Doctor's Diaries - Cheryl Dorsey

From the Echoing Green blog, I was led to this programme on the PBS website. Doctors' Diaries has followed seven Harvard Medical School students over the last 21 years (This is in the same tradition as the Seven Up series, which followed a set of children from the age of 7 years and re-visited them every 7 years after that.)

I have only watched one of the videos: the one following Cheryl Dorsey from her time as a fresh-faced med student. Cheryl Dorsey is now president of Echoing Green, which funds start-up social innovations. In fact, she was an Echoing Green fellow in 1992 for her idea, the Family Van, which was a community-based mobile health unit that provided basic health care and outreach services to at-risk residents of inner-city Boston neighborhoods.

It is fascinating for me to see her path veer from an initial plan to specialise in pediatrics to her current position managing one of the biggest social entrepreneurship funding organisations, because I am very interested in learning how people got to do what they are doing now - especially if their current position is polar opposite from their starting point.

Girls Helping Girls

I like to highlight interesting, powerful work going on around the world. I came across Girls Helping Girls, an organisation based in Kolkata, India. Run by 17 year old Sejal Hathi, Girls Helping Girls is an international nonprofit organisation that empowers girls to transform their world by mobilizing them to eradicate poverty, increase access to education, improve health, and promote peace.

GHG' first initiative, Empower-a-Girl, is a grassroots sister-team program that partners girls in the US with those in developing countries to collaborate through cultural exchange, education, and social change projects to achieve major global goals. The second, the Sisters 4 Peace Network, is a social change platform and community that provides girls the one-on-one mentorship through a family of successful girl entrepreneurs, the resources, the toolkits, and the support network to launch and sustain their own initiatives or advocate and micro lend for existing ones.

Read an interview with Sejal on the Change.org website.

Change.Org: Social Entrepreneurship

Have I shared one of my favourite blogs, Change.Org's Social Entrepreneurship channel? Not sure if I have. I started following this blog when it was launched a little while ago and the information I've found there have been valuable for my work.

Pitched at people working in the nonprofit and social enterprise circles or interested in making positive changes in their communities, this blog is frequently updated with thoughtful posts and links to what others in the field are talking about.

Yesterday, I read The Entrepreneurial Presidency: Five Ways to Govern Like a Startup, which is most appropriate in this economic downturn. It's very useful information for nonprofits, which are widely expected to perform miracles on a shoe-string budget. However, this is not always the case, especially here in Nigeria where "NGO" is an evil acronym for organisations expert in churning out successful grant-winning proposals, where the money goes straight to the founder's bank account.

It captures 5 key things to do:
5. Do more with less
4. Harnessing your team's talent around a meaningful mission
3. Find the right partners
2. Learn from everything
1. Iterate and scale success

Then Charity's Existential Dilemma: Are We Really Making a Difference? explores the feeling of helplessness that many people in nonprofits experience regularly, i.e. Is all this slaving away under difficult working conditions having any sort of real impact? Wouldn't I be doing more by handing over my life to a corporate behemoth in return for lots of money, which I can spend on and help boost the economy?

WeMedia Competitions

There are 2 exciting competitions for aspiring social entrepreneurs being run by WeMedia.

The first, ReImagine Media offers the opportunity to win up to $50,000 in seed funding. Sponsored by WeMedia and Ashoka's Changemakers, they are searching for the best new ideas for inspiring a better world through media and technology. These could be either business or non-profit venture ideas.

Learn more and apply at the Changemaker's website. You can also review the competition.

The second, PitchIt offers up to $25,000 in seed capital to the owner of an innovative idea to build a better world through media and technology.
Finalists will be invited to pitch their ideas at next February's WeMedia conference, an annual conference that brings together leaders and ideas shaping media, business, communication, technology, education and participation in the connected society.

Learn more about PitchIt.

Deadline for both is January 21, 2009, 6PM EST.

PRI Social Entrepreneurship Podcast

Another podcast on social entrepreneurship. This one is brought to us by PRI and supported by the Skoll Foundation (www.skoll.org).

'Be Bold' Podcast: Social Entrepreneurship

If you've heard the term "social entrepreneurship" and are unclear what it means; or if you have heard the term and are thinking about related career options, here is a podcast that you might want to check out.

I haven't listened to it yet (my currently highly unsatisfactory internet service won't permit me to), but Echoing Green, the organisation behind this podcast, are great supporters of social entrepreneurs (infact it's all they do), so it can't be half-bad. If you are able to listen to it, please share your feedback. It'll be much appreciated.