post the assignment for 1/29 ("what makes this organization entrepreneurial") under the previous paragraphs for that organization, or at the bottom of the page if it hasnot been previously researched


Better World Books
Susan Chen, Leah Karlins

Better World Books is an American social enterprise that collects used books and sells them. The profit is used to fund 80 non-profit literacy programs. Better World Books follows a mission “to capitalize on the value of the book to fund and support literacy initiatives locally, nationally, and around the world.” The enterprise started in May of 2002 when three University of Notre Dame students led a book drive to help the Robinson Community Learning Center in Indiana. The students won the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza School of Business top prize for social entrepreneurship in the McCloskey Social Venture Business Plan competition. They students expanded book drives beyond the Midwest, at over 1,000 college and university campuses across North America. Better World Books either sells the books to raise funding for its literacy partners, sends the books directly to partner programs, or recycles the books not suitable for sale or donation. Better World Books' impact is great: it has collected over 10 million books and raised over $2.3 million for non-profit literacy programs. Regarding the environment, it has helped save over 5,350 tons of books from landfills.

Better World Books is clearly a well-planned social enterprise with a noble purpose. However, it is a for-profit company. As a for-profit social enterprise, the company has not released financial figures or salary figures of employees and executives. I wonder the truly "giving back" component of the company when part of its incentive is to make profits. Nevertheless, Better World Books seems sustainable and has high impact. Across the world, many people are in need of books. The company's customers are pleased with its service. Better World Books provides excellent, fast service. It is effective and well-managed. Better World Books operates under a for-profit business model in which success is measured by the positive impact a company makes in addressing a specific social issue. Regarding the company's success, it is right on.

WHY IT'S SOCIALLY ENTREPRENEURIAL:
social mission unique and specific; social impact great and sustainable

Cause: Alleviate the global illiteracy pandemic. Globally, an estimated 781 million adults are illiterate.

Mission: "a social venture dedicated to finding new uses for old books and funding literacy, Better World Books is metrics-obsessed."

Social Impact

• Collected over 10 million books
• Raised over $2.3 million for over 80 literacy and education non-profit organizations
• Directly sent more than 570,500 books to Books for Africa, the National Center for Family Literacy, and Feed the Children
• Created over 130 full-time jobs (with full benefits)

http://www.betterworldbooks.com
http://www.nacs.org/news/112604-webcaution.asp?id=cmb


Heifer International
Susan Chen, Leah Karlins

Heifer International is a nonprofit charitable organization based in Arkansas dedicated to reducing world hunger and poverty. It provides livestock and plants, and education in sustainable agriculture to financially-disadvantaged families around the world. A 2005 report by the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance (WGA) found that Heifer International met all the standards for charity accountability. Heifer started when American farmer Dan West, the founder, was serving as a church relief worker in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.Upon his return to the US, he founded Heifers for Relief in1943 to provide freedom from hunger by giving families livestock and training so that they "could be spared the indignity of depending on others to feed their children." Heifer runs on the basic philosophy of "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; you have fed him for a lifetime."

I am amazed at the creativity pf Heifer's programming. Heifer International works to ensure that the gift of each animal will eventually help an entire community to become self-sustaining. It aptly provides a breeding animal along with the gift animal so that it can produce offspring. Participating families are required to "pass on the gift", that is: they must give at least one of the female offspring to a neighbor who has undergone Heifer's training. Then that neighbor will pass along one of the offspring of its animal, and so forth. It is no wonder that Heifer is very successful and sustainable. Currently, Heifer International is embarking on a campaign called Hope for the Future,dedicated to raising $800 million by 2010 to encourage five million families worldwide to self-reliance. I have no doubt that this campaign will prove fruitful.

http://www.heifer.org


City Year
Susan Chen, Leah Karlins

City Year is a program for 17- to 24-year olds to commit a year of full-time community service in their community. City Year is held in 17 cities across the United States and in Johannesburg, South Africa. It was started in Boston by Harvard Law School students Michael Brown and Alan Khazei in 1988 with private funds. City Year initially began with efforts on neighborhood beautification and building a sense of community throughout Boston. These efforts have expanded and improved. Bill Clinton, inspired by City Year's success, created the AmeriCorps national service program as a way to fund City Year and other similar organizations. The money received via AmeriCorps allows City Year to support its 1,000 corps members annually.

