Week in Review 12-10-10

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Trends, topics and tidbits this week

Our photo of the week:
Each week, we post photographs from Fellows’ organizations in the field to give you a first-hand look of activities and happenings on the ground. This week, we feature an update from 2010 Echoing Green Fellow Jodie Wu, founder of Global Cycle Solutions. She is transforming the bicycle into a vehicle for income-generation and innovation for the 500 million smallholder farmers around the world earning less than one dollar per day. Take a look at the full gallery on Facebook.

Blogpost of the week:
Failure is Not a Dirty Word was our most popular blogpost this week, with quite a bit of feedback about the importance of not just failure, but talking about failure and sharing the lessons that come from it.

In the same vein, Shivani Siroya (@shivsiroya) shared a quite an interesting study conducted by Harvard Business School in 2008 about performance persistence in entrepreneurship—the results may just surprise you! In case you don’t have time to read the entire paper, The New York Times presents some key insights that are definitely worth reading.

Trends and topics:
Some of our most trending content included Pulitzer Prize- winner Nick Kristof’s list of his top five books on saving the world, along with Six Keys to Excellence from the Harvard Business Review.

Lindsay Clinton (@lindsclint), editor of Beyond Profit, created quite the buzz on Twitter this past week with two articles. The first is a thoughtful summary of a jam-packed report on data related to and the emergence of impact investing as an asset class developed in partnership with JP Morgan, the Rockefeller Foundation, and GIIN. Her second article in the Wall Street Journal examines the intersection of social entrepreneurship and government and the critical need for partnership between these two sectors. We’re excited to co-host the next #SocEntchat with @AshokaTweets on this very topic in the coming days—stay tuned for more details!

One of our favorite TED talks this week was by Jason Fried on where you do your best work and why often, it doesn’t actually happen at work!

The Aspen Institute’s First Movers Fellowship was also quite popular, demonstrating that many innovators are eager to find ways to drive change at their own companies.

The debate over for-profit, socially driven, public companies continues, certainly indicated by the conversation over Hugh Whalen’s recent piece on the dangers of demonizing them.

Our most retweeted quote this week was “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” by Mary Oliver. We also saw a couple of great responses:

@DeliciousPeace - I plan to spend it engaging with other humans and telling stories that otherwise might not be told.
@dbraines - I plan to spend it working toward progressing our planet to equality.

A few upcoming opportunities:

• The next Teach For America application deadline is December 17th.
• The Unreasonable Institute deadline is just around the corner on December 15th.
• The Dell Social Innovation competition is in full swing – the Round 1 deadline is February 14th.
• The Harvard Social Enterprise Conference on March 6-7, 2011 is now open for registration.

Inside Echoing Green:
We would be remiss if we didn’t send a big high-five to all those innovators who applied for the 2011 Echoing Green Fellowship! We are furiously reading your applications and we will continue to share interesting trends and news in the days to come, so stay tuned and look for our next big announcement in early January.

We are also very excited to welcome our newest staff members, Jay Geneske, Director of Online Communications, and Jesse Gerstin, Special Assistant to our President, Cheryl Dorsey.

The Echoing Green Team heads off to our holiday party this afternoon…until next week, have a wonderful weekend!