Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons^™

New Partnering Opportunities For The Nonprofit Sector, Kathleen M. Wilburn, H. Ralph Wilburn

Journal of Vincentian Social Action

Consumers are demanding that corporations practice social responsibility. In order to meet this demand and keep their activist stockholders satisfied that they are still focused on profit and dividends, many corporations have established foundations that operate separately from the company. The foundations provide grants to nonprofits that can help the corporations fulfill their social responsibility, but, unlike prior philanthropic programs, these grants are based on developing partnerships with nonprofits that share the corporations’ social mission. There is also a group of smaller companies that nonprofits can partner with, the Benefit Corporation, as well as a new certification called the B …

A Model For Better Social Project Management, Brenda Massetti

Journal of Vincentian Social Action

With environmental degradation and other social ills on the rise, demand for businesses to perform social action is growing (Robertson, 2014). Yet, most Commercial enterprises take a diminutive view of social projects, and many Social enterprises flounder in the harsh realities of commerce (Austin, Stevenson, and Wei-Killern, 2012). To improve all enterprises’ social performance, the paper introduces the Social Project Grid, a dual-factor assessment tool which prioritizes social projects for better managerial oversight. In specific, it compares social projects on their Resource Use and Outcome Clarity to highlight which projects are successful and which are in trouble. Not only is …

Changing Donor-Ngo Relations Thorough Viable Alternatives To Conventional Grantmaking, Kio Okawa

Capstone Collection

The purpose of this research is to explore ways in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs) can become more sustainable in light of a crucial challenge facing them today: that of financial instability. In the charitable sector in the U.S, NGOs, especially small-scale NGOs, have struggled with securing daily operating revenue rather than revenue for long-term program operations, in spite of the continuing needs of their beneficiaries (Janus, 2018; Le, 2017; Meehan & Jonker, 2017). Fundraising has come to involve relationships between NGOs and institutional donors such as foundations, government agencies and corporations. Competition among NGOs and rampant power asymmetry between donors …

Looking At Innovation Dialogically: Teaching Communication And (Social) Change In The Innovation Engineering Program At The University Of Maine, Mark J. Congdon Jr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Higher education institutions face two concurrent demands: preparing students for the job-market, while also developing informed and engaged citizens (Frey & Palmer, 2014; Gould, 2003). How universities reconcile these demands varies. The Innovation Engineering program (IE) at the University of Maine strives to both, “change the world by enabling innovation” (concern for social issues) and educate entrepreneurs (students) whose innovations reach markets quicker and at a decreased risk (capitalist orientation) (Hall, 2013; Kelly, 2014). The program uses a systems approach to innovation by teaching tools and methods for creating, communicating, and commercializing meaningfully unique ideas. Processes and contexts are important …

Nonprofits: Big Problems, Small Budgets, Anna Gazdik

Marriott Student Review

Nonprofit Organizations are given big problems to solve and almost no resources to solve them. This paper examines how nonprofit organizations are evaluated, and how we can improve such evaluation to increase results.

The Pine Street Project, Molly Mcgrail

Lesley University Community of Scholars Day

At the beginning of the 2017-2018 school year a group of my classmates and I worked together to help solve a problem for Pine Street Inn, the largest homeless shelter in New England. We planned two major events and raised $500 for hot meals. After raising the $500 over the time of our class I decided to set a personal goal. I plan on raising $5,000 for Pine Street in total by the time I graduate with my masters degree in three to four years. I wanted to be able to help change something within my community for the better …

Microfinance: Combating World Poverty One Small Business At A Time, Alison Basney

Senior Honors Theses

Poverty is a major problem that reaches millions of people around the world. Although many organizations and individuals work daily to combat this, much of the work done to reduce poverty lacks sustainability and serves only to remedy to the effects of poverty, rather than create a solution to the causes of poverty. Microfinance can be very basically defined as the provision of banking to the impoverished who would not otherwise have access to these services. This purpose of this thesis is to show that microfinance is the ideal solution to the poverty problem by using research and evidence from …

Identifying Cross-Country Key Drivers Of Social Entrepreneurial Activity, Cris Bravo

Dissertations

Governmental and philanthropic efforts alone are not sufficient to eradicate poverty. The world needs new frameworks that enable sustainable development by integrating the economic, social and environmental dimensions, and social entrepreneurship is of great interest because it has the capacity for facilitating societal change by fostering innovative ways to address social inequality, unemployment, and climate change. Precisely because social entrepreneurship lays at the intersection of the business and nonprofit worlds, it is a complex phenomenon, and there are many unknowns regarding how the convergence of these dimensions can be understood and managed at cross-national levels.

To investigate this phenomenon, this …