“Slums will not go away because a few dozen Americans or Europeans spent a morning walking around them. There are solutions to our problems — but they won’t come about through tours.”

The Nonprofit Times (NPT) released its thirteenth annual Power & Influence Top 50. Last year, there were a number of Echoing Green Fellows who made the prestigious list. This year, Echoing Green's own president Cheryl Dorsey makes an appearance.

Joining Cheryl are Echoing Green Fellows Doug Ulman (of the Lance Armstrong Foundation) and Michael Brown (of City Year). The list also includes Paul Schmitz, CEO of Public Allies (an Echoing Green-supported nonprofit) and leaders in the social entrepreneurship field, Bill Drayton and Marc Freedman.

The field of social entrepreneurship has been evolving at warp speed. Because of Echoing Green’s open application process, we have the unique opportunity to examine trends and changes within the field globally. Each year, we collect data from our semifinalists as a proxy for trends occurring within the field at large.   

This year, we surveyed over 300 semi-finalists and received an 88 percent response rate. Their responses were compared with similar surveys conducted in 2007 and 2008 as well as with semifinalist data from 2009.

Ben Smilowitz is known for being a watchdog for transparency in the social change space. Most recently, Ben and his team at Disaster Accountability Project (DAP) released a report that aims to hold relief organizations responding to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake more accountable to the public.