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Fast Company Magazine and Monitor Group Announce 2007 Social Capitalist Awards Winners

Issue serves as an "investors guide" for donors who want highest possible social return for their charitable gifts

NEW YORK, Nov. 16, 2006 – Forty-three non-profits using tools of business to solve the worlds most pressing social problems are the 2007 Social Capitalist Awards winners, announced today by Fast Company magazine and Monitor Group.

The program honors non-profits, or "social entrepreneurs," who combine creativity and ingenuity with business solutions to address social ills, ranging from poor healthcare in developing nations to unequal education access, homelessness, unemployment and substance abuse in the United States.

The winners are featured in Fast Companys Dec./Jan. 2007 cover story, on newsstands Nov. 21, 2006 – Jan. 16, 2007 and will be recognized at a ceremony in New York City on Jan. 9, 2007. The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, started by Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, will honor First Book, one of the Social Capitalist awardees, as the winner of its 2007 "Outstanding Social Entrepreneur" award. First Book will receive a free trip to Davos, Switzerland for the 2007 World Economic Forum and an invitation to join the Foundations network of global social entrepreneurs.

Making A Profit And Making A Difference
More and more, business-minded social entrepreneurs are helping to shape a new version of capitalism—one that melds financial success with social responsibility. This year, Fast Company and Monitor Group have put numbers to this trend, assessing and honoring organizations among the Social Capitalist Award winners that demonstrate excellence in creating and sustaining partnerships with for-profit companies. Through these deals, social entrepreneurs and businesses are raising the stakes, creating both business and social impact.

"If business inevitably shapes the future, it has a responsibility to help choose what the future will be," said Mark Vamos, editor of Fast Company. "Corporate America is well-served to look for guidance on seizing this future from social entrepreneurs.

"Our Social Capitalist Awards winners have forged partnerships that blur commerce and charity, challenging our assumptions about making a profit and making a difference," Vamos said. "Their alliances help big business bring conscience to commerce, changing old-style capitalism as we know it."

2007 Social Capitalist Awards winners

• ACCION International (Boston, Mass.) – Trains banks around the world to be microfinance partners, making small loans to help impoverished people start their own businesses.
• Grameen Foundation USA (Washington D.C.) – Creates a chain reaction of lending between large banks, 52 microfinance partners, and poverty-stricken individuals starting businesses.
• Unitus Inc. (Redmond, Wash.) – Helps micro-finance institutions grow and become commercially sustainable by providing financial support and consulting services.

• A Fighting Chance (New Orleans, La.) – Provides staff investigators to indigent defendants in high-profile cases most likely to result in death sentences.
• PeaceWorks Network Foundation (New York, N.Y.) – Via workshops, town hall meetings, and college tours, emphasizes tolerance and co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians.
• TransFair USA (Oakland, Calif.) – Certifies "fair-trade" coffee and other developing-nation crops, then works with certified growers to get higher prices.
• WITNESS (Brooklyn, N.Y.) – Trains human rights organizations to document abuses on camera and to use the video in advocacy campaigns.
• Working Today (Brooklyn, N.Y.) – A sort of union for independent workers, offering members low-cost health, life and disability insurance.

