Echoing Green’s Spark * Blog documents news, trends, and the true life of social entrepreneurs. The spark in Spark * Blog comes from Echoing Green’s goal to seed social entrepreneurs and their innovative ideas for positive change. Contact us directly (we’d love to hear from you) or add your comments into the mix.
In the past week, two articles challenged previous assumptions about two of the hottest topics in social entrepreneurship: microfinance and charter schools. Tim Harford writes about the backlash microfinance receives in "Perhaps microfinance isn’t such a big deal after all," which was published in the December 5th edition of the Financial Times.
As Harford questions the impact of microlending, Nancy Hass paints a picture of hedge fund managers and analysts coming together to solve issues in education by creating charter schools. Hass' article, "Scholarly Investments" appeared in the New York Times last Friday.
Hedge fund managers are not only creating new schools; they also sit on the board of many of New York City's charter schools. Listed as an example is Whitney Tilson, founder and Managing Partner of the hedge fund T2 Partners LLC. Whitney sits on the board of a number of charter schools and supporting organizations, and was involved with the development of Teach for America.
Interested in reading what others have to say about these articles? Check out Kevin Dick's comments in "Micro-lending Is Not a Silver Bullet" and Nikhil Swaminathan's comments in "Hedge Funders Love Charter Schools. Is That a Good Thing?"
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Special Issue on "Ökologisches Wirtschaften"
The English version of a special issue on Social Entrepreneurship is now available for download free of charge from:
http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/fileadmin/getidos/pdfdownload/Speci...
The Special Issue includes brief articles written by social entrepreneurs and noted international researchers including James Austin, John Elkington, Pamela Hartigan and Johanna Mair. Themes covered include institutional entrepreneurship, social intrapreneurship, social entrepreneurship education as well as the potential of social entrepreneurship for sustainable develoment.
The proceedings of the first conference on social entrepreneurship with a call for papers in German language are also available for downloand from: xxx. The proceedings of this event at the Berlin Hub include discussions of impact evaluation, types of social entrepreneurship as well as the governance role of social entrepreneurship. The winning paper of the call for papers is also included in the proceedings, and has also been published in Ökologisches Wirtschaften 4/2009 (see here http://www.oekom.de/zeitschriften/oekologisches-wirtschaften/archiv/oeko...).
These publications have been co-ordinated by the social entrepreneurship research group GETIDOS and at the Berlin Institute of Ecological Research (IÖW). GETIDOS primary focus is on the contribution of social entrepreneurs to sustainable water management.
For a project description see here: http://www.botanik.uni-greifswald.de/314.html?&L=1
If you like to find out more about GETIDOS, its members and upcomings, then please visit our homepage www.getidos.net or just follow us on www.twitter.com/getidos.
Innovation in social media
Innovation in social media could trigger better accounting trigger aggregation of corporate behavior and CSR. ''The YES Movie'' produced by Louis Lautman
www.TheYesmovie.com
Looking in more detail
Time will come when we will have to look in far more detail at the pros and cons of social entrepreneurship on a case by case basis, not just assuming it's all good.