From water resource management and food production, to disease and conflict: climate change exacerbates underlying vulnerabilities. As the severity of these impacts increase over the coming decades, poor communities in…
In addition to moving from an economy powered predominantly by fossil fuels to one powered by clean energy, an important piece of the climate change mitigation puzzle is arresting deforestation.…
India’s commons—collectively owned land administered by the government—make up as much as 25 percent of the nation's territory. The government legally owns these lands, but lacks the reach, incentive, and…
China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, is experiencing massive health costs due to air pollution, with some 1.6 million premature deaths attributed to air pollution annually. China is also…
The Skoll Foundation is deeply committed to broad action against climate change, action that exceeds our core grantmaking through the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. The innovations and global consensus…
Erratic rainfall, extreme droughts and floods, and deterioration in water quality brought on by climate change will intensify existing water stress and water allocation challenges. By 2025, absolute water scarcity…
Oceans provide livelihoods and protein-rich food to more than 3 billion people, cover nearly three quarters of the earth’s surface, and are home to a diverse community of a million…
More than half the U.S. states have policies that require utilities to power their grid with a certain amount of renewable energy and for that amount to increase over time.…
The agriculture sector is highly dependent on consistent climatic conditions to produce food. The roughly 475 million smallholder farmers in developing countries, who rely largely on rain-fed rather than irrigated…
Thirty years ago, as horrific disease like AIDS and tuberculosis ravaged much of the world, three remarkable young people—Jim Yong Kim, Paul Farmer, and Ophelia Dahl—came together in a squatter…
With President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, it’s become even more clear how critical the leadership of investors and companies are in tackling climate change and pushing for clean…
No condition is permanent. That’s the refrain of tough-minded optimism that Raj Panjabi, founder of Last Mile Health, grew up with in Liberia. It’s the mantra often repeated by his…
Leadership transition—particularly founder transition—is top of mind among many social entrepreneurs within the Skoll community. In fact, almost half of Skoll Awardee organizations have already weathered such a milestone. Some…
“I see aspirations converging all over the world and I’m really worried about it because unless we move more quickly in fighting poverty, unless we move more quickly in creating…
Imagine a country’s Olympics team getting all mixed up. The swimmers end up in the sprint and the cyclists are handed javelins. There’s a wrestler on a horse and a…
Invest. Connect. Celebrate. This is the Skoll Foundation’s mission and deep commitment to the field of social entrepreneurship. The Skoll World Forum is one of our greatest opportunities for the 'celebrate'…
After 16 years at the helm of the Skoll Foundation, Sally Osberg announced plans to step down as President & CEO. She will continue to lead until her successor is…
“What if sociologists had as much influence as economists?” That’s the provocation with which Bjarni Benediktsson, Iceland’s 46-year-old Prime Minister of Iceland, set the tone for recent global summit of…
Ruth Norris - Resources Legacy Fund , April 27, 2017
"Global health is a marathon, not a sprint." -- Barbara Bush, Global Health Corps The race often starts with great excitement over big breakthroughs: new vaccines and treatments, new technologies…
Invest. Connect. Celebrate. That’s the Skoll Foundation mission in a nutshell, and the ‘celebrate’ part of that triad is where Skoll’s storytelling resources take center stage with the medium of…
The annual Skoll World Forum was, as always, an inspiring, energizing, and at times dizzying week of conversations and celebrations in the hallowed halls and cobblestoned streets of Oxford. Stephan Chambers…
Employee #1 of the Skoll Foundation Unleashed Social Impact Felt in Every Corner of the Globe Palo Alto, CA – After 16 years of dedicated leadership, Sally Osberg announced her…
Asia’s Tigers, the collection of booming economies that emerged in the East following World War II, are often hailed as economic miracles. There was, though, no “secret sauce” behind that sustained…
Ruth Norris - Resources Legacy Fund , April 13, 2017
In the past five years, 70 countries have passed restrictive laws controlling civil society organizations, with more than half of them restricting foreign funding. There is a crisis of effectiveness…
Kola Masha was unable to attend Oxford's New Theatre in person this evening, because he was waiting for the imminent arrival of his second child. Appolo Goma, Babban Gona Executive…
These four short films situate you right in the center of the landscape where each of our 2017 Skoll Awardees make lasting impact on the world’s most pressing problems: Nepal…
The development community has experienced various ‘revolutions’ over the years – from microfinance to women’s rights, from the green revolution to sustainable development. Each of these awakenings has improved our…
By: Fiona Mavhinga, Founder, Camfed’s CAMA alumnae network “I have seen girls suffer,” Mary told me. “And I knew I had to speak for them.” Mary was born poor and grew…
By: Katherine Milligan and Nicole Schwab As the world grapples with increasingly complex and seemingly intractable challenges, a new answer is gaining momentum: systems change. But what is systems change?…
