Social Entrepreneurship
Example of Omydar Network
"We believe every individual has the power to make a difference.
We exist for one single purpose: So that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen.
We are actively building a network of participants, because we know we can't do this alone. "
Omidyar Network is a mission-based investment group committed to fostering individual self-empowerment on a global scale. Established in June 2004 by Pierre and Pam Omidyar, the Network derives its focus and values from Pierre's experience as founder of eBay.
The Network funds for-profits, nonprofits and public policy efforts that promote:
• Equal access to information, tools and opportunities
• Rich connections around shared interests
• A sense of ownership for participants
Because we believe issues are best addressed by the people who face them, we fund citizen-driven models that enable individuals to pursue what matters most to them. Therefore, our approach is to focus on the how, rather than the what.
Omidyar Network is developing a diverse portfolio that fosters individual self-empowerment across the economic, political and social realms. We invite you to learn more about the organizations we've funded.
American India Foundation
The American India Foundation is devoted to improving social and economic conditions in India by mobilizing resources in the US for impoverished Indian communities.
Apache Software Foundation
The Apache Software Foundation, formed by the open source developer community it supports, provides hardware, communication, and business infrastructure for Apache software projects.
Ashoka
Ashoka helps create systemic social change by providing social entrepreneurs with funding and a global network of relationships, knowledge, and resources.
Backfence
Backfence provides highly localized Web sites that enable members of local communities to post their news, share what's happening within their own neighborhoods, and connect with others who care about the same issues.
Carter-Baker Commission
The Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform is a nonpartisan, independently funded commission assessing the effectiveness of and recommending improvements to the US electoral system and the Help America Vote Act.
Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity provides the public with the findings of its investigations and analyses of public service, government accountability and ethics-related issues.
Center for Responsive Politics
The Center for Responsive Politics seeks to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry, and a more responsive government by tracking money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons breaks down barriers to sharing creative content imposed by existing copyright law, using private rights to create public goods.
Digg
Digg harnesses the collective wisdom of its online audience by allowing it to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Internet.
DonorsChoose
DonorsChoose is the online marketplace where teachers and citizens connect to give students the resources they need to learn.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation works to educate press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology, and acts as a defender of those liberties.
Electronic Privacy Information Center
The Electronic Privacy Information Center works to promote the public voice and protect privacy, freedom of expression and constitutional values in decisions concerning the future of the Internet.
EVDB
EVDB (Events and Venues Data Base) is a collaborative, online information resource that helps people discover events and share their discoveries with others, allowing those who would not otherwise have connected to meet and interact.
Federated Media Publishing
Federated Media Publishing is developing a suite of publishing services that will enable a network of established, high quality, independent authors to thrive through partnerships with endemic and national advertisers.
Feedster
Feedster is an RSS search engine that enables the public to create a richer, more diverse and connected exchange of information.
FreeBSD Foundation
The FreeBSD Foundation promotes collaborative research and development involving the open source FreeBSD operating system.
GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving is an Internet-based marketplace for international philanthropy, connecting individual and institutional donors directly to locally run, social and economic development projects around the world.
Global Social Venture Competition
The Global Social Venture Competition actively supports the creation and growth of successful social ventures around the world.
Grameen Foundation USA
Grameen Foundation USA empowers the world's poorest people to lift themselves out of poverty with dignity through access to financial services and to information.
Grassroots Media
Grassroots Media is a project to apply the best practices and principles of professional journalism to the emergent fervor and knowledge of citizens, who want to bring their own voices to the journalistic process.
Hagar
Hagar's Reintegration of Trafficked Women Project helps Cambodian women and girls who are victims of human trafficking successfully begin a new life in mainstream society.
Institute for Justice
The Institute for Justice is a public interest law firm providing strategic litigation, communication and outreach to secure consitutional rights such as economic liberties, private property rights, and freedom of speech.
KaBOOM!
KaBOOM! empowers civic participation nationwide by working with communities to design, build and maintain their own playgrounds, skateparks, and athletic fields.
Keystone
Keystone aims to provide the first global reporting standards for donors in the nonprofit market, akin to what generally accepted accounting practices provide for investors in the stock market.
Kids Voting USA
Kids Voting USA fosters an informed, participating electorate by educating and actively engaging students and their families in citizenship, civic responsibility, democracy and the importance of political participation.
Linden Lab
Linden Lab is the producer of Second Life, an online world imagined, created and owned by its residents and guided by its participatory democracy.
Microcredit Summit Campaign
Through a series of regional and global events, microfinance stakeholders gather to advance the field of microfinance and, ultimately, reduce poverty among 100 million of the world's poorest families.