I was positively influenced by the energy and creativity that City Year Corps members brought to my elementary school. City Year is a rewarding experience for both the Corps members and the community. Clearly, the community enjoys the fruitful results of the Corps members' efforts but these youthful volunteers also learn about community service, leadership development, and civic engagement. I believe that recruiting young people to put in a year of community service before they move on to shape their adult lives is a great concept. Many Corps members will later began careers in community service; others will bring new insight back to the academic or work force. City Year serves as model for a national-service ideal.

http://www.cityyear.org


Bring Me A Book Foundation
Michael Hornstein & Catherine Lee

Bring Me A Book (BMAB) is an award-winning literacy nonprofit, committed to ensuring that all children are exposed to high quality children’s literature during the first years of their lives and to inspire reading aloud with children. BMAB serves over 400,000 children, parents, and teachers in over 1000 sites. Its programs include the Book Bag Library (BBL) that provides free lending libraries of quality, multicultural children’s books for businesses and nonprofit organizations and The Bookcase Library, which places free bookcases in community organizations including preschools, classrooms, childcare centers, shelters, and waiting rooms, and the First Teachers Program which engages and educates parents and teachers on the importance of reading aloud and read aloud strategies.
Over 80% of low-income child care centers lack age-appropriate books. 1 in 3 children enter kindergarten lacking basic pre-literacy skills and are unprepared to learn. There is a real need for organizations like BMAB. Many programs target early childhood literacy, but what differentiates the Bring Me A Book Foundation is that it offers easy and equitable access in the workplace and/or community service organization; quality and multicultural selection by internationally recognized Children’s Literature Specialists, and audio recordings for English language learners. The organization focuses not only on kids but on educating parents, caregivers, and teachers on the importance of reading aloud to children and on the lasting benefits and value of reading to children from infancy.
Source: www.bringmeabook.org
http://www.almanacnews.com/morgue/2003/2003_03_19.book.html

Delaney Street
Michael Hornstein & Catherine Lee

Delancey Street is considered the country’s leading residential self-help organization for substance abusers, ex-convicts, homeless, and others who have hit bottom. Many of its residents have been gang members, drug addicts, most have been trapped in poverty for several generations. Delancey Street is run with no staff and no funding – the residents must learn to develop their strengths and help each other. At Delancey Street, ex-voncits and ex-addicts become teachers, general contractors, and truck drivers. In exchange for their basic needs being met, cons work hard – in restaurants, studying, obtaining high school diplomas and college degrees.
Cons are fed, clothed, and paid a small stipend, all from a general fund. Delancey Street prides itself on receiving no government aid, so everything comes from revenue or donations. I was amazed by Mimi Silbert's vision, and how she started Delancey Street despite everyone believing it would be a failure - indeed, it's hard to imagine a restaurant run by felons being a smooth running enterprise, much less a hit/success! Delancey Street has been a success story against all odds, and is the only program of its kind in the nation.

The New Teacher Project
Michael Hornstein & Catherine Lee
Research has shown that teacher quality - not class size, curriculum, nor facilities - is the single most important school-based factor influencing student achievement. The New Teacher Project (TNTP) collaborates with school districts to recruit, select, and train exceptional teachers. It is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving teacher quality in low-performing schools. TNTP relies mainly on a fee-for-service business model to sustain its operations, relying minimally on external funding. Since its creation, the organization has recruited and trained approximately 28,000 teachers in over 200 school districts and 26 states - affecting the educational quality for as many as 3.8 million students. TNTP recruits teachers through their Teaching Fellows program - a highly competitive program with an acceptance rate of only 15% - then assigns trained teachers to low income schools. Additionally, TNTP has done much research to reform school staffing policy, to "dismantle the flawed policies that keep the best out of the schools that need them most."
I'm inspired by TNTP's goals to effect change by focusing on those with arguably the most impact on the next generation - teachers. TNTP seems to have succeeded very much in recruiting interested teachers, top graduates from many universities - the Teaching Fellows program is as low as some of the most competitive universities. I wonder if they have perhaps become a bit too selective, but I admire their commitment to excellence by being careful about who they choose to train.

http://www.tntp.org/

VESTERGAARD FRANDSEN GROUP
Shelly Ni & Belinda Chiang

Though you probably haven't heard of this Danish company, you may have heard of the products they've designed. The Vestergaard Frandsen Group provides emergency response and disease control textiles and equipment at short notice to NGOs, the UN, and health ministries of various countries. They invented the ZeroFly and PermaNets, special sheets of mosquito netting made for emergency shelters and the LifeStraw, a portable water purifier that kills 99.99% of bacteria in water(rated 2005's Best Invention by TIME Magazine).