PALO ALTO, CA, MARCH 27, 2017 —Kicking off next week’s 14th Annual Skoll World Forum, the Skoll Foundation announced the four recipients of the 2017 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.…
Skoll World Forum delegates often talk about the “magic” that happens in Oxford; an ineffable quality turns a gathering of some thousand people into an experience of unquantifiable value. We’ve…
Universal access to safe water in Latin America? How is this possible to achieve in a region where some of the most beautiful tourist destinations in the world have signs…
In 2014, Isaac Jonas had left his small village in Zimbabwe to study for a master’s degree in food and resource economics at the University of British Columbia, Canada. The…
Several years ago I embarked on a learning journey to better understand why Skoll was experiencing what we refer to as the “mezzanine melt” in finding female social entrepreneurs poised…
Friends, Over my lifetime, the course of human events here in the US has always found its way forward. While far from perfect, our union has been characterized by its…
The Skoll Foundation is delighted to announce that Pat Mitchell has joined the Board of the Skoll Fund. “Over the years, Pat has been a deeply valued advisor to the…
Kim Hogan, Skoll Foundation Citigroup makes strides towards systems change in the financial inclusion space by investing $1 billion in Citibanamex as the government of Mexico launches its National…
At the Skoll Foundation much of the work we support—and the stories we seek to tell—has to do with organizations and movements seeking to protect the environment and indigenous land…
What are social entrepreneurs? What are the unique ways in which they work to achieve lasting solutions to the enormous problems facing humankind? What makes social entrepreneurship different from other…
I was moderating an open discussion at a program on “safety in public transport” in a college in the state of Haryana, India. The students had heard about how girls…
Last year in Paris, nations forged a historic agreement on halting climate change. The Paris Agreement called for zero net greenhouse gas emissions by the second half of this century,…
Despite the long shadow from the US election, the COP22 climate negotiations in Morocco, which wrapped on November 18, were a remarkable feat of global optimism, resolve and concrete action…
The Africa that I visited recently was very different from what I had read about in U.S. newspapers. Instead of terrorist attacks and marauding gangs, I saw economic vitality, world-leading…
Most entrepreneurs can agree that research and development (R&D) are key to innovation. Take the mobile phone, which weighed 2.4 pounds when invented in 1973. Today, the iPhone clocks in…
Richard Fahey, Skoll Foundation It took only a few days for more than 365 of America’s largest companies and leading brands to assert that the transition to clean energy…
An emerging theme among Skoll Foundation Awardees is the strategic use of data to inform and influence decision-making by governments, corporations, consumers, and communities. While all organizations use data on…
I met Maria when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She was three years old—smiley, pudgy, and fun. I lived with her grandparents. We spent a…
Silicon Valley is a hub of innovation, but it also lives in a bit of a bubble. Many startups’ design decisions are based on assumptions that simply don’t apply or…
After more than four years of negotiations, the referendum to ratify the final peace agreement that would end the armed conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas was held on October 2, 2016. It…
Rosemary Kumwenda - United Nations Development Programme , October 10, 2016
Public health is the core of medicine. It entails that we, as health care professionals, need to ensure public goods are delivered in a safe and sustainable way. Public procurement…
A major traumatic experience changed Muhammad’s life and he grew increasingly bitter, angry, and paranoid. Things escalated to the point where his family life began to suffer. Muhammad had been…
Social entrepreneurs work in proximity to entrenched social challenges, come to know these challenges deeply, and work wholeheartedly to bring about a new status quo. Few challenges are as…
At the Hilton Humanitarian Symposium in New York on September 30, 2016, Skoll Foundation President & CEO Sally Osberg had the honor of introducing David Ross, President & CEO of…
In a 2015 article, New York Times writer Eduardo Porter, noting that one in 20 Americans fall below the poverty line, deftly summarized the poverty research of Harvard sociologist Matthew…
In honor of World Water Week: a look at water and sanitation and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This article was originally posted in September, 2015. The world achieved the…
In July I attended the Aspen Institute’s Resnick Aspen Action Forum in Aspen, Colorado, along with a number of Skoll Awardees. The Skoll Foundation sponsors this annual four-day event, where…
As Skoll Foundation CEO and President Sally Osberg says, “social entrepreneurs are cracking the code of some of the world’s most pressing problems.” The Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship are…
Over the course of the 2016 Olympics in Rio, we’ve delved into some of the challenges facing Brazil. We began with the Social Progress Index’s (SPI) assessment of Brazil’s performance…
Ceres’ Clean Trillion campaign aims to increase clean energy investments globally by $1 trillion a year, in order to minimize the damaging impact of climate change. Part of that campaign…
PALO ALTO, August 22, 2016—The Skoll Foundation community is heartbroken to have lost our brilliant colleague and founding member of our Board of Directors, Peter Hero, to cancer yesterday. Peter…
