A new model for positive world change.

Around the world, a new form of social change is taking place. In contrast to traditional NGOs, a core set of extraordinary individuals and organizations—called social entrepreneurs—are using business rigor to develop and implement economically-sustainable, high-impact solutions to social and environmental problems. We at Social Profit Network are working with some of the most powerful social entrepreneurs in the world, helping to scale their solutions and maximize their impact.

We help social entrepreneurs:

• Become economically self-sustaining—even cash flow positive—as quickly as possible
• Use cash flow from successful social ventures to launch others
• Develop cost-effective production and distribution methods that maximize both social and economic profit

The social entrepreneurs we work with have:

• Turned traditional medical and technology development, distribution, and profit models upside-down, by making their products affordable for everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status
• Changed the way humans view, interact with and protect their surrounding natural environment by creating economically-sustainable community engagement models
• Begun to change the way mainstream companies design and produce products in ways that don’t just minimize impact but actually contribute to natural systems.

Social entrepreneurs—the highest-impact investment on the planet.

Many people in the world have the common goal of improving the social and environmental state of the planet. We, at Social Profit Network (SPN), believe that one of the most powerful ways to fuel world change is to put more power into the hands of proven social entrepreneurs. SPN defines social entrepreneurs as individuals and organizations that combine the passion of a social mission with business rigor, innovation and determination. The social entrepreneurs with whom we engage strive to make all of their projects economically self-sustaining, and, in many cases, cash-flow positive. In our experience, these are the social entrepreneurs who have the greatest impact because they work more efficiently than any other group. Social entrepreneurs are, by definition, entrepreneurial—they have lean, agile, high-functioning teams that work quickly and intelligently to create and implement solutions.

The problem: Community and world-changing solutions don’t go to scale

There are social entrepreneurs throughout the world working to implement solutions that could positively impact their communities and the world at large. Most of them, like many nonprofit organizations, spend the majority of their time trying to raise money instead of actually doing the work they intended to do. Thus valuable time that should be spent implementing and scaling projects is wasted in a constant search for capital. Social entrepreneurs avoid building fundraising divisions within their organizations to maintain their streamlined nature.

What social entrepreneurs need is direct access to a source of seed funding as well as connections to other resources—strategy, communications, legal services—that will speed their ability to scale their solutions. In essence, like the venture capital market-place in the for-profit world, social entre-preneurs need a market mechanism and infrastructure to support their social ventures and help bring them to scale. Currently, no such mechanism or infrastructure exists.
At the same time, there are many well-intentioned people who want to contribute their money, skills, knowledge and connections to improving the world’s condition. We call them philanthropic entrepreneurs. They struggle to find trustworthy, non-bureaucratic, truly high-impact individuals or organizations to engage with. When they can’t, they give to “safe” organizations (normally highly bureaucratic), or to none at all, never connecting deeply to a cause and never feeling that they’ve had a real, positive impact on a community or world issue.

As a result, social entrepreneurs and well-intentioned people never connect and world-changing solutions never go to scale.

Social Profit Network: Bringing together social and philanthropic entrepreneurs to catalyze positive world change

SPN proactively seeks out and engages with proven social entrepreneurs, helps with strategic project development, gives them seed funding, and then connects them to individuals who want to invest their resources (money, connections, skills, knowledge) in economically sustainable, socially profitable projects.

To do this, SPN focuses on social entrepreneurs whose projects have the potential to become self-sustaining, replicable and scalable—eventually becoming highly effective, cash flow-positive NGOs. To support them, SPN attracts philanthropic entrepreneurs who want action, minimal bureaucracy, and have a desire to play a catalyzing role in the success of the projects they are involved with.

By connecting highly motivated social entrepreneurs with dedicated, action oriented, entrepreneurial philanthropists, SPN has been able to launch and scale projects that show significant social and economic returns (see case studies). The founders and the people within our network have been experimenting with this model, using their own money, connections and know-how, for close to ten years. We now know what works and we have assembled a group of the most powerful social entrepreneurs in the world.

We’re ready to take our model of social change to scale. To do that, the social entrepreneurs we work with are actively engaging more and more of their peers while we seek to engage a broader set of philanthropic entrepreneurs who want to partner with us to fuel positive world change.

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To learn more about SPN social entrepreneurs and how we work with them, have a look at our case studies. more ›› Learn about our Self-Starters Group   Self Starters Overview   PDF download more ››