Garden-Variety Revolution
TerraCycle turns what others leave behind into fertilizers and fashion.
TerraCycle turns what others leave behind into fertilizers and fashion.
During turbulence and social upheaval most people retreat into themselves and focus on only one task—survival. Fortunately for the women and children of Afghanistan, Sakena Yacoobi did more. With only $20,000, Yacoobi formed what is now the Afghan Institute of Learning (AIL). Until the fall of the Taliban in 2001, AIL operated underground. AIL now serves 350,000 women and children each year. Yacoobi explains her vision for AIL to Design for Change host Sheela Sethuraman as well as her incredible journey and experiences along the way.
SSIR Managing Editor Eric Nee spoke with Escuela Nueva’s president Vicky Colbert about her efforts to change the way children are educated.
Despite temptations to broaden its focus, the Rural Development Institute has remained single-mindedly devoted to its mission. As a result, the organization has helped 400 million poor farmers around the world take ownership of some 270 million acres of land – all on a modest budget.
In remote rural areas in India, 18 million people suffer isolation and poverty due to their inability to work. In this audio interview, Jennifer Roberts, associate editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, converses with D.R. Mehta, whose NGO gives mobility to 20,000 people a year through the fitting of a high-tech prosthetic limb known as the Jaipur Foot. Mehta discusses the genesis of his organization, which makes the prosthesis freely available to the poor.
Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, not the isolated intervention of individual organizations.
Social entrepreneurship is attracting growing amounts of talent, money, and attention, but along with its increasing popularity has come less certainty about what exactly a social entrepreneur is and does.
A veteran social entrepreneur provides a guide to those who are thinking through the thorny question of whether to create a nonprofit, a for-profit, or something in between.
Why Kiva chose to be a 501(c)(3), what this tax status buys the organization, and how being a nonprofit poses challenges.
Social entrepreneurs have taken the hybrid model to a new level, crafting it into a single structure that can operate as both a for-profit and a nonprofit.