Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
In September there was some surprising good news about climate change. Yes, you read that right. We are perhaps, slowly, starting to address that problem (mind blowing, huh?). And in other news, there was a call for funders to help nonprofits become better fundraisers and some tools to help nonprofits use data in that pursuit. Add to […]
December is often a fairly quiet month in the world of social change writing because of the holidays and time off, but there was still some great stuff to read. From Giving Tuesday, to Teach for America’s 25th anniversary, to philanthropy buzzwords, to social media trends to watch, to a critique of Charity Navigator’s naughty and nice […]
I was out of town for the first half of July (and mostly away from social media), so I’m probably not qualified to give a 10 best list for the month, but I’m still going to try (ha!). As always, please add what I missed (particularly this month) to the comments. To me, July was […]
In this month’s Social Velocity blog interview, we’re talking with Lara Galinksy. Lara is an author, career expert and senior vice president of Echoing Green. Over the last two decades, Echoing Green has invested $30 million in 500 social entrepreneurs around the world. Galinsky is the co-author of Work on Purpose, which provides a framework […]
I started Social Velocity because I saw a real hole in the nonprofit sector. Small and medium nonprofits working on social change lacked access to expertise and resources to strengthen and grow their solutions. The Teach for Americas of the world were building impressive organizations and replicating their solution far and wide. But they were […]
Today Echoing Green launches their annual search for budding social entrepreneurs to invest in. For over 20 years Echoing Green has provided $30 million in seed funding and support to nearly 500 social entrepreneurs – including the founders of Teach For America, City Year, College Summit, and SKS Microfinance, some of the darlings of the […]
Along with the burgeoning social entrepreneurship movement comes a bit of hubris that social entrepreneurs know better how to create social change than do the nonprofits that have been working toward social change for years. Some social entrepreneurs argue that nonprofits are too set in their ways to embrace a new way of creating solutions. […]
Nonprofits exist in a strange netherworld between market forces and social change. They are trying to create a solution to a social problem, but as much as some might like to deny it, that desired social change exists within a market economy. That means that in order to be successful, nonprofits, just like any business, […]
It occurred to me in two conversations I had this morning that small change can create large change, but how exactly does that happen? My first conversation was a phone call with George Overholser, from the Nonprofit Finance Fund and a leading thinker around new kinds of capital for nonprofit organizations. I was getting some […]
In a recent blog post, Tony Wang, a brilliant researcher at Lucy Bernholz’s Blueprint Research & Design, a strategy consulting firm for philanthropy in the Bay Area, makes a thought-provoking, yet ultimately flawed argument about the social impact of nonprofits (which he calls charities) versus social businesses. Tony and I have sparred before on PRIs […]
