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Social Entrepreneurship

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Welcome to the Social Entrepreneurship Information Page!

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change.

Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.

Each social entrepreneur presents ideas that are user-friendly, understandable, ethical, and engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize their idea, and implement with it. In other words, every leading social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers-a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything.

Over the past two decades, the citizen sector has discovered what the business sector learned long ago: There is nothing as powerful as a new idea in the hands of a first-class entrepreneur.

Contents at a Glance

Top Social Entrepreneurship Organization...
Get Involved!
Social Entrepreneurship in the News
Social Entrepreneurship Reading Suggesti...
Stories of a Social Entrepreneur
New Donations

Top Social Entrepreneurship Organizations

These are the most active and involved nonprofit organizations in the field of social entrepreneurship.

Acumen Fund: Acumen Fund is a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. We seek to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor. Our investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services - like health, water, housing and energy - through innovative, market-oriented approaches.
Ashoka: Ashoka is the world's largest working community of more than 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs. We champion the newest and most important social change by supporting the entrepreneurs behind the ideas. Ashoka helps these innovative individuals jump start their ideas, grow, collaborate and succeed. Our mission is to build an Everyone a Changemaker(TM) World, where everybody has opportunities to create change and self-identify as changemakers.
Echoing Green: Since 1987, Echoing Green has provided seed funding and support to more than 450 social entrepreneurs with bold ideas for social change in order to launch groundbreaking organizations around the world.
Omidyar Network: Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives. We invest in and help scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic, social, and political change.
Skoll Foundation: The Skoll Foundation's mission is to advance systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurs are proven leaders whose approaches and solutions to social problems are helping to better the lives and circumstances of countless underserved or disadvantaged individuals.

Get Involved!

Use the links below to navigate your way to social change.

Idealist: Idealist is a project of Action Without Borders, a nonprofit organization founded in 1995 with offices in the United States and Argentina. Idealist is an interactive site where people and organizations can exchange resources and ideas, locate opportunities and supporters, and take steps toward building a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives.
Taproot Foundation: Nonprofits have the greatest potential for addressing our society's most challenging social and environmental problems, but often lack the operational resources to be effective. The Taproot Foundation exists to close this gap and ensure all nonprofits have the infrastructure they need to thrive.

We do pro bono.
Every year, hundreds of nonprofit organizations rely on the Taproot Foundation's award winning Service Grant program to provide millions of dollars worth of pro bono marketing, HR, IT, and strategy management consulting services that better equip them to tackle our society's toughest challenges.

We inspire others to do pro bono.
We partner with corporations, universities, and trade associations to infuse the pro bono ethic into every business profession - increasing the resources available to the nonprofit sector. By 2020, we strive to have all business professionals consider pro bono work an integrated and esteemed part of their careers.
USA Service: Every time our nation faces crisis, our national experience has shown Americans rise to the challenge. While government has an important role to play in helping rekindle our economy and addressing the problems of a distressed nation, President-elect Obama believes each of us, as Americans, have a responsibility to do what we can for our communities and fellow citizens. We are one nation.

The United States is once again at a crossroads and that is why the President-elect hopes to use the occasion of his Inauguration to rally our nation to commit to service in our communities. We are asking for your participation in meeting this challenge.
Volunteer Match: VolunteerMatch strengthens communities by making it easier for good people and good causes to connect. The organization offers a variety of online services to support a community of nonprofit, volunteer and business leaders committed to civic engagement. Our popular service welcomes millions of visitors a year and has become the preferred internet recruiting tool for more than 63,000 nonprofit organizations.