Civic Ventures bags Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship

Microfinance Focus, Sept. 1, 2009: The Skoll Foundation has named its first award recipient for its 2010 cohort, Civic Ventures. Founded by Marc Freedman 10 years ago with the goal of finding caring, Civic Ventures committed adults to help young people growing up in poverty — as mentors, teachers and youth workers.
His belief that the vast and growing older population could serve as a critical resource for children led him to spearhead the development of Experience Corps, now a highly successful tutoring and mentoring program helping 20,000 children in 23 cities. Later, Freedman founded the Purpose Prize, a $100,000 award for social innovators over 60. His newest goal is to get millions of boomers to pour their life experience into “encore careers,” which combine personal meaning, continued income and social impact. This new and growing workforce for social change could solve some of society’s toughest problems — from education to the environment, health care to homelessness. The Skoll grant will allow Civic Ventures to promote the encore career and make midlife transitions easier, with new continuing education programs, Encore Fellows initiatives and an online community at Encore.org.

Ashoka and ShoreCap II receive Skoll investments

The Skoll Foundation has announced a new $350,000 grant to Ashoka, a long-time partner of the foundation and a proponent of social entrepreneurship as a model for change. Ashoka plays a key role identifying, strengthening the capacity, and building the community of social entrepreneurs around the globe. The new grant will help Ashoka develop a more robust knowledge sharing platform, as well as promote the organization’s work to develop standardized methods to measure impact in the field of social entrepreneurship, said a press release.

The foundation also announced a program-related investment in ShoreCap II in the form of a purchase of redeemable shares of up to $2,000,000. ShoreCap II is a $100 million fund to invest in small business banks and microfinance institutions serving those without access to capital. This follows a successful investment by the Foundation in the initial ShoreCap International fund. Focusing its efforts on sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, ShoreCap II will shift the primary investment focus from microfinance institutions to regulated small business banks. ShoreCap II will also consider other specialized non-bank financial institutions, such as leasing companies and housing finance entities.
“In a resource constrained environment, we are always looking for innovative ways to leverage our financial assets. ShoreCap II presents an opportunity to fund via equity the efforts of an innovative and socially entrepreneurial intermediary to accelerate the provision of capital and other resources to underserved markets,” said Richard Fahey, chief operating officer of the Skoll Foundation. “An equity program related investment is one of the most leveraged charitable options available to achieve large-scale impact.”

The Skoll Foundation, created in 1999 by eBay’s first president, Jeff Skoll, drives large-scale change by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs and other innovators dedicated to solving the world’s most pressing problems.
The Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship is the foundation’s flagship program. There are currently 60 organizations represented by 73 remarkable social entrepreneurs in the program, working individually and together across regions, countries and continents to deliver solutions to the world’s most challenging economic and social problems.

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