By Sujeet Kumar In the last several years, there have been discussions and attempts to distinguish between social entrepreneurship and ‘plain vanilla’ charitable/NGO work. Semantics notwithstanding, I am myself, oftentimes, confused as to the real differences between the two. Oftentimes, charitable organizations survive at the mercy of their donors contributions, which can vary. A nonprofit [...]

The next session of the NGOs & Development study group will meet Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 4:00pm in Weil Town Hall (Belfer L1) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  This discussion, entitled “Leveraging Social Entrepreneurship for Development: Strategies to Promote Innovation and Leadership”, will be led by Nishith Acharya, Executive Director of the Deshpande Foundation. 

By Steven Lawry In Part IV of this series I argued that large, conventional foundations, staffed by highly-qualified and increasingly specialized professional staff, are over-specifying the solutions to poverty in-house and, in the process, are increasing the possibility that potentially breakthrough ideas coming from outside of foundations get over-looked and go unfunded. New philanthropies, founded [...]

by Steven Lawry I argued in Part II of this series that foundations as private organizations are freer than public funders to get behind new and untested ideas for reducing poverty that show promise. Foundations are less subject to the political, economic and bureaucratic orthodoxies that channel public funds and for-profit investments to tried and [...]