Monk E-Business
LaserMonks, a multimillion-dollar enterprise, sells ink-jet cartridges and other office supplies online to support its Cistercian abbey in Wisconsin and to help others.
Social Enterprises
Latest
Podcast
Panel Discussion - Skoll World Forum: Hybrid Business Models
How do you use for-profit activities to fund your social entrepreneurship mission? In this panel discussion at the Skoll World Forum, experts talk about how to combine for- and nonprofit activities for greatest effect. They show that business and nonprofit can mix, drawing on examples such as efforts to profitably provide water to poor villagers by training street children to run businesses, and franchising medical care to creating a transparent market place for handmade goods.
Soup Kitchen Confidential
To share its expertise without jeopardizing its mission, FareStart spun out a new organization.
Dialing for Development
The world's neediest people are using mobile phones in ways that were never intended, and with great success. With wireless technologies, Indian farmers are finding out the latest crop prices, Nigerian youth are learning how to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and Peruvian citizens are reporting criminal activity in their neighborhoods. Yet dialing into these powerful tools is not always straightforward. The author explains how to make the wireless revolution ring in economic growth and prosperity for people living at the bottom of the pyramid.
Social Enterprise in Scotland: The World Forum
The first Social Enterprise World forum focuses on how to use business to accomplish social outcomes.
Most Popular
Drowning in Data
Funders are calling for more program evaluation, but nonprofits are often collecting dubious data, at great cost to themselves and ultimately to the people they serve.
Microfinance Misses Its Mark
Despite the hoopla over microfinance, it doesn't cure poverty. But stable jobs do. If societies are serious about helping the poorest of the poor, they should stop investing in microfinance and start supporting large, labor-intensive industries.
For Love or Lucre
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.
The Profit in Nonprofit
Why Kiva chose to be a 501(c)(3), what this tax status buys the organization, and how being a nonprofit poses challenges.
Do No Evil
Google DotOrg launched in 2004 with bold ambitions and almost $1 billion in seed funding. But the results have been less than stellar.