• Aspire Public Schools (Oakland, Calif.) – Builds and operates small public charter schools in under-served neighborhoods, with a curriculum that reinforces the possibility of college for all students.
• BELL (Dorchester, Mass.) – Provides after-school and summer tutoring for underperforming, low-income elementary students.
• Citizen Schools (Boston, Mass.) – Recruits over 2,000 professionals to provide after-school "apprenticeships" to low-income middle school students.
• Civic Builders Inc. (New York, N.Y.) – Develops affordable charter schools in New York Citys poorest neighborhoods, including the first, last summer, under a massive new city initiative.
• Civic Ventures/Experience Corps (San Francisco, Calif. and Washington, D.C.) – Engages 2,000 people over the age of 55 who serve as tutors and mentors in underserved public schools in 19 cities.
• College Summit (Washington D.C.) – Raises college enrollment among low-income students by training youth who are applying for college to help others with applications.
• First Book (Washington D.C.) – Through 13,000 literacy programs, its National Book Bank gives children from low-income families new books that publishers would otherwise toss away.
• Jumpstart (Boston, Mass.) – Recruits college students to increase the number of adults working in preschools and improve early education in low-income communities.
• New Leaders for New Schools (New York, N.Y.) – Trains and places principals and administrators to work in troubled urban schools.
• Raising a Reader (Menlo Park, Calif.) – Fosters healthy brain development, parent-child bonding and early literacy by engaging parents in daily read-aloud with their children.
• Room to Read (San Francisco, Calif.) – Builds schools and libraries in seven countries.
• SEED Foundation (Washington, D.C.) – The worlds only public urban prep and boarding school.
• Teach for America (New York, N.Y.) – Recruits top college graduates to teach at troubled rural and urban schools.

• Calvert Social Investment Foundation (Bethesda, Md.) – Connects financial markets to social markets by raising capital from private and institutional investors, then lending it to over 200 socially oriented organizations.
• DonorsChoose (New York, N.Y.) – Links donors with public school projects in need of funding.
• Endeavor Global (New York, N.Y.) – Helps entrepreneurs across Africa and Latin America build and fund successful businesses.
• Global Fund for Women (San Francisco, Calif.) – Makes grants of $500 to $100,000 to women-led organizations advancing womens human rights.
• Nonprofit Finance Fund (New York, N.Y.) – Provides individualized financial planning and analysis, asset-building programs, and loans of up to $2 million to non-profits.

• Ceres Inc. (Boston, Mass.) – Forged a network of 70 companies committed to publishing sustainability reports and improving environmental and social performance.
• RARE (Arlington, Va.) – In more than 40 countries, protects wild lands from destruction through social action projects and ecotourism programs.

• City Year (Boston, Mass.) – Recruits and trains young adults for a year of full-time civic service in 17 U.S. sites and one in South Africa.
• Hands On Network (Atlanta, Ga.) – Links national corporations and local nonprofits to fuel volunteer efforts in community service projects.

• EcoLogic Finance, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.) – Provides affordable credit and financial education to cash-strapped coffee growers in developing countries.
• Heifer International (Little Rock, Ark.) – Supplies livestock and training to help farmers in 50 poor countries thrive.
• KickStart (San Francisco, Calif.) – Fights poverty in sub-Saharan Africa by selling low-cost irrigation pumps that dramatically raise farmers crop yields and incomes.

• New Community Corporation (Newark, N.J.) – Broad-based community program that has helped more than 5,000 Newark residents find jobs and get off welfare.
• Pioneer Human Services (Seattle, Wash.) – Through 10 enterprises, employs people on the margins of society, such as ex-offenders, addicts and the homeless.
• Rubicon Programs (Richmond, Calif.) – Uses profits from a gourmet bakery and landscaping business to fund programs for poor, homeless, and/or addicted Bay Area residents.

• PATH (Seattle, Wash.) – Creates and distributes low-cost healthcare solutions, in one instance partnering with WHO and UNICEF to vaccinate 12 million people in India and Nepal against Japanese Encephalitis.
• Population Services International (Washington, D.C.) – Works with donors to subsidize products and services that drastically reduce HIV infections, unintended pregnancies, child deaths and malaria episodes in developing countries.
• Scojo Foundation (New York, N.Y.) – Provides eye-exams and reading glasses to people in developing nations.

• Springboard Forward (Mountain View, Calif.) – Helps low-wage workers move into higher-paying jobs and become more productive members of society, breaking a vicious cycle of poverty.
• Year Up (Boston, Mass.) – Trains urban youth in Web design and help-desk support, then places them in jobs.

• Corporation for Supportive Housing (Oakland, Calif.) – Provides loans, grants and expertise to developers of affordable homes with services targeting the poor, ill and addicted.
• Housing Partnership Network (Boston, Mass.) – Through 87 nonprofit housing organizations, builds affordable homes and acquires properties for development for low-income families.