Congratulations to Fast Company Magazine and consulting firm the Monitor Group for expanding the number of organizations they recognize as winners of the 2007 Social Capitalist Awards. Last year I complained that by naming only 10 or 15 organizations and allowing them to repeat they limited our exposure to terrific organizations doing good work.

This year there are 43 winners. All of last years winners are included again, but a solid group of new organizations are added, including Civic Ventures and DonorsChoose, two of my favorites. Here are the profiles (with links to make a contribution) of all 43 winners.

ACCION International (4-time winner)
A Fighting Chance
Aspire Public Schools
BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) (2-time winner)
Calvert Social Investment Foundation (2-time winner)
Ceres Citizen Schools (3-time winner)
City Year (4-time winner)
Civic Builders
Civic Ventures
College Summit (4-time winner)
Corporation for Supportive Housing
DonorsChoose
EcoLogic Finance
Endeavor Global
First Book (4-time winner)
Global Fund for Women
Grameen Foundation (3-time winner)
Hands On Network Heifer International (2-time winner)
Housing Partnership Network (3-time winner)
Jumpstart (4-time winner)
KickStart (2-time winner)
New Community Corp (2-time winner)
New Leaders for New Schools (4-time winner)
Nonprofit Finance Fund PATH (4-time winner)
PeaceWorks Foundation
Pioneer Human Services (2-time winner)
Population Services International
Raising a Reader (2-time winner)
Rare (3-time winner)
Room to Read (4-time winner)
Rubicon Programs Inc. (4-time winner)
Scojo Foundation
SEED Foundation
Springboard Forward
Teach for America (2-time winner)
TransFair USA (3-time winner)
Unitus (2-time winner)
WITNESS (4-time winner)
Working Today (3-time winner)
Year Up

The New York City-based Acumen Fund is seeking applicants for its second group of Acumen Fund Fellows. Applications for the year-long program are due by 31 January 2007.

In an email announcement, Acumen Fund Founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz wrote:

While capital is a constraint to building systems to make critical goods and services accessible to the poor, an even larger constraint is people. The world needs to build an "entrepreneurial bench" of top talent with strong financial and operational skills as well as the moral imagination to build appropriate enterprises with local stakeholders.

The program begins in September 2007, and fellows will spend eight weeks in New York City in an intensive training program where they focus on business models for the poor and their own leadership – both theoretical and practical. At the end of the training, each fellow will be assigned to work with an Acumen Fund investment in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, India or Pakistan, and given a concrete set of deliverables for the following nine months. After these assignments, fellows return to New York for a month to share experiences, exchange lessons learned, and focus on potential job opportunities.

The Acumen Fund seeks "individuals with exceptional business skills, proven international interests and a great ability to work with people." They add that fellows must "have the talent to do almost anything in their careers, and the vision to see themselves making significant change to challenging social problems." For more information and to apply, see the Acumen Fund Web site (and its many PDF files).

Proving that social change is at the heart of social entrepreneurship, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for "their efforts to create economic and social development from below." The announcement noted further:

Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights.

Yunus is widely acknowledged for pioneering the use of micro-credit, small loans to poor people (mostly women) without any financial security to enable them to build a business. According to London Times Online, the Grameen Bank, founded after the Bangladeshi famine of 1974, has lent out £2.9 billion [$5.38 billion] to more than 6 million Bangladeshis, 96 percent of them women. More than 98 percent of the money has been repaid.

Returning to the official announcement:

Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.

Micro-credit has proved to be an important liberating force in societies where women in particular have to struggle against repressive social and economic conditions. Economic growth and political democracy cannot achieve their full potential unless the female half of humanity participates on an equal footing with the male.

It's an inspiration to see an effective leader and program celebrated for their contributions to mankind. At the same time this prize is a call to each of us to see how we can support or create mechanisms for change.

Update
To learn more, see these books:

By Muhammad Yunus: Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty

By David Bornstein: The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank

Jonathan Greenblatt at WorldChanging has posted an article discussing the possibility of a Social Enterprise Corps. I tried to write a long comment and the site would not accept it (a temporary bug, I hope). Instead of losing the inspiration I include it here. I will add a link from the original to this addition.

A Social Enterprise Corps is a terrific idea. The approach could work in lots of ways, though the government-funded one you propose may be difficult in the tight-discretionary-funding world we are soon to be entering.

The SECorps members could follow the Peace Corps model where most are new college grads, but others are late career folks, people making a transition from business careers, the occasional business school grad, etc.

Another angle is to institute the SECorps as one of several options for mandatory national service for all. I believe that in addition to providing a broader base for our military recruiting, national service would institute a process for educating all about their civil responsibilities. It would create a stream of young people who could teach reading, rebuild communities, learn the skills of social entrepreneurship, defend the borders, etc.

National service would certainly make the centers of undergraduate education more productive, because they would not be enrolling green 18-year-olds out for their first adventure in the big world. Instead they would be enrolling individuals who had shared an experience in national service, learned something about life as an adult, and entered college with an appreciation of the luxury and utility of education.

So let's continue to explore the SECorps (SEC is reserved for the Securities and Exchange Commission in my mind). How can we create more well-equipped social entrepreneurs working to promote social change in effective ways? How can we strengthen our existing nonprofits with an infusion of these new young people? How can we spark new organizations with their energy and abilities?