One by one, states are adopting new legislation that gives corporate directors legal protections for making decisions to maximize stakeholder value in addition to shareholder value. These new corporate structures are spawning an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors eager to build firms that simultaneously scale profits and social or environmental impact.

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What a difference a year makes!  In 2011, the Pipeline Fellowship  began as a single program in New York to train ten women to become angel investors and support women social entrepreneurs.  In 2012, the Pipeline Fellowship is expanding to include two locations, four programs, and will train forty women. 

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Social enterprises are picking up the where the system is leaving off, investing in human beings and equipping them with the tools to create a new world built around compassion, respect, innovation and imagination.

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The Ashoka Foundation is the largest association of leading social entrepreneurs in the world.  They work on three simple levels: By supporting individual social entrepreneurs throughout their life cycle, they bring communities together. These communities then help leverage their impact, scale their ideas and capture and disseminate their best practices. Then they help to build the [...]

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Today, poverty is an epidemic. A startling portion of the world’s population dies from preventable diseases, our environmental resources are being depleted at unprecedented rates, and things we take for granted in first world countries — clean water, sufficient food, an opportunity for education — are impossible dreams elsewhere. We know these are issues, but [...]

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It’s a shocking case of a government making good on a campaign promise:  British government ministries have made their energy usage data available online, in many instances in real time. The ensuing task is figuring out what to do with it. For the first time, we are getting a glimpse at the first apps for [...]

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Sparkseed is a social venture that supports other social ventures — but does it work?

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GE’s ecomagination program–out of the blue two months ago–became a sponsor of the Bay Area Green Business Meetup Group, which I co-chair with the help of 3P’s founder, Nick Aster. It’s not often that sponsors fall from the sky with unsolicited ad dollars. Through a partnership with Meetup.com, GE is sponsoring not just our Meetup [...]

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We all know that person.  She works her desk job dutifully, all the while lamenting her lack of freedom to start her dream green business.  Whether it’s an organic restaurant locavores would love, an eco-friendly landscape design firm, or a nifty clean tech application that needs to be created and marketed, she’s in love with [...]

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Editor’s Note: This article was written by Nick Cain, and originally appeared on Dowser.org. When we hear the word “incubator,” the image that comes to mind is big heat lamp glowing above a newborn or maybe a basket of eggs. To the entrepreneur, both business and social, the word conjures up a friendly place where [...]

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We’ve all read or watched the horror stories coming out of Afghanistan.  This remote and rugged land has seen more than its share of suffering during the Soviet invasion, the tyranny of the Taliban, and the chaos of the most recent decade.  Whatever one’s take is on the current situation and uncertain future of Afghanistan, [...]

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(Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from David Bornstein and Susan Davis’ recent book, Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.) By David Bornstein and Susan Davis Launching an organization is a process of recruiting funders, advisors, board members, and staffers, one by one. Over the past thirty years, the resource landscape has exploded [...]

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In the same way ecosystems with high biodiversity have higher survival rates, businesses with high personnel diversity also fare better than those with one variety of employee. Increased diversity of employees results in a wider variety of thinking, more robust solutions to problems, etc.  In the same way, it’s not surprising that evidence has emerged [...]

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Sustainability is a poorly defined notion. More often than not—and we’re guilty of this, as well—sustainability is talked about in environmental terms. Be it about a company’s footprint from its data centers or the methodology for reporting, we sometimes miss the other two aspects of the bottom line. What sort of pundits would we be [...]

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It costs an employer 23 cents per hour per worker—on average—to provide sick time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.   Yet, 39 percent of workers in the private sector and 26 percent of those who work part time do not have any sick days. And, about two-thirds of people who earn $10.40 an hour [...]

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A $3 device may just help wound patients with limited access to medical personnel heal faster.  And, there are about 55 million people in developing countries who could eventually benefit. Negative therapy pressure systems Negative-pressure therapy is relatively standard in the U.S., but the devices are relatively heavy, require a power supply to function and [...]

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Did you know that 2.4 billion people worldwide lack access to energy?  Hugh Whalan, CEO of Energy in Common (EIC), refers to these people as energy impoverished and has made it his mission to eradicate 15 million cases of energy poverty in the next five years by making green energy loans powered by individual contributions. [...]

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“This is a once-only opportunity to build a whole new country from scratch, perhaps to offer something of the good wishes the new nation should have been given 200 years ago,” writes AA Gill in the London Times, in a gut-wrenching account of living conditions in Haiti today, three months after a crushingly destructive earthquake [...]

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By John Comberiate Speaking at the Leadership for a Better World – Creating Social Value through Innovation Conference, Paul C. Light set out to define what it is to be a Social Entrepreneur.  Lack of clarity in the term often creates conflict between groups that feel they have been promoting social values throughout their existence [...]

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