This company is an example of how design is used to help solve global health issues. According to the company website, about half the world's poor suffer from waterborne illnesses, 6,000 of which die daily by drinking unsafe water. I'm inspired by this company's efforts to improve the quality of life for those in refugee camps or suffering from poverty. Design shouldn't just be about making a prettier laptop or a more interesting chair -- better products should improve the lives of those who can't afford luxury designer goods.

Source:
Product website: http://www.lifestraw.com
Gizmag artice: http://www.gizmag.com/go/4418/

ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMANITY
Shelly Ni & Belinda Chiang

AFH is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that maintains a network of design/architecture professionals who work pro bono to help communities in crisis or those in need. It's rather like Doctors Without Borders for architects and designers. AFH works to facilitate global collaboration between designers, while also fostering locally inspired and adapted designs. They created the Open Architecture Network, an online resource that any professional working for a better 'built environment' can collaborate on. It is the first website to provide open source architectural plans.

With recent disasters like Hurrican Katrina or the 2004 tsunami, the devastation wrought by large-scale disasters is readily apparent. The need for quick but responsible reconstruction is also evident. Communities need to be rebuilt to start the healing process. Often survivors have lost everything. It is good to see industry professionals donating their time and expertise to reconstructing structures for communities in need at little or no cost. The online project created by AFH highlights their desire to make rebuilding an open and collaborative process.

AFH is an example of a social e venture because their premises are unprecedented in scope and inspiration. Never before has an open source resource for architectural plans been undertaken. The idea of cross-cultural collaboration and promotion of local design talent is a simple one, but one that adds depth to the original idea of pro bono design for communities in need. AFH changes from a simple charitable organization to one that promotes effort and ideas from members of the communities being helped.

Source: http://architectureforhumanity.org/featured_projects

ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD
Shelly Ni & Belinda Chiang

OLPC is a 501(c)(3) foundation dedicated to providing low cost laptops and software to children around the world. As its chairman Nicholas Negroponte says, "It's an education project, not a laptop project." Various design and computing firms are involved with the project. Several governments have committed to purchasing and distributing the computers via their ministries of education. There have been several criticisms of this effort, one of which is the top-down design and distribution of the laptop is imperialistic and condescending. Another is that the money used to purchase the computers may be put to better use: what good will a computer do when there are more pressing issues like food and water shortages?

PSI
Wesley and Yin Yin

PSI engages the private sector to alleviate health problems by providing low cost health care products to vendors. Started in 1970, PSI has become the leading social marketing organization in the world. It uses commercial advertising tactics to improve issues of reproductive health, malaria, clean water availability, reproductive health, child survival rates, and HIV facing underdeveloped nations. By providing health care products, such as condoms, mosquito nets, and reading glasses, PSI improves people’s well being by giving them the tools they need to stay healthy. PSI estimates that it has prevented more than 218,000 HIV infections, 6.7 million unintended pregnancies, and more than 140,000 child deaths from malaria and diarrhea.
PSI is not a charity. It does not give out the products for free, but rather supplies them at highly subsidized costs to independent venders; a box of 120 condoms are sold to vendors for only $0.70. The highly attractive profit margins provide an incentive for the seller to use creative methods to sell the products. By harnessing the entrepreneurial talent of the population, PSI not only provides a valuable product for the needy, but also gives people a chance to help themselves.
http://www.psi.org/about_us/

SustainAbility:
Wesley and Yin Yin

SustainAbility bridges the divide between the business and environment interests. Understanding the needs of business to maximum profit and the desire of environmentalists to use conserve resources, SustainAbility finds solutions that provide long-term value benefiting both groups. It helps businesses create business models suited to for tomorrow’s energy needs by offer services such as sustainability strategy development and implementation, materiality analysis, executive challenge and education, and more.
Founded in 1987 by John Elkington as the first for-profit company dedicated to sustainable development, SustainAbility has always maintained its mission to “inspire and support the innovation that creates tomorrow’s value.” SustainAbility undermines that the common belief that being profitable and green is incompatible. They use novel technology to form creative solutions that capitalize on the opportunities latent in sustainability challenges. Rather than relay upon the good will of corporation, SustainAbility shows corporations that being supporting sustainable development is not only good for the environment, but for their bottom line as well.
www.sustainability.com/

