Archive for Social Entrepreneurship
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Financing Not Fundraising: Aligning Money and Mission
In our ongoing series “Financing Not Fundraising,” we are exploring the argument that nonprofits need to stop fundraising and start financing social impact. The idea is that nonprofits have to break out of the narrow view that traditional FUNDRAISING (individual donor appeals, events, foundat...
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Can You Really Wave Goodbye to Fundraising Forever?
There’s a new, or perhaps it is very old, idea kicking around the blogosphere that is probably a dream of many nonprofit leaders. The idea, put forward by Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG) founder Peter Haas, is that there could be a company to which nonprofits completely outsou...
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A Revolution in Nonprofit Finance: An Interview with Clara Miller
Last month we kicked off a new, monthly Social Velocity blog interview series where I interview leading thinkers and doers in the social innovation space. Our inaugural interview was with Kevin Jones co-founder of both Good Capital, one of the first venture capital funds that invests in social ente...
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The Road to a Better World is Jammed with Red Bikes
This past Memorial Day weekend I headed to Denver to have fun and explore the city. The trip was made infinitely better because of 500 red bikes. Denver is the first city in the country to have a bike sharing program, called B-cycle, and it is phenomenal. It results in a cleaner city and healthier c...
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Fixing the World Requires Disruptive, not Incremental, Change
The nonprofit sector has always been, at its core, about social disruption–some sort of disequilibrium exists in the market (poverty, unequal access to healthcare, segregation, homelessness, hunger) and a nonprofit organization is born to correct it. But somewhere along the way the big changes non...
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What Does the Handmade Movement Say About Social Entrepreneurship?
I have a new post up at the Change.org blog, “What Does the Handmade Movement Say About Social Entrepreneurship?”. Here is an excerpt: Last weekend I went to the Renegade Craft Fair, the first time the traveling “edgy craft fair” has made it to Austin. As I passed booth after booth of cre...
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The Future of Financing Impact: An Interview with Kevin Jones
I am launching a new regular interview series on the Social Velocity blog that will feature discussions with the leading thinkers and doers in the social innovation space. I will talk with philanthropists, social investors, social entrepreneurs (from the nonprofit and for-profit side) and others le...
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Social Innovation Comes to Texas with a Bang
As I wrote in an earlier post, I have been part of an exciting new project that is bringing social innovation to Texas. The Texas Social Innovation Initiative is a partnership between Dallas Social Venture Partners, the OneStar Foundation, and Root Cause in Boston to help seven innovative Dallas-a...
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Financing Not Fundraising: The Plan
A few months ago I argued that nonprofits need to stop fundraising and start financing for social impact. As I wrote: Fundraising in its current form just doesn’t work anymore. Indeed, traditional fundraising is holding the sector back by keeping nonprofits in the starvation cycle of trying t...
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The Strategy of Disruption
Competition is often a dirty word in the nonprofit sector. Indeed, playing nice is the norm. But to truly solve social problems, nonprofits have to not only compete, but compete well. This means understanding how their strengths compare to their competitor’s weaknesses, and how to take advan...