Microfinance Information eXchange, Inc. (The MIX)
The Microfinance Information eXchange is an online information marketplace that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration between microfinance institutions and prospective investors and clients.
Microfinance Securities
Omidyar Network is investing in the first large US pooling of funds for microfinance, hoping to stimulate broader participation from mainstream investors.
MicroVest
MicroVest is an investment firm providing microfinance institutions with access to new sources of commercial capital, helping to build capital markets that work for the poor.
Modest Needs
Modest Needs helps keep struggling families from entering the cycle of poverty, allowing them to cover small, but unexpected expenses by pooling what others can afford to share.
Myelin Repair Foundation
The Myelin Repair Foundation is driving innovation in multiple sclerosis research by creating a collaborative environment in which disparate scientists work together on a shared research plan as a single community.
New Voters Project
The New Voters Project is a nonpartisan, grassroots campaign focused on increasing the turnout of young voters for the 2004 election.
OneWorld International
OneWorld is a global information network developed to support communication media of the people, by the people and for the people — everywhere.
Project on Government Oversight
The Project on Government Oversight strives to make the federal government accountable to its citizens by investigating, exposing, and remedying the government's abuses of power, mismanagement, and subservience to special interests.
Project Vote
Project Vote empowers low-income and minority citizens to increase voter education, registration, and turnout rates within their own communities, and helps them protect their voting rights.
Python Software Foundation
The Python Software Foundation supports the developer community devoted to advancing Python, the open source programming language easily learned within a few days.
Science Commons
Science Commons encourages scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and enterprises to share scientific literature, data, and materials.
Secrecy News
Secrecy News aims to increase transparency and accountability of the democratic process by challenging excessive government secrecy, providing alternative channels for public access to government information, and promoting public oversight.
Socialtext
Socialtext, the leading enterprise social software provider, makes it easy for workgroups to communicate effectively and build group memory, social capital and trust.
Solar Electric Light Fund
Solar Electric Light Fund works with rural communities in the developing world to establish solar-powered electric infrastructure, laying the foundation for economic development and an improved quality of life.
SourceForge.net
SourceForge.net is the world's largest open source software development website, offering the most comprehensive repository of open source code and applications for free.
SpikeSource
SpikeSource makes open source software safe for the enterprise by providing testing, certification and support services.
United Villages
United Villages enables people in underserved, rural areas of developing countries to communicate by email and voicemail through cost-effective, "store-and-forward" wireless networks.
Unitus
Unitus works to accelerate the growth of the highest-potential microfinance institutions in developing countries, demonstrating that MFIs can be operated as large-scale, commercially funded, regulated financial institutions.
Votewatch.us
Votewatch.us is a nonpartisan organization working toward a fully transparent and accountable election system to ensure all votes are counted as they were cast.
Voxiva
Voxiva's information applications leverage the existing communications infrastructure of developing countries to help organizations and their field staffs to track diseases, monitor patients, manage projects and respond to disasters in real time, significantly reducing response times and ultimately saving lives.
WITNESS
WITNESS helps local human rights defenders in the U.S. and around the globe use video to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools of justice.
World of Good
World of Good brings ethically sourced, handcrafted gifts and accessories into the US market under one brand, providing microentrepreneurship and a sustainable living for thousands of individual artisans from developing countries.
YackPack
YackPack combines the richness of voice communication with the convenience and simplicity of email, allowing even non-technical people to strengthen connections with those closest to them.
YouthBuild
YouthBuild works to unleash the intelligence and positive energy of low-income youth to rebuild their communities and their lives.
For more information about Omidyar Network:
http://www.omidyar.net/
PIERRE OMIDYAR
Ebay founder & Omidyar founder
On Labor Day 1995, Pierre launched eBay as an experiment. He wondered, "What would happen within a marketplace if everyone had equal access to information and tools? Would a level playing field enable individuals to compete alongside big businesses? What if members managed their own transactions and accountability?" At the time, Pierre didn't know the answers to his own questions. Today, his experiment continues to prove the benefits of an open and honest environment. Hundreds of thousands of members make their living entirely on eBay and enjoy the freedom of owning a business. More than 150 million people trust strangers with every transaction. Strangers find common ground where none seemed to exist before.
After eBay's success and its IPO in 1998, Pierre, along with his wife, Pam, co-founded the Omidyar Foundation to fund nonprofits. Yet eBay's tremendous social impact as a for-profit company demonstrated that business could also be an effective tool for making the world a better place. In response, they broadened their scope in June 2004 and formed a new entity, Omidyar Network, to invest in for-profit, nonprofit and public policy efforts. To date, the Network has funded a number of areas that leverage transparent, collaborative and bottom-up approaches so that "more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen." Those areas include microfinance, citizen journalism, open source, representative government and elections, and intellectual property commons, among others. Over the next five years, the organization plans to invest $400 million across sectors and seek out financially self-sustaining models that can only be successful by having a social impact.
