Social Entrepreneur

After returning from time volunteering in Mother Teresa’s mission in Thailand, Dana Frasz was shocked to see the amount of food being wasted on her college campus. She founded Empty Bellies, an award-winning system to fight waste and hunger. They collected leftover food from local businesses, campuses and events and donated the food to soup kitchens and communities in need. After graduation, she spent three years at Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs...

In many ways Teju Ravilochan’s story is the story of many immigrant families. His parents were born in India, but he was born in the United States. His parents learned how to adapt to their new culture through their own experience but also through the experiences of their children. Teju also learned about the world through the eyes of his parents.

It was on a trip to India as a young man when a person Teju saw someone around his age who was begging for money...

If I told you about a startup that reached $1 million in recurring annual revenue, in 11 months, would you be interested in learn more? What if I told you that the founder had bootstrapped her way to success, would be even more interested? I know I was.

Laura started as a freelance web and print designer, which led to gigs in social media marketing consulting, followed by social media marketing training. She is well known for launching B-School with Marie Forleo...

Purpose matters. 90% of U.S. consumers say they would switch brands to one associated with a cause, given comparable price and quality, according to a study conducted by Cone Communications. In another study conducted by World Federation of Advertisers and Edelman, 60% of people said that they are actively seeking brands with a sense of purpose...

Cathy Clark first came to my attention as the coauthor of the book The Impact Investor: Lessons in Leadership and Strategy for Collaborative Capitalism. However, as she tells me in this interview, she had an early start to social entrepreneurship.

Cathy grew up in inner city Philadelphia. While still a high-school student, she helped her father create a program that prepared students for college...

There’s an old saying that has been attributed at different times to Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln (neither of whom said it. 

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing momentum.”

For any entrepreneur, especially social entrepreneurs, the ability to balance tenacity with humility is key. An entrepreneur listens carefully, designs a minimally viable product, tests it in the marketplace, pivots and then starts again...

If Jeffrey Hollender’s name is familiar to you, it should not be surprising. As the cofounder of Seventh Generation, the author of a half dozen books, and a frequent speaker on using business to do good in the world, he’s a natural fit for a conversation with Social Entrepreneur. But he did not come on the podcast to talk about his past accomplishments. He’s busy taking a systemic approach to his latest business Sustain Natural...

When Mariana Costa and her partners started a web development company in Lima, Peru, she quickly learned that good web developers are hard to come by. She also noticed that, of the candidates that applied for her open positions, very few of them were women. And, while there was a very high demand for web developers, there were also millions of young people who neither went to school nor worked, and of those, 70% were women...

Colleges and Universities are complex organizations with lots of deep thinkers and multiple stakeholders. Marina Kim has had a lot of practice at working across complex cultural boundaries. The daughter of Korean and American parents, raised by a single mother, summers in Costa Rica, moved to northern England at 10 years old, and then attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, California...