By Todd Cohen
A national network to serve social entrepreneurs is taking shape, thanks to support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Echoing Green Foundation.
The effort, known as Seachange -- or Social Entrepreneurship Alliance for Change -- aims within nine months to develop a plan for an alliance to support the work of social entrepreneurs and help them find ways to work together more closely and learn from one another, says Tom Reis, venture philanthropy director for the Kellogg foundation.
The new alliance is one of a handful of collaborative initiatives that Reis hopes Kellogg can help get started over the next 18 months. The goal is to help entrepreneurs become more philanthropic, and help nonprofits become more entrepreneurial.
In a report released in January, Kellogg called for the creation of a collaborative "marketplace" that would make it easy for nonprofits, entrepreneurs and public officials to form partnerships, stimulate social investment and exchange entrepreneurial know-how and tools.
Seachange is the first initiative growing out of that report.
To develop the alliance, Jim Pitofsky of the Echoing Green Foundation is taking a nine-month leave of absence. Funding for the project includes $70,000 each from Kellogg and Kauffman and $35,000 from Echoing Green.
Reis says Kellogg expects to invest $1 million to $2 million to help support three to six entrepreneurial initiatives over the next year and a half.
Other projects, which still are only tentative, might include:
Working with new philanthropists interested in improving elementary and secondary schools and skills for youngsters. The project, which could include a collaborative venture, might involve the large network of Kellogg grant recipients and connect them with philanthropists who could provide both money and know-how.
Working with entrepreneurs and nonprofits in a number of cities, including Battle Creek, Mich., where Kellogg is based, to work together more collaboratively. The idea would be to make capital and know-how more accessible to social enterprise and to find ways to assess the social return on charitable investments.
Convening groups of entrepreneurs and nonprofits to talk about innovative ways they might work together. An initial focus might be on finding ways that nonprofits could use technology more productively.
Reis says Kellogg wants to be a catalyst to accelerate entrepreneurial activity in the nonprofit world on a collaborative basis and connect nonprofits to entrepreneurs' money and expertise.
"We need to learn by doing and we need to let it happen organically," he says. "These activities need to be self-organizing."