Pierre graduated from Tufts in 1988 with a B.S. in computer science. He then joined Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, as a consumer software engineer. Next, he co-founded Ink Development Corp., later renamed eShop and acquired by Microsoft. Today, Pierre serves as a Trustee of Tufts University and Santa Fe Institute, a Director of Meetup Inc., Chairman of
eBay Inc., and CEO of Omidyar Network.
Also, for more information about Pierre:
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/omi0int-2
Social Entrepreneurship
November 27, 2005
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar donates $100 million for microfinancing
According to USA Today, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar will be donating $100 million to a Tufts University program that will generate small loans to finance entrepreneurs in India, Bangladesh, and other poor countries. The goal is to ease poverty in these poor countries.
He's donating $100 million to a university ; Today's tech execs seek to change the world with their own form of philanthropy: Social entrepreneurship
SAN FRANCISCO -- Entrepreneurship turned eBay founder Pierre Omidyar into one of the world's richest men. Now, he's betting it can ease one of the world's most daunting problems: poverty.
Omidyar, who started eBay 10 years ago, will announce today that he is donating $100 million for a new Tufts University program to generate millions of tiny loans, some as small as $40, to finance entrepreneurs trying to escape poverty in India, Bangladesh and other poor countries.
The gift is a big endorsement of social entrepreneurship -- a field of growing interest for the new generation of technology entrepreneurs. The shift could recast traditional philanthropy dominated by non-profits such as the Ford Foundation built on Old Economy wealth.
The new entrepreneurs, impatient to resolve global problems more quickly, are applying the very business models that made them rich at eBay, Microsoft, Google and America Online to battle the most vexing issues, from poverty to childhood disease. "We ought to be looking at business as a force for good," Omidyar said in an interview.
Other tech entrepreneurs are making similar moves. Microsoft's Bill Gates just announced $258 million to help drug giant GlaxoSmithKline and others defeat malaria, a disease killing 2,000 African children daily.
Google's founders last month said their planned $1 billion in philanthropy would include backing entrepreneurs in places such as western Africa. On a smaller scale, America Online co-founder Steve Case in August said he hoped to reduce urban pollution by investing in a novel U.S. car-rental start-up.
Yet the $100 million from eBay Chairman Omidyar and his wife, Pam, both 38, stands out for several reasons. It's a record dollar commitment by an individual to the microfinance industry, he says.
The industry began about 30 years ago in rural Bangladesh when economics professor Muhammad Yunus launched what is now Grameen Bank. It has 3.7 million borrowers, virtually all women, relying on the bank's nearly 1,300 branches covering 46,000 villages. Repayment rates are 95% to 98%, says Grameen Foundation USA, the bank's U.S. affiliate.
Since Grameen's launch, a network of other microlenders -- as many as 10,000 -- has sprung up worldwide, lending about $24 billion annually, says the Microcredit Summit Campaign, funded partly by Omidyar. Over the next 10 years, he expects the Omidyar- Tufts Microfinance Fund could unleash $1 billion in loans, many to women, as capital is repaid, then lent again. That could attract billions more from Wall Street.
It is the biggest -- though not the last -- such gift from a man with very deep pockets: Omidyar, with $10 billion, ranks No. 18 on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans.
Omidyar's capitalist approach to philanthropy could encourage other wealthy entrepreneurs from his generation to follow a similar trail, says Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a charity trade group whose members include stalwarts such as the American Red Cross. "These guys broke the business mold and, in a way, they are trying to break the social-compact mold as well," Aviv says.
Omidyar's gambit is not guaranteed. For decades, do-gooders have thrown billions at programs meant to raise living standards for the world's 3 billion poor, many living on far less than $1 a day. "We're talking about deep, intractable problems," says Gene Tempel, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
While Grameen Bank has been successful, few have tried what Omidyar seeks on such a big scale: luring risk-averse Wall Street to invest in entrepreneurs such as Bhagyamma Vadla, 26, in the Andhra Pradesh province of southern India.
She started a buffalo-milk dairy and clothes-making business with four loans totaling $674 over the past four years, says Grameen Foundation USA. She now earns $2.44 a day, nearly four times what she earned before the loans.
Driving social good
Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are prime examples of the newly minted billionaires who also believe entrepreneurship can drive social good. Both 32, their wealth has soared to $14 billion each in little more than a year. At the launch of the online giant's initial public offering last year, they said the Google Foundation might someday "eclipse Google itself" in world impact. Last month, they poured $90 million into the newly launched foundation to be given to groups such as TechnoServe in Norwalk, Conn. Among its ventures, TechnoServe will sponsor a contest in Ghana whose winners will get start-up financing.
