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OPINION: Is Too Much Funding Going to Social Entrepreneurs—And Too Little to Social Movements?
Are social movements more effective at bringing about large-scale change than social entrepreneurs? And if they are, why are so many funders excited about the latter compared to the former?
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Viewpoint: “Social Responsibility” in Investments is Open to Interpretation
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker has a fascinating idea: People get nicer over time.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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These Early Tesla Investors Are Pouring Millions Into Companies That Could Change the World
Ten years ago when Nancy Pfund first started making social impact investments, many people were skeptical about the idea of investing both for profit and social benefit. You either made money or you did good, but rarely both. "It was unheard of by most," she says. "There was a very limited set of investors who were prepared to take the plunge."
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact investing
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When Impact Investing Stays Local
By the mid-1990s, the Houghton family, whose wealth is derived from the glass and ceramic material manufacturer Corning, was into its sixth generation. Many of the cousins felt they had lost touch and were drifting away from the family.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Impact Investing Needs a Better Way to Measure Impact
In places where electricity is scarce or unreliable, kerosene lamps are a standard lighting source—but the fumes from burning kerosene pollute the air and kill 1.6 million people each year. D.Light Design, a private company based in San Francisco, manufactures inexpensive solar-powered lamps and sells them cheaply around the world. It is safe, reliable, and renewable energy available for about the same cost as a few candles. D.Light believes that it’s not only reducing pollution, but also improving health, safety, and performance—in school, productivity, and income.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact investing
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“empowering people. Award” to Identify Tech-Based Social Solutions Is Looking for Nominations
The “empowering people. Award” was launched at an event in Munich with the online participation of a large international community. Inventors and developer teams are called on here to submit their low-tech innovations in one of eight categories that cover the main areas of basic supply in impoverished regions. The potential to be embedded in entrepreneurial models providing sustainable help to individuals and communities in developing regions is one of the pivotal criteria.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Measuring Client Health Outcomes Using Simple Indicators: Data collection is the easy part; the next test is helping organizations analyze, interpret
The Microcredit Summit Campaign is hoping financial services providers and others will use the “health outcome performance indicators” (HOPI) to assess the health and well-being of clients and their families, and believes wide usage of the HOPI could create short- and long-term value for practitioners, social investors and donors, raters and other actors.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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Can a Bajaji Change a Teen Girl’s Life?
“Human-centered design has a role in solving every problem,” says Pam Scott, a serial design thinker whose career has wended from advertising to customer research to a board seat at IDEO.org to a current chapter that might be dubbed activist philanthropy. A born connector, Scott has spent nearly three decades working at the intersection of design and impact, and much of her power lies at getting the right people in the room and prompting them to ask — and answer — the right questions.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- philanthropy
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