Tag Archives: social venture

Evolving the Supply Chain: From Slave Labor to Personal Transformation

. “What would you say to companies that see improving even one piece of their supply chains as too expensive?” I asked. Joe Sibilia had just shared one method to help companies become more sustainable: take one ingredient in the supply chain and use it to create a social benefit. This is what he had done […]

In 3 Words: How to Build a Purpose-Driven Business

To polish up a year’s worth of learnings from working with and writing about purpose-driven companies, I’ve summed up 42 principles in exactly three words each. Three words–easy to understand, easy to share. This list partially represents the 155 blogs I’ve written this year, but it’s nowhere near complete. Add your triplets in the comments […]

Who Are Today’s Social Entrepreneurs? Echoing Green’s Lara Galinksy Talks Trends

Within the world of social enterprise, there’s a subsect of organizations that help incubate and scale social ventures.  These entities, from veterans Ashoka and Echoing Green to young buck Unreasonable Institute, play varying roles of investor, connector, teacher and trend-chronicler of a rising-star sector. To look beyond the magazine gloss and speculation and get a […]

A Social Business Venture Can Make You an Iconoclast, But You’ll Have To Do a Lot of Balancing

A social business venture packs a lot of punch. If you care strongly about mission and impact but don’t want to solicit donors and institutional funding, it might be the right model for your work. By definition, this type of enterprise generates profits, which are reinvested into the business to advance the cause and sustain […]

How Vittana Is Using Micro-lending To Help Students Triple Their Earning Power–with Kushal Chakrabarti

Click the player to listen to our conversation. Prefer MP3? Right-click and download. [Audio clip: view full post to listen] After he left Amazon (“one of the hardest, scariest and best decisions” he’s made in his life) Kushal Chakrabarti knew he would start a company.  He’d done well at Amazon, helping to improve its product […]

If Businesses Can’t BOGO and NGOs Are Crushing Entrepreneurship, Where Does That Leave Us?

If you caught my poll earlier this week asking what areas you find meaningful in the cosmos of business and social responsibility, you know that I’ve been thinking hard about how to make the biggest impact.  On one hand, there’s the CSR approach, which I’ll generalize as reaching more people but having less direct impact […]

The bigger, better, faster, stronger type of More (Poll)

Note on this post: It’s personal.  Come back tomorrow for stories and tactics, but stay today to participate and be heard. I launched this site in January 2008 to log my discoveries and articulate my thoughts on business and social responsibility. In the last nine months, I’ve worked to shape Cause Capitalism into a resource […]

Two Questions You Need To Answer Before Choosing a Structure For Your Social Enterprise–with Brian Howe

How much control of your company are you willing to give up in exchange for funds? is a question that all investment-seeking entrepreneurs need to answer. Social entrepreneurs are confronted with another key question that impacts how they want to set legally establish their organization: How important is profit versus mission? With these two questions […]

An Avon Approach To Healthier and Wealthier Communities

The concept is simple and brilliant. When I came across Living Goods, my stomach flipped with the potential impact of the organization’s work.  The mechanisms, intent and appeal match that of blockbuster social enterprises Kiva and charity: water. Living Goods replicates Avon’s model of door-to-door selling, but instead of peddling lipstick and mascara to middle-class […]

Confused About L3Cs and the Rest? Me Too. Jenny Kassan, Esq. Helps Us Out

Click the player or right-click and save for the MP3. Business structures for Triple Bottom Line ventures are my Bermuda Triangle.  I’m whipped around to end up confused about the benefits of each structure (L3C, LLC, Special Purpose Corporation, hybrid for-profit and nonprofit) and its respective requirements and restrictions.  So I asked Jenny Kassan, managing director at Katovich […]