Microsoft's Gates is taking a different approach, investing money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation into partnerships with pharmaceutical firms that otherwise might not pursue cures with little profit potential. This week's $258 million in grants follow $3.6 billion for global research and development and other efforts since the foundation's launch in 2000.
Social entrepreneurship is also taking place in smaller ways.
Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen launched a $5 million venture philanthropy arm in 2000 that's financing New England start-ups to boost the state's rural economy. The Barred Rock Fund's investments include Vermont Mystic Pie in Chester, Vt., a baker creating a market for Vermont apples, and jobs producing them.
In Nashville, retired biotech entrepreneur Joseph Cook created Mountain Group Capital in 2003, a venture fund that invests in U.S. manufacturers with hopes of preserving good jobs in the USA. Cook started the fund with more than $5 million of the money he made as former CEO of Amylin Pharmaceuticals in San Diego.
Calling it "business philanthropy," Cook aims for market-rate profits without cutting employee benefits. "We think a health care plan is an important component of a stable environment where people want to work," he says.
AOL co-founder Case, to be sure, wants to profit from buying majority control of Flexcar in Seattle. It rents cars, many gas- electric hybrids, for a few hours at a time in congested urban areas such as Washington and Los Angeles.
Flexcar could make it possible for city dwellers to give up car ownership, Case says, turning the once "fringy" environmental movement into something more mainstream.
Case says others investing alongside his new $500 million Revolution investment fund include Carly Fiorina, the entrepreneurial former CEO of tech giant Hewlett-Packard.
More Revolution investments are likely; this week, Case resigned as a board member of AOL owner Time Warner to focus on Revolution.
The power of tiny transactions
How did French-born Omidyar, uneasy with sudden wealth and now living in a quiet Las Vegas suburb, decide to become a high-profile champion of microfinance's role in social entrepreneurship?
Omidyar (pronounced "oh-MID-ee-ar") says it was a natural outcome of eBay, the online auctioneer that's become the world's biggest 24- hour garage sale. The Silicon Valley icon, with 168 million registered users worldwide, proved that an enterprise built around millions of tiny transactions can prosper.
EBay, with a $55 billion market capitalization, says more than 700,000 users now support themselves part time or full time as online merchants -- a prime example, Omidyar says, of "economic self- empowerment."
About 18 months ago, after learning about microfinance, the Omidyars revamped their philanthropic operation, the Omidyar Network, to invest in for-profit ventures alongside traditional grants to non-profit groups.
The Omidyars have not abandoned traditional philanthropy -- giving to charities such as the Red Cross. "I just think the largest potential is in thinking about business as having a social impact," he says.
Housed in Silicon Valley's Redwood City, the Omidyar Network has $400 million in assets and 37 full-time staffers. Before today's announcement, it had plowed $15 million into microfinance ventures, including Grameen.
Omidyar figured microfinance needed a big push to prove its profitability and attract really big bucks from Wall Street. "In order to get a large-scale global effort, you need a lot of capital," he says. In other words, "microcredit needs IPO-level capital to demonstrate its true potential as a business," says David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.
And that, of course, is Omidyar's aim with his $100 million gift.
"Who says philanthropy has a monopoly on making the world a better place?" he says. "There are lots and lots of businesses that make the world a better place by their very existence."
Now, with today's announcement, he hopes to prove it.
Example of project – ventures & foundation related
The judges awarded an Honorable Mention to a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a public-health organization in Nepal for a low-tech, relatively low-cost home water-filtration system for use in developing countries. The team, led by MIT research engineer and lecturer Susan Murcott, sought to address one of the most pressing public-health problems in developing countries: the lack of clean drinking water, especially for those living in rural areas or urban slums. Millions of people die every year from water-related illnesses, with many of the victims young children.
The MIT team's water-filtering system won in the environmental technology category. Though decidedly a low-tech solution, it was praised by judges for addressing an important problem in an original fashion. However, they also cautioned that even at $20, the price may be too high for the poor households it's targeted for.
"Clean water is not sexy, and $20 a year won't make anyone rich," says Robert Drost, a scientist at Sun Microsystems Inc. and leader of the team that won last year's Gold award. "But third-world challenges in water, food, shelter, and basic medical care are much more important than innovations in first-world entertainment."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112975757605373586-ZbxLQQFpW_SrJk31It0qBaExZiU_20061023.html?mod=public_home_us
"We believe every individual has the power to make a difference.
We exist for one single purpose: So that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen.
