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Good reading

December 1, 2010 – 9:57 am

Worth reading this week – Bay Area social entrepreneur Paul Lamb’s fine piece on social enterprise in the Huffington Post — The Business of Hope; and an interesting article on a Johnson and Johnson sponsored program to help people with mental illness get into the workforce in the Stanford Social Innovation Review — Employment Power. [...]

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Thanksgiving and the American Dream

November 23, 2010 – 4:01 pm

The term American Dream was coined during the Great Depression by the historian James Truslow Adams who said it was, “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.”  He added, “It is not a dream of motor [...]

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Spending money well builds public trust

November 19, 2010 – 1:34 pm

As our newly elected Governor and other representatives prepare for the coming year, and the highly partisan public debate about government spending rages, those of us working at the community level know that the fight over cutting or increasing taxes does not tell the whole story.  We know that business as usual is neither possible [...]

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Now is the time to invest in innovation

November 11, 2010 – 10:50 am

While a flurry of different interpretations of last week’s election results clog the airwaves, one thing seems pretty clear from coast to coast – voters are in no mood to spend more taxpayer dollars.  And it’s hard to see anything but shrinkage in the size of government as a result. From my point of view [...]

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Election Day 2010: An open letter to the incoming Governor of the State of California

November 2, 2010 – 12:08 pm

Dear Governor-Elect: Congratulations, and please get some rest.  We’ll need all the energy you have for the next four years. When Governor Schwarzenegger was first sworn in as Governor in November 2003, Californians faced an unemployment rate of 6.6% — 5.4% when he was reelected in January 2007. You take the oath of office with [...]

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Building the Ecosystem – Connecting the Dots

October 28, 2010 – 12:55 pm

Heroes and gurus of social entrepreneurship gathered at the Mozilla Foundation headquarters in Mountain View last week to illuminate what it takes to ‘scale social impact’.  Duke University convened the session which offered the intellectual firepower of Professors Dees, Bloom, Robinson, and Clark and the practical experience of social sector leaders Jordan Kassalow (VisionSpring ); [...]

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Leveraging change where the market has failed

October 18, 2010 – 3:06 pm

No matter what your position on crime, whether law and order or reform and rehabilitation – just about everyone knows that if we don’t get people to work after they serve their sentences, we are unlikely to change the unfortunate and costly reality that the US has 5 % of the world’s population and 24% [...]

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SOCAP 2010 – moving from the clouds to the ground

October 7, 2010 – 12:25 pm

With more than a thousand attending, SOCAP 2010 came into its own this year.  After creating the concept three years ago, Kevin Jones, his wife Rosa Lee, and their ever-expanding group of creative networkers put the conference on the ground two years ago and have kept it growing and changing.  Someone said it reminded them [...]

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Sneak Preview – REDF Goes to Work for Thousands of Californians

September 28, 2010 – 12:13 pm

When I got my first job as a teenager in New York City, I applied for my work permit at a huge, old administration building way downtown. While I stood on line, I had time to think about my grandparents who had lived nearby after immigrating to the US. My grandfather worked as a tenement [...]

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Request for Qualifications now open – apply to join REDF’s Portfolio

September 20, 2010 – 10:48 am

Today REDF takes the first step toward achieving the goals of our new 2011-2015 Strategy, which will be formally announced at our September 30 Benefit.   Over the coming years we will work together to build a transformative, widely-replicable model of social enterprise that employs low income people with barriers to employment. Today we also publicly [...]

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