PATH:
Wesley and Yin Yin

Path creates sustainable, culturally relevant solutions to help communities worldwide break from cycles of poor health. It incorporates the public and private sector to bring its products to people in the poorest and most remote regions. Path subscribes to the mission of creating technology that is “effective, culturally acceptable, available, and affordable to the people who need them most.” Using innovative technology, Path developed the Uniject, a disposable needle with that enables healthcare workers with no training to provide vaccines to children. In return for licensing the Unijet to a syringe manufacture, Path secured a commitment from the company to continue producing large quantities at low costs to provide to public-sector buyers.
Path is different from the traditional pharmaceutical company because it focuses on social change not pure profit. When you turn on the TV each day, you can’t help but be bombarded by erectile disfunction commercials. Billions are spent to research these non-threatening, but highly profitable diseases, even though millions of people die from malaria and other killers. PATH focuses on the poorest people, and targets diseases that ignored by many companies. It takes full advantage of innovation and its resource of people to educate them on living healthier lives.
www.path.org

Why it's sustainable:
Path is a social entrepreneurial organization because it recognizes a social issue and uses business tactics to make a social change. It measures its performance in social returns, and not profit. While Path does relay upon government donations, its work is self-sustainable and does not need many levels of organization to produce change. By giving people a monetary incentive to provide a service for their community, Path provides a practical reason for people to help others. Like other social entrepreneurial organizations, Path is innovative and takes a radically new approach to alleviating health problems.

Google.org
Belinda Chiang and Shelly Ni

Google.org was borne out of Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s vision to devote one percent of Google’s profits and equity toward philanthropy. Google.org is a for-profit charity under the non-profit Google Foundation. It utilizes Google's financial resources and social capital to make grants and invest in individuals and for-profit entities. These funds are channeled to target three global problems: climate change (renewable energy, plug-in hybrid vehicles, alternative transportation solutions), global public health (early detection and early response, eradicating polio), and economic development and poverty (supporting development and growth in Africa, stimulating better access to capital and markets for entrepreneurs in the developing world, and using information to improve essential services to the poor).

Google.org, with its ties to Google, has immense power and resources to leverage change. As a for-profit, it is able to fund start-ups, partner with VC’s, and even lobby Congress. While still very young compared to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google.org has certainly been established much earlier in Google’s history compared to Microsoft. Just as an interesting fact, Dr. Larry Brilliant – now director – was recruited after Google insiders heard that Brilliant won the TED award (which awards three recipients $100,000 and a “wish” for how to change the world) and wished for the creation of an “early detection, rapid response” system for disease outbreaks. “The idea would be an open-source, nongovernmental, public access network for detecting, reporting and responding to pandemics.” The organization acutely represents a merging of the high tech / Silicon Valley mindset and philanthropy / social change.

Official Website – http://google.org
New York Times – http://tinyurl.com/qrc9t
Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google.org

Médecins Sans Frontières
Belinda Chiang and Shelly Ni

Officially called Doctors Without Borders in the United States, MSF is a secular humanitarian-aid NGO that targets war-torn regions and developing countries facing endemic disease. Created in 1971 by a small group of French doctors, it provides health care and medical training in more than seventy countries, prioritizing civilian welfare over political or religious boundaries. In 1999, MSF received the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize.

I love the philosophy behind Doctors Without Borders. I feel that with all the lawsuits and evilness that’ve become associated with the medical profession, Doctors Without Broders continues to maintain the legitimacy and purity of doctors – unqualified care uncompromised by prejudice. I have deep respect for everyone who works for MSF.

Official Website – http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/
Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors_without_borders

Institute for OneWorld Health
Belinda Chiang and Shelly Ni

OneWorld Health is a non-profit pharmaceutical company that develops “safe, effective, and affordable new medicines for people with infectious diseases in the developing world.” It was founded in San Francisco in 2000, now has a staff of 50, and has a budget of $90 million. Its first drug was recently approved in August 2006 by the Drug Controller General of India for treatment of Visceral Leishmaniasis, the second most deadly parasitic disease in the world following malaria. In 2006, it was awarded a $46 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop anti-secretory drugs inhibiting intestinal fluid loss, and thus diarhheal diseases—which are a leading cause of death in children under the age of five worldwide. In 2005, it was awarded the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.

Unlike Google.org, OneWorld Health funnels its funds into only a few projects. However, these relatively few projects—against diarrheal disease, malaria, and Chagas disease—are saving people’s lives from the most debilitating and devastating diseases currently plaguing developing countries.

Official Website – http://www.oneworldhealth.org/
Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_OneWorld_Health

How OneWorld Health Is Socially Entrepreneurial
Belinda Chiang

- "the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity" (Drucker).
- "by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological possiblity for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, by opening up a new source of supply of materials or a new outlet for products" (Schumpeter).
- Victoria Hale learned that a particular drug could cure thousands of people, but it wasn't on the market simply because the pharmaceutical company couldn't lower the costs sufficiently to make a profit. Though Hale, a pharmacologist, didn't invent the cure herself, she was able to take advantage of an existing drug, and make it affordable for widespread use.