We are actively building a network of participants, because we know we can't do this alone. "
Omidyar Network is a mission-based investment group committed to fostering individual self-empowerment on a global scale. Established in June 2004 by Pierre and Pam Omidyar, the Network derives its focus and values from Pierre's experience as founder of eBay.
The Network funds for-profits, nonprofits and public policy efforts that promote:
• Equal access to information, tools and opportunities
• Rich connections around shared interests
• A sense of ownership for participants
Because we believe issues are best addressed by the people who face them, we fund citizen-driven models that enable individuals to pursue what matters most to them. Therefore, our approach is to focus on the how, rather than the what.
Omidyar Network is developing a diverse portfolio that fosters individual self-empowerment across the economic, political and social realms. We invite you to learn more about the organizations we've funded.
American India Foundation
The American India Foundation is devoted to improving social and economic conditions in India by mobilizing resources in the US for impoverished Indian communities.
Apache Software Foundation
The Apache Software Foundation, formed by the open source developer community it supports, provides hardware, communication, and business infrastructure for Apache software projects.
Ashoka
Ashoka helps create systemic social change by providing social entrepreneurs with funding and a global network of relationships, knowledge, and resources.
Backfence
Backfence provides highly localized Web sites that enable members of local communities to post their news, share what's happening within their own neighborhoods, and connect with others who care about the same issues.
Carter-Baker Commission
The Carter-Baker Commission on Federal Election Reform is a nonpartisan, independently funded commission assessing the effectiveness of and recommending improvements to the US electoral system and the Help America Vote Act.
Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity provides the public with the findings of its investigations and analyses of public service, government accountability and ethics-related issues.
Center for Responsive Politics
The Center for Responsive Politics seeks to create a more educated voter, an involved citizenry, and a more responsive government by tracking money in politics and its effect on elections and public policy.
Creative Commons
Creative Commons breaks down barriers to sharing creative content imposed by existing copyright law, using private rights to create public goods.
Digg
Digg harnesses the collective wisdom of its online audience by allowing it to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Internet.
DonorsChoose
DonorsChoose is the online marketplace where teachers and citizens connect to give students the resources they need to learn.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation works to educate press, policymakers and the general public about civil liberties issues related to technology, and acts as a defender of those liberties.
Electronic Privacy Information Center
The Electronic Privacy Information Center works to promote the public voice and protect privacy, freedom of expression and constitutional values in decisions concerning the future of the Internet.
EVDB
EVDB (Events and Venues Data Base) is a collaborative, online information resource that helps people discover events and share their discoveries with others, allowing those who would not otherwise have connected to meet and interact.
Federated Media Publishing
Federated Media Publishing is developing a suite of publishing services that will enable a network of established, high quality, independent authors to thrive through partnerships with endemic and national advertisers.
Feedster
Feedster is an RSS search engine that enables the public to create a richer, more diverse and connected exchange of information.
FreeBSD Foundation
The FreeBSD Foundation promotes collaborative research and development involving the open source FreeBSD operating system.
GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving is an Internet-based marketplace for international philanthropy, connecting individual and institutional donors directly to locally run, social and economic development projects around the world.
Global Social Venture Competition
The Global Social Venture Competition actively supports the creation and growth of successful social ventures around the world.
Grameen Foundation USA
Grameen Foundation USA empowers the world's poorest people to lift themselves out of poverty with dignity through access to financial services and to information.
Grassroots Media
Grassroots Media is a project to apply the best practices and principles of professional journalism to the emergent fervor and knowledge of citizens, who want to bring their own voices to the journalistic process.
Hagar
Hagar's Reintegration of Trafficked Women Project helps Cambodian women and girls who are victims of human trafficking successfully begin a new life in mainstream society.
Institute for Justice
The Institute for Justice is a public interest law firm providing strategic litigation, communication and outreach to secure consitutional rights such as economic liberties, private property rights, and freedom of speech.
KaBOOM!
KaBOOM! empowers civic participation nationwide by working with communities to design, build and maintain their own playgrounds, skateparks, and athletic fields.
Keystone
Keystone aims to provide the first global reporting standards for donors in the nonprofit market, akin to what generally accepted accounting practices provide for investors in the stock market.
Kids Voting USA
Kids Voting USA fosters an informed, participating electorate by educating and actively engaging students and their families in citizenship, civic responsibility, democracy and the importance of political participation.
Linden Lab
Linden Lab is the producer of Second Life, an online world imagined, created and owned by its residents and guided by its participatory democracy.
Microcredit Summit Campaign
Through a series of regional and global events, microfinance stakeholders gather to advance the field of microfinance and, ultimately, reduce poverty among 100 million of the world's poorest families.
Microfinance Information eXchange, Inc. (The MIX)
The Microfinance Information eXchange is an online information marketplace that promotes knowledge sharing and collaboration between microfinance institutions and prospective investors and clients.