When a group of twelve twelve-year-olds gathered in my parents’ living room 20 years ago to draft a petition to end child labor, we felt strong together, but alone in…
Social entrepreneurs aim at the root causes of social problems. For WITNESS, one of the main reasons human rights abuses persist is a lack of visibility. WITNESS empowers citizens to…
My dear colleagues, friends, and fellow travelers, I write to let you know that we lost our beloved Pamela Hartigan on August 12th, valiant to the end, but as she…
At the Skoll Foundation, we have seen time and again the importance of the deep connection and inspiration social entrepreneurs get from working with and staying close to people and…
This week The Task Force for Global Health was awarded the 2016 Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Hilton Humanitarian Prize, an inspired choice for this wonderful award. Since its inception in…
The opening ceremony for the 2016 Summer Olympics kicks off today in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Both the city and the country have been mired in controversies in the lead-up…
Last month I traveled to Nepal and India to meet with Skoll Awardees and partners and learn about their progress in deploying mobile health solutions, fighting gender bias, and expanding…
Recently I joined the pandemics team from the Skoll Global Threats Fund (SGTF) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to spend a week learning about disease surveillance and how it’s used to detect…
During the July 2016 AWNY Stages Summit in Chicago, the Skoll Foundation’s Director of Public Engagement & Communications Suzana Grego delivered a speech about her experiences working in human rights…
Israelis and Palestinians often play the blame game on the crucial issue of water. Palestinians scream “water apartheid” and Israelis respond with accusations of a “sewage intifada.” But recently there…
As President Obama said in his address to hundreds of Global Entrepreneurship Summit attendees at Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium last week: “Entrepreneurship is the engine for growth….You [entrepreneurs] are the bridge,…
Comparing the recently-launched 2016 Social Progress Index to prior years, we can see what many already know—social progress takes time. As developing countries struggle to provide equitable access to important…
The Skoll Foundation is a partner and passionate supporter of the Social Progress Imperative because their work advances our knowledge of how the world is currently faring, based on comprehensive…
Today, the US healthcare sector is no longer debating the connection between patients’ unmet social needs—like shelter, heat, employment, and food—and poor health. It’s widely recognized that just 10 percent…
The world’s eyes are fixed on one of the most pressing social crises of our time—the refugee crisis unfolding across Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Driven…
This is part of a series of articles about the 2016 Skoll World Forum, which took place April 13-15 in Oxford, England. Even though the social sector is one of…
In 2015 Blue Ventures won the highest award in our sector, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. A year later, has anything changed? Can winning a major award really be…
Rosemary Kumwenda - United Nations Development Programme , June 10, 2016
Standard medical ethics dictate “primum non nocere” (first do no harm). The health sector provides an indispensable service to the public, playing an essential role in human development as the…
Made by Children. Instead of Made in China or Made in India, what if this was the label inside the neatly stacked sweaters on a department store shelf? For most…
Annual general meetings at the world's largest fossil fuel companies are usually a time for reflecting on strategies to increase revenues for the coming year, global energy outlooks, and governance.…
Despite continuing disputes over settlements, Jerusalem, borders, and refugees, there is at least one problem on which Arabs and Israelis can still make progress—water. Much hard work lies ahead. The…
Lack of access to finance and business development services are key obstacles to growth for social enterprises operating in frontier markets. While there has been a rise in investment in…
When Participant Media and Skoll Foundation founder and chairman Jeff Skoll, Vice President Al Gore, and Davis Guggenheim premiered An Inconvenient Truth on May 24, 2006, the effect was immediate…
This is part of a series of articles about the 2016 Skoll World Forum, which took place April 13-15 in Oxford, England. In recent years, wealth inequality has been passionately…
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” –Rumi Those of us working towards a more just society…
There is a global crisis in healthcare; the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that one billion people lack access to basic care, and a further 100 million are pushed into…
Every social entrepreneur dreams of telling the perfect story, the one that inspires not just people who see the potential of their vision, but also those so deeply entrenched in…
Echoing Green provides seed funding and technical assistance to emerging social entrepreneurs. Over the last few years we’ve seen a significant increase in innovative enterprises making social change through for-profit…
Fadwa, Mahmoud, and Yasser have three things in common. They all live in Istanbul, but not by choice. They are there because their lives in Syria became too dangerous or…
The world is changing, and it’s changing fast—much faster than our education system has so far been able to keep up. In his TED talk titled “Do schools kill creativity?”…
In 2008 I was talking to social entrepreneur Vera Cordeiro of Saúde Criança—a Skoll Awardee and, like me, an Ashoka Fellow. I was in the midst of a sabbatical, and…
