Wordchanging Attention Philanthropy campaign winner in Indonesia

At the end of May Worldchanging published the 2010 winners of their  “attention grants” as part of the inspiring  Wordchanging Attention Philanthropy campaign. The Attention Philanthropy campaign shines a light on good work, work worth supporting: it is grant-making that deals in praise, rather than money. One of the projects selected was Any Sulistyowati and [...]

Cambodian knitters help build sustainable social enterprise

Social Earth posted this great story about a social enterprise in Cambodia: Knitting is often associated with grandmas, not social enterprise. However, Cambodian Knits founder and social entrepreneur Monika Nowaczyk makes the connection. At six years old Monika fled Communist Poland to live a better life in Canada. As a child she didn’t fully understand [...]

Asia’s Young Changemakers: Manoj Vasudevan

More and more companies are looking at the bottom billion, the million of poor people, worldwide as customers for the products and services. Not many however, look at the poor as pool of talented yet underdeveloped employee pool as Manoj does. Despite India’s many advances, there are eight million educated unemployed youth in India’s countryside. [...]

India’s Biggest Business Plan Competition for Social Entrepreneurs

via The Social Innovation Blog: Villgro presents the annual Business Plan Competition for social innovators. Wantrapreneur is all about identifying ideas that have the potential to transform lives and nurturing them to become market-ready products and services. So if you have an idea that you think can change lives, apply now. The top two winners [...]

Young Indians making a difference – New rediff series

rediff.com celebrates the sincere spirit of young Indians making a difference in a new series. There first story: “I aspire to make a difference in the lives of people around me,” says Apoorve Dubey, who at 26 delivers motivational lectures in schools and colleges, works as a software engineer with Symantec and has also written [...]

Indians now see career options in the business of social good

Salary structures are better and social sector experience can also prove very useful in the corporate sector Bangalore: This summer, after she graduated with a master’s in information systems from Texas A&M University, US, Pooja Rao headed to India for what she thought would be a six-month break before taking up a job. To fill [...]

Social enterprises in Cambodia

Today, most Cambodians are living in extreme poverty; over 77% of Cambodians live on less than US$2 a day and 35% of the population live below the national poverty line. Women and children disproportionately bear the burden of intermittent employment, food insecurity, and limited access to health and education services, drastically impacting their health and [...]

Schwab Social Entrepreneurs of the Year Award – Asia

The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship honored five Social Entrepreneurs as leading social entrepreneurs in Asia. Three are Asia regional winners, and two are country winners from Singapore and Indonesia from year-end 2008. “We need new ideas, new initiatives on the micro as well as the macro level. All attempts to rethink, redesign and rebuild [...]

Power of MNEs to encourage entrepreneurship

Many large and medium size companies have the power to promote and facilitate entrepreneurship through their supply chain and distribution channels. One of the companies trying out to reach to new customers by working with local microentrepreneurs has been Nestle in the Philippines, which introduced programs to help in the branding of products of small-scale [...]

What can companies learn from social entrepreneurs?

I recently read a report about what companies can learn from SEs by Johanna Mair and Christian Seelos. The two researchers propose three models of collaboration (integrated, symbiotic, and complementary) that companies may use to formulate global strategies that will serve their own sustainable development needs while also serving society’s need for innovation. 1. Integrated [...]