Microfinance Securities
Omidyar Network is investing in the first large US pooling of funds for microfinance, hoping to stimulate broader participation from mainstream investors.
MicroVest
MicroVest is an investment firm providing microfinance institutions with access to new sources of commercial capital, helping to build capital markets that work for the poor.
Modest Needs
Modest Needs helps keep struggling families from entering the cycle of poverty, allowing them to cover small, but unexpected expenses by pooling what others can afford to share.
Myelin Repair Foundation
The Myelin Repair Foundation is driving innovation in multiple sclerosis research by creating a collaborative environment in which disparate scientists work together on a shared research plan as a single community.
New Voters Project
The New Voters Project is a nonpartisan, grassroots campaign focused on increasing the turnout of young voters for the 2004 election.
OneWorld International
OneWorld is a global information network developed to support communication media of the people, by the people and for the people — everywhere.
Project on Government Oversight
The Project on Government Oversight strives to make the federal government accountable to its citizens by investigating, exposing, and remedying the government's abuses of power, mismanagement, and subservience to special interests.
Project Vote
Project Vote empowers low-income and minority citizens to increase voter education, registration, and turnout rates within their own communities, and helps them protect their voting rights.
Python Software Foundation
The Python Software Foundation supports the developer community devoted to advancing Python, the open source programming language easily learned within a few days.
Science Commons
Science Commons encourages scientific innovation by making it easier for scientists, universities, and enterprises to share scientific literature, data, and materials.
Secrecy News
Secrecy News aims to increase transparency and accountability of the democratic process by challenging excessive government secrecy, providing alternative channels for public access to government information, and promoting public oversight.
Socialtext
Socialtext, the leading enterprise social software provider, makes it easy for workgroups to communicate effectively and build group memory, social capital and trust.
Solar Electric Light Fund
Solar Electric Light Fund works with rural communities in the developing world to establish solar-powered electric infrastructure, laying the foundation for economic development and an improved quality of life.
SourceForge.net
SourceForge.net is the world's largest open source software development website, offering the most comprehensive repository of open source code and applications for free.
SpikeSource
SpikeSource makes open source software safe for the enterprise by providing testing, certification and support services.
United Villages
United Villages enables people in underserved, rural areas of developing countries to communicate by email and voicemail through cost-effective, "store-and-forward" wireless networks.
Unitus
Unitus works to accelerate the growth of the highest-potential microfinance institutions in developing countries, demonstrating that MFIs can be operated as large-scale, commercially funded, regulated financial institutions.
Votewatch.us
Votewatch.us is a nonpartisan organization working toward a fully transparent and accountable election system to ensure all votes are counted as they were cast.
Voxiva
Voxiva's information applications leverage the existing communications infrastructure of developing countries to help organizations and their field staffs to track diseases, monitor patients, manage projects and respond to disasters in real time, significantly reducing response times and ultimately saving lives.
WITNESS
WITNESS helps local human rights defenders in the U.S. and around the globe use video to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools of justice.
World of Good
World of Good brings ethically sourced, handcrafted gifts and accessories into the US market under one brand, providing microentrepreneurship and a sustainable living for thousands of individual artisans from developing countries.
YackPack
YackPack combines the richness of voice communication with the convenience and simplicity of email, allowing even non-technical people to strengthen connections with those closest to them.
YouthBuild
YouthBuild works to unleash the intelligence and positive energy of low-income youth to rebuild their communities and their lives.
For more information about Omidyar Network:
http://www.omidyar.net/
PIERRE OMIDYAR
Ebay founder & Omidyar founder
On Labor Day 1995, Pierre launched eBay as an experiment. He wondered, "What would happen within a marketplace if everyone had equal access to information and tools? Would a level playing field enable individuals to compete alongside big businesses? What if members managed their own transactions and accountability?" At the time, Pierre didn't know the answers to his own questions. Today, his experiment continues to prove the benefits of an open and honest environment. Hundreds of thousands of members make their living entirely on eBay and enjoy the freedom of owning a business. More than 150 million people trust strangers with every transaction. Strangers find common ground where none seemed to exist before.
After eBay's success and its IPO in 1998, Pierre, along with his wife, Pam, co-founded the Omidyar Foundation to fund nonprofits. Yet eBay's tremendous social impact as a for-profit company demonstrated that business could also be an effective tool for making the world a better place. In response, they broadened their scope in June 2004 and formed a new entity, Omidyar Network, to invest in for-profit, nonprofit and public policy efforts. To date, the Network has funded a number of areas that leverage transparent, collaborative and bottom-up approaches so that "more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen." Those areas include microfinance, citizen journalism, open source, representative government and elections, and intellectual property commons, among others. Over the next five years, the organization plans to invest $400 million across sectors and seek out financially self-sustaining models that can only be successful by having a social impact.