- Entrepreneurs create value, according to Say. Hale, in a sense, re-creates value for those drugs.
- Say also described the entrepreneur as one who "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher producitvity and greater yield."
- "To elaborate on Say's original insight, the entrepreneur engineers a permanent shift from a lower-quality equilibrium to a higher-quality one" (Martin & Osberg).
- Edward Penhoet, former chief executive of a pharmaceutical firm, said Hale's institute should fill a "huge gap in bringing badly needed drugs to market for the majority of diseases that afflict the undeveloped world."

- "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled" (Stevenson).
- Founding a non-profit pharmaceutical company seems somewhat oxymoronic and would definitely be a risky endeavor. Regardless, Hale believed in her mission and was able to attract financial resources and a dedicated staff. In 2006, OneWorld Health was able to receive a substantial donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (96% of their funding for that year).

Benetech Wes Mateo and Yin Yin Wu
Benetech is a Silicon Valley based organization whose stated mission is to “create new technology solutions that serve humanity and empower people to improve their lives.” Although similar in model to other technology startups, Benetech focuses on applications capable of making a “great social impact” instead of pursuing applications with “commercial potential”. Presently Benetech is pursuing projects in three areas: 1) providing people with vision and reading disabilities access to digital libraries of “reading” material, 2) improving literacy via web-based applications, and 3) increasing access to valuable case documentation for human rights advocates. In addition to identifying opportunities for technological applications to create social impact, the Benetech management team also performs viability research and develops product development and business plans for these applications.
Benetech is a fascinating tech-oriented venture because it pursues ideas, from the very earliest stages, based only upon their potential to “serve humanity”. I find it quite admirable and inspiring that president Jim Fruchterman (who can literally be called a rocket scientist) and the rest of the organization’s management team choose to work in a non-profit setting even when they could do very, very well by devoting their expertise to commercial enterprises. I am interested in learning more about the process by which these technological solutions are identified, refined and implemented by Benetech.
References:
http://www.benetech.org/about/business_model.shtml http://benetech.blogspot.com/ http://www.netsquared.org/2006/conference/confirmed-presenters/jim-fruchterman-president-benetech
Kiva Wes Mateo and Yin Yin Wu
Kiva is an organization that enables people to make small-scale loans from the comfort of their own homes to aspiring entrepreneurs in the developing world. By partnering with microfinance institutions around the globe, Kiva has acquired a vast network of prospective loan recipients. Kiva’s web-based interface allows donors to not only view the profiles of thousands of loan applicants, but also to transfer funds to recipient entrepreneurs halfway around the world with the ease of a PayPal transaction. By successfully leveraging the power of the Internet to connect donors and loan recipients, Kiva facilitates a process that increases the opportunity for microlending to occur in a very efficient and personal fashion.
I think there’s a lot of beauty in the simplicity of Kiva’s mission and function. Obviously Matt Flannery (a Symbolic Systems major during his time here on the Farm) had a pretty elegant insight when he started Kiva with his wife late in 2004, and I am generally interested in hearing what areas social entrepreneurs like him consider to be similarly low-hanging fruit. Additionally I think that Kiva’s success hints at the potential for online social networking to play an increasingly strong role in connecting people geographically distant from one another in a common effort to alleviate poverty (and solve other such problems).
http://www.kiva.org/about
Genocide Intervention Network Wes Mateo and Yin Yin Wu
The Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net) was established in 2004 by a pair of then-Swarthmore students to create a community of people ready to stand and work against the “recurring problem of genocide”. The scope of this organization’s concern surpasses any one particular case of genocide (such as in Darfur) in an effort to unite people to facing the problem as a whole (as opposed having smaller distinct communities formed with a specific interest in only a single region). Since its inception, GI-Net has focused its efforts on education, advocacy and fundraising to urge and facilitate American action (in varying forms) against genocide. In addition to providing up-to-date news information on the conflict of Darfur, GI-Net also rated members of Congress on their legislative records with regard to Darfur. The organization’s fundraising efforts go towards African Union peacekeeping missions.
The mission of this organization is interesting due to the fact that it does not explicitly name any one conflict as the target of its action. This seems the natural way to define the organization if it is intended to operate over a long period of time in potentially addressing multiple distinct cases. I think GI-Net would also be a particularly valuable case study in regard to its establishment of the STAND coalition, which has had a noticeable presence on Stanford’s campus and likely also across the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_Intervention_Network#Advocacy http://www.genocideintervention.net/advocate