Volans Launches ‘The New Opportunity’ Game!
Volans launches an innovative game on understanding the collective mindset of where Public and Private Finances should be allocated. The areas for allocation are Education, Energy, Finance, Food, Health, Transport, and Water & Sanitation.
The game gives a player $100 million dollars (play money, of course!) and asks the player to allocate based on his or her priorities.
Click here to Play >
Pamela Hartigan’s new role as the Director of the Skoll Centre at Oxford
The Volans Team congratulates Pamela on her new role as the Director of the Skoll Centre at Oxford. This is is a significant boost to the social entrepreneurship movement and Volans looks forward to collaborating closely with the Skoll Centre in pushing this movement forward as well as continuing to help build the essential critical mass for social and environmental transformation. This is particularly pressing in this era of economic turmoil that is likely to be as challenging for social enterprises as it is for leading multinational corporations. In this new role, Pamela will have the opportunity to share her energy, enthusiasm and deep knowledge of social entrepreneurship with a wide and captive audience - something we are incredibly lucky to behold at Volans. We look forward to continuing to benefit from Pamela’s directional vision through her role as a Volans Non Executive Director.
- Volans Team, November 25th, 2008.
Social Entrepreneurs of the year
India and South Africa had reason to celebrate as The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship announced its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year.
In India, Arbind Singh, Executive Director, Nidan, is the winner of the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2008. Montek S. Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, India, conferred the award on Singh at the World Economic Forum’s India Economic Summit. In India, the Social Entrepreneur Year of the Award is an initiative of The Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation and The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in collaboration with the UNDP.
Nidan is developing sustainable businesses, cooperatives, trade unions and “people’s institutions” led by the most excluded categories of the poor in Bihar. It has promoted and built 20 independent profit-making ventures governed and owned by the urban poor including waste workers, ragpickers, vegetable vendors, construction labourers, domestic helpers, micro-farmers, street traders and other marginalized occupation groups. As legitimate competitors in the mainstream economy, the collectives negotiate with the government for their rights and entitlements.
In South Africa, the Social Entrepreneur Award was presented to Patrick Schofield, Chief Executive Officer of the Streetwires Artists Collective - which is revolutionizing and formalizing the informal wire and bead market. Schofield was recognized not only for growing the social business of Streetwires and its craftsmen and craftswomen, but by lifting the status of these crafts into art forms, giving them true aesthetic and economic value.
By creating innovative and formal systems of craft development, team cooperative manufacturing, quality control and marketing to local and international audiences, Streetwires ensures the producers a fair price for their art, making it the first fair trade craft organization in South Africa. Through government-certified training programmes, its member wire artists and students trained in outreach projects empower the individuals with qualifications and skills to create their own enterprises in the industry. The Streetwires approach has become best practice for the craft industry in South Africa, with their systems and designs taken up by many in the industry.
Global Trends 2025 report paints grim backdrop
While we are increasingly optimistic about the potential for a broad range of innovators and entrepreneurs to help shape a better future, with a new Phoenix Economy likely to take flight in the decade 2010-2020, we keep a wary weather eye out for evidence of countervailing trends. And if that’s what you’re looking for, look no further than the latest report from the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Entitled Global Trends 2025, much of it makes bleak reading indeed. Among its key conclusions:
- The whole international system - as constructed following WWII - will be revolutionised. Not only will new players - Brazil, Russia, India and China - have a seat at the international high table, but they will bring new stakes and impose new rules of the game.
- The unprecedented transfer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will continue for the foreseeable future.
- The potential for conflict will increase, owing to political turbulence in parts of the greater Middle East.
- And, the part that relates most closely to what Volans plans to work on, unprecedented economic growth, coupled with 1.5 billion more people, will put pressure on resources - particularly energy, food, and water - raising the specter of scarcities emerging as demand outstrips supply.
Learning from the experts — and they’re not who you think!
Pamela blogs on Harvard University’s Center for Public Leadership about how social entrepreneurs invest and partner with local communities for the long-term to address social needs; this runs counter to how international development gets “delivered” to these communities by international aid agencies and NGOs.
Full details of blog can be found here.
Social Entrepreneurship – The Way of the Future?
The London Chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organisation (EO) hosted an event dedicated to Social Entrepreneurship in August 2009. Pamela Hartigan was a guest speaker.
Read a write-up of the event here
London, August 2008
Unreasonable People Needed
The Futurist, an online magazine of forecasts, trends and ideas about the future reviews ‘The Power of Unreasonable People’.
July-August 2008
Q&A with John Elkington
‘The social capitalist behind the phrase “triple bottom line” talks about why some greenwashing is good’. Jesse Finfrock interviews John Elkington for Mother Jones, November-December 2008 edition.
USA, Winter 2008
SWEDISH KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATION
| February 5, 2009 |
Event: The Foundation’s programme on societal entrepreneurship
Volans Team: Pamela Hartigan will give a keynote presentation on social entrepreneurship
Date of event: February 5th, 2009
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Organiser: The Knowledge Foundation
Website: www.kks.se
THE ENVIRONMENT COUNCIL
| December 8, 2008 | ||
| 7:00 pm | to | 9:00 pm |
Event: The Environment Council Partners’ Dinner
Volans Team: John Elkington will give a dinner address on the challenges that society and businesses face in a sustainability and CSR context, and the potential for social entrepreneurship and innovative to help forge solutions to global issues
Date of event: December 8th, 2008
Location: London, UK
Organiser: The Environment Council