Pierre graduated from Tufts in 1988 with a B.S. in computer science. He then joined Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, as a consumer software engineer. Next, he co-founded Ink Development Corp., later renamed eShop and acquired by Microsoft. Today, Pierre serves as a Trustee of Tufts University and Santa Fe Institute, a Director of Meetup Inc., Chairman of
eBay Inc., and CEO of Omidyar Network.
Also, for more information about Pierre:
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/omi0int-2
Collaborate: Work with others to make your vision a reality.
Social Entrepreneurship
November 27, 2005
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar donates $100 million for microfinancing
According to USA Today, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar will be donating $100 million to a Tufts University program that will generate small loans to finance entrepreneurs in India, Bangladesh, and other poor countries. The goal is to ease poverty in these poor countries.
He's donating $100 million to a university ; Today's tech execs seek to change the world with their own form of philanthropy: Social entrepreneurship
SAN FRANCISCO -- Entrepreneurship turned eBay founder Pierre Omidyar into one of the world's richest men. Now, he's betting it can ease one of the world's most daunting problems: poverty.
Omidyar, who started eBay 10 years ago, will announce today that he is donating $100 million for a new Tufts University program to generate millions of tiny loans, some as small as $40, to finance entrepreneurs trying to escape poverty in India, Bangladesh and other poor countries.
The gift is a big endorsement of social entrepreneurship -- a field of growing interest for the new generation of technology entrepreneurs. The shift could recast traditional philanthropy dominated by non-profits such as the Ford Foundation built on Old Economy wealth.
The new entrepreneurs, impatient to resolve global problems more quickly, are applying the very business models that made them rich at eBay, Microsoft, Google and America Online to battle the most vexing issues, from poverty to childhood disease. "We ought to be looking at business as a force for good," Omidyar said in an interview.
Other tech entrepreneurs are making similar moves. Microsoft's Bill Gates just announced $258 million to help drug giant GlaxoSmithKline and others defeat malaria, a disease killing 2,000 African children daily.
Google's founders last month said their planned $1 billion in philanthropy would include backing entrepreneurs in places such as western Africa. On a smaller scale, America Online co-founder Steve Case in August said he hoped to reduce urban pollution by investing in a novel U.S. car-rental start-up.
Yet the $100 million from eBay Chairman Omidyar and his wife, Pam, both 38, stands out for several reasons. It's a record dollar commitment by an individual to the microfinance industry, he says.
The industry began about 30 years ago in rural Bangladesh when economics professor Muhammad Yunus launched what is now Grameen Bank. It has 3.7 million borrowers, virtually all women, relying on the bank's nearly 1,300 branches covering 46,000 villages. Repayment rates are 95% to 98%, says Grameen Foundation USA, the bank's U.S. affiliate.
Since Grameen's launch, a network of other microlenders -- as many as 10,000 -- has sprung up worldwide, lending about $24 billion annually, says the Microcredit Summit Campaign, funded partly by Omidyar. Over the next 10 years, he expects the Omidyar- Tufts Microfinance Fund could unleash $1 billion in loans, many to women, as capital is repaid, then lent again. That could attract billions more from Wall Street.
It is the biggest -- though not the last -- such gift from a man with very deep pockets: Omidyar, with $10 billion, ranks No. 18 on Forbes' list of the 400 richest Americans.
Omidyar's capitalist approach to philanthropy could encourage other wealthy entrepreneurs from his generation to follow a similar trail, says Diana Aviv, president of Independent Sector, a charity trade group whose members include stalwarts such as the American Red Cross. "These guys broke the business mold and, in a way, they are trying to break the social-compact mold as well," Aviv says.
Omidyar's gambit is not guaranteed. For decades, do-gooders have thrown billions at programs meant to raise living standards for the world's 3 billion poor, many living on far less than $1 a day. "We're talking about deep, intractable problems," says Gene Tempel, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
While Grameen Bank has been successful, few have tried what Omidyar seeks on such a big scale: luring risk-averse Wall Street to invest in entrepreneurs such as Bhagyamma Vadla, 26, in the Andhra Pradesh province of southern India.
She started a buffalo-milk dairy and clothes-making business with four loans totaling $674 over the past four years, says Grameen Foundation USA. She now earns $2.44 a day, nearly four times what she earned before the loans.
