computer programming to students in New York City high schools.
• Arlene Ducao, who leads Open Infrared, a project that maps…
September 11, 2012, 9:07 am
Cash Rewards Spur Poor Communities to Pay for Sanitation Projects
Children try out a new hand-washing station. (Photograph by East Meets West Foundation)
An international aid charity is taking an unorthodox approach to helping people in Cambodia and Vietnam improve sanitation and hygiene: It asks beneficiaries to help pay for the construction of latrines and hand-washing stations, but then gives them cash rewards when they get results. The effort will now spread, thanks to a $10.9-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The East Meets West Foundation, in Oakland, Calif., works with local groups to provide hygiene education, train masons to build high-quality latrines, and broker low-cost loans that families can use to install latrines and hand-washing devices. Families receive a $10 rebate to help offset construction costs after an independent group has…
September 5, 2012, 8:09 pm
Update: Salesforce.com Retreats on Trademarking ‘Social Enterprise’
The software giant Salesforce.com has announced that it plans to withdraw its applications to trademark the term “social enterprise.”
The company, which had sought the trademark in Great Britain, Jamaica, the United States, and the European Union, has been using the term in its advertising for the last two years to describe how businesses use social media to connect with customers. In its announcement, Salesforce.com pointed to the outcry from nonprofits and socially minded businesses as the primary reason for its reversal.
“It was never our intention to create confusion in the social sector which we have supported since our founding,” Marc Benioff, chief executive of Saleforce.com, said in a written statement. “As a result of the feedback we received, Salesforce.com has decided to withdraw its efforts to trademark the term ‘social enterprise’ and plans to discontinue its use…
August 31, 2012, 9:11 am
The Fight Over Trademarking the Term ‘Social Enterprise’
The United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected Salesforce.com’s request to trademark the term, “social enterprise”—and the nonprofit Social Enterprise Alliance wants to make sure the agency doesn’t change its mind.
The alliance is calling on supporters to write letters supporting the trademark office’s denial of the application during its comment period, which ends September 9.
In the United States and around the world, tens of thousands of businesses whose primary goal is social or environmental good use the term social enterprise, says Kevin Lynch, chief executive of the Social Enterprise Alliance.
“If somebody gets a trademark on it, the ability of individual organizations to continue doing their work under the banner of social enterprise all of the sudden is very much diminished,” he says. “One private company could control the use of that phrase.…
July 30, 2012, 4:57 pm
Why Today’s Challenges Require Nonprofits to Be Nimble
To tackle problems in a rapidly changing world, nonprofits need to adopt a new mind-set, one that emphasizes improvisation, ad hoc networks, and adaptation, says Andrew Zolli, executive director of PopTech, a New York charity focused on innovation, and co-author of a new book, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.
Because the world has entered a period of “extraordinary volatility” and the problems society faces are increasingly complex, he argues, figuring out why some individuals, organizations, and systems are resilient in the aftermath of a crisis while others are not is paramount.
“We’re all ballroom dancing in the minefield,” says Mr. Zolli. “In an environment like that, we have to be able to prepare our companies, our communities, our organizations to be able to deal with those disruptions. And that is a different agenda that we have had, even in the recent…
July 13, 2012, 9:19 am
Harnessing the Internet to Provide Low-Cost Higher Education
A University of the People student from Haiti (Photo courtesy of University of the People)
University of the People has an ambitious goal: to use the Internet to provide an extremely low-cost college education to students around the world. And the nonprofit’s big idea is starting to gain traction with grant makers.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $500,000 to support the university’s effort to gain accreditation. The grant comes on the heels of recent awards by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Intel Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
Since its inception in 2009, University of the People has enrolled 1,500 students from 132 countries. Courses are taught by professors from around the world who volunteer their time, and the university offers degrees in…
July 6, 2012, 10:27 am
Evaluating Programs? Ask Clients What They Think
Nonprofits need to get a lot better at asking clients what they think — and acting on the information they receive, says Peter York, director of research for TCC Group, a management-consulting company that advises charities.
Information from beneficiaries can help organizations improve their programs and spark new ideas for fighting tough problems. For real-world examples of charities using client feedback to strengthen their programs, read an opinion piece from The Chronicle’s current issue.
Too often, nonprofits are uncomfortable asking clients what they think about programs and fail to appreciate the value of their feedback, argues Mr. York. Instead, he says, charities prefer to ask employees for their comments and suggestions, and hire outside evaluators.
“Self-reporting has gotten such a bad rap,” says Mr. York, “and the entire private sector would just guffaw at…
June 21, 2012, 1:14 pm
‘Random Hacks of Kindness’ Uses Technology to Solve Problems
Programmers in San Francisco and Berlin got together recently to attempt to build a system that would allow immigrants to tell their families they’ve arrived safely at their destination without anyone else finding out.
In Nairobi, a similar group worked on a system to report election results in real time, including incidents of election violence and accusations of voter fraud.
In Toronto, others worked on a system that could allow Nepali women to send ultrasound pictures via mobile devices.
All of them were volunteers, willing to lend their technological expertise to nonprofits and causes.
These projects and others were part of the “Random Hacks of Kindness” weekend, a twice-yearly, 36-hour work session for designers, programmers, and technology experts to solve problems facing nonprofits and other organizations interested in doing good. The most recent events, held this…
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