Driving social good
Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are prime examples of the newly minted billionaires who also believe entrepreneurship can drive social good. Both 32, their wealth has soared to $14 billion each in little more than a year. At the launch of the online giant's initial public offering last year, they said the Google Foundation might someday "eclipse Google itself" in world impact. Last month, they poured $90 million into the newly launched foundation to be given to groups such as TechnoServe in Norwalk, Conn. Among its ventures, TechnoServe will sponsor a contest in Ghana whose winners will get start-up financing.
Microsoft's Gates is taking a different approach, investing money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation into partnerships with pharmaceutical firms that otherwise might not pursue cures with little profit potential. This week's $258 million in grants follow $3.6 billion for global research and development and other efforts since the foundation's launch in 2000.
Social entrepreneurship is also taking place in smaller ways.
Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen launched a $5 million venture philanthropy arm in 2000 that's financing New England start-ups to boost the state's rural economy. The Barred Rock Fund's investments include Vermont Mystic Pie in Chester, Vt., a baker creating a market for Vermont apples, and jobs producing them.
In Nashville, retired biotech entrepreneur Joseph Cook created Mountain Group Capital in 2003, a venture fund that invests in U.S. manufacturers with hopes of preserving good jobs in the USA. Cook started the fund with more than $5 million of the money he made as former CEO of Amylin Pharmaceuticals in San Diego.
Calling it "business philanthropy," Cook aims for market-rate profits without cutting employee benefits. "We think a health care plan is an important component of a stable environment where people want to work," he says.
AOL co-founder Case, to be sure, wants to profit from buying majority control of Flexcar in Seattle. It rents cars, many gas- electric hybrids, for a few hours at a time in congested urban areas such as Washington and Los Angeles.
Flexcar could make it possible for city dwellers to give up car ownership, Case says, turning the once "fringy" environmental movement into something more mainstream.
Case says others investing alongside his new $500 million Revolution investment fund include Carly Fiorina, the entrepreneurial former CEO of tech giant Hewlett-Packard.
More Revolution investments are likely; this week, Case resigned as a board member of AOL owner Time Warner to focus on Revolution.
The power of tiny transactions
How did French-born Omidyar, uneasy with sudden wealth and now living in a quiet Las Vegas suburb, decide to become a high-profile champion of microfinance's role in social entrepreneurship?
Omidyar (pronounced "oh-MID-ee-ar") says it was a natural outcome of eBay, the online auctioneer that's become the world's biggest 24- hour garage sale. The Silicon Valley icon, with 168 million registered users worldwide, proved that an enterprise built around millions of tiny transactions can prosper.
EBay, with a $55 billion market capitalization, says more than 700,000 users now support themselves part time or full time as online merchants -- a prime example, Omidyar says, of "economic self- empowerment."
About 18 months ago, after learning about microfinance, the Omidyars revamped their philanthropic operation, the Omidyar Network, to invest in for-profit ventures alongside traditional grants to non-profit groups.
The Omidyars have not abandoned traditional philanthropy -- giving to charities such as the Red Cross. "I just think the largest potential is in thinking about business as having a social impact," he says.
Housed in Silicon Valley's Redwood City, the Omidyar Network has $400 million in assets and 37 full-time staffers. Before today's announcement, it had plowed $15 million into microfinance ventures, including Grameen.
Omidyar figured microfinance needed a big push to prove its profitability and attract really big bucks from Wall Street. "In order to get a large-scale global effort, you need a lot of capital," he says. In other words, "microcredit needs IPO-level capital to demonstrate its true potential as a business," says David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas.
And that, of course, is Omidyar's aim with his $100 million gift.
"Who says philanthropy has a monopoly on making the world a better place?" he says. "There are lots and lots of businesses that make the world a better place by their very existence."
Now, with today's announcement, he hopes to prove it.
Example of project – ventures & foundation related
The judges awarded an Honorable Mention to a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a public-health organization in Nepal for a low-tech, relatively low-cost home water-filtration system for use in developing countries. The team, led by MIT research engineer and lecturer Susan Murcott, sought to address one of the most pressing public-health problems in developing countries: the lack of clean drinking water, especially for those living in rural areas or urban slums. Millions of people die every year from water-related illnesses, with many of the victims young children.
The MIT team's water-filtering system won in the environmental technology category. Though decidedly a low-tech solution, it was praised by judges for addressing an important problem in an original fashion. However, they also cautioned that even at $20, the price may be too high for the poor households it's targeted for.
"Clean water is not sexy, and $20 a year won't make anyone rich," says Robert Drost, a scientist at Sun Microsystems Inc. and leader of the team that won last year's Gold award. "But third-world challenges in water, food, shelter, and basic medical care are much more important than innovations in first-world entertainment."
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112975757605373586-ZbxLQQFpW_SrJk31It0qBaExZiU_20061023.html?mod=public_home_us
posted by Ludovic Bodin at 6:34 AM
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