OXFORD, April 11, 2016—Kicking off this week’s 13th Annual Skoll World Forum, we are pleased to announce the six recipients of the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. The Skoll…
When we think about global development, we generally picture tangible improvements like bridges, hospitals, and schools. When it comes to agriculture, people think of improved seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation. But…
As human beings, our brains are wired for stories. It’s how we expand our knowledge, and experience going places we’ve never gone, doing something perhaps we’d never even thought to…
Bruce Lowry - Skoll Global Threats Fund , March 17, 2016
The Jeff Skoll Group had the honor of hosting a breakfast event at the recent TED2016 conference in Vancouver, featuring two leaders in the fight against climate change—Christiana Figueres, the…
The climate deal agreed on by 196 countries at COP21 in Paris this past December is extraordinary in its ambitions—a 1.5° C limit on warming, and net zero emissions in…
Catalina Cock Duque is the director of the Mi Sangre Foundation, founded in 2006 by Juanes, the Grammy Award-winning Colombian musician and social activist. Juanes will perform at the 2016…
Raymond Guthrie and I are in Zimbabwe visiting Camfed, one of our early Skoll Award winners (class of 2005), to learn more about their work within rural communities to support…
The Sundance Film Festival this year celebrated 10 years of its New Frontier program, which highlights the intersection of technology and storytelling. One such feature was a virtual reality experience…
Laura Mecagni - International Finance Corporation , February 5, 2016
Also read the Skoll perspective from principal Eric Cooperström. Worldwide, roughly 450 million smallholder farmers scrape out a living by working two hectares of land or less. Figuring out how…
The two-week UN Climate Change Conference wrapped up last weekend in Paris. COP21 was the latest international meeting to follow the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the…
Building an online community is a priority for most non-profit organizations. Active and engaged online communities create a wealth of opportunities: to attract volunteers, increase fundraising revenue, expand reach, or…
Twenty-one recipients of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship will be participating in the Challenge and will have the opportunity to win $250,000 in prizes from the Skoll Foundation, in…
Skoll Awardee Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) just launched a new website called Amazon Gold Rush: Gold Mining in Suriname. The site offers a rich, interactive user experience that tells the story…
The Skoll Foundation mourns the loss of Soraya Salti, founder of INJAZ al-Arab. Last week, Soraya and her sister, Jumana, both died tragically and unexpectedly. Soraya was an outstanding leader and…
Global forest loss is a complicated and multi-dimensional problem, and the signals of progress (or regression) can be confusing. On the one hand, a recent study by Global Forest Watch…
Women and girls make up two-thirds of the world’s 774 million illiterate adults and more than two-thirds of the 130 million school-age children not enrolled in school. By missing out…
Malala Yousafzai grew up in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan. From the age of 10, she has campaigned for the rights of girls to receive an education. At 15,…
The world achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water in 2010—ahead of schedule. But progress towards sanitation…
Adam Mordecai is editor-at-large at Upworthy. When he’s not trying to get millions of page views (300 million to date) on issues like racial justice, climate change and economic inequality,…
As a brand developer, I’ve met countless social entrepreneurs all over the world: people with an extreme passion for social or environmental impact. They have a lot to master in…
Ehren Reed, the Skoll Foundation’s Director of Evaluation, was recently asked what matters when he is looking at the measurements social entrepreneurial organizations use. “Organizations have the power to achieve…
The United Nations just released its 2015 Millennium Development Goals report, so we thought it was a good time to share the thoughts of five experts who joined the United Nations’ Tomas…
Jenny Bowen thought her work was almost done. After 17 years of running OneSky (formerly known as Half the Sky), she had helped transform China’s child welfare institutions, and she could “see…
Jack Sim - World Toilet Organization , June 29, 2015
I was born in a slum in Singapore in 1957. Except for the British, almost everyone else was poor. My father worked in a grocery shop and his salary as…
Velvetine, a local fisher from a village on the coast of Madagascar, reports: “Before we started doing octopus closures, we were only catching two or three octopus in a day,…
Dasra, a strategic philanthropy foundation in India, wrote a case study on Educate Girls affirming of the importance of investing in measurement. Here’s more from Dasra’s Divya Pamnani and Arjav Chakravarti: “Dasra worked closely with…
Cecilia Flores-Oebanda and some of her children were jailed for four years for fighting against the Marcos regime of the Philippines. (Former President Ferdinand Marcos was removed from power in 1986). Her…
In a recent Huffington Post blog Skoll Awardee Jeremy Hockenstein—co-founder and CEO of Digital Divide Data (DDD)—posits, “Nowadays, almost every major company and institution outsources business processes offshore. Imagine the…
Jim Fruchterman founded Benetech in 2000. Since then, his organization has been featured in numerous publications, such as Barron’s, The New York Times, and public radio station KQED. At the…
At the Skoll World Forum last month, Jeff Kehoe of the Harvard Business Review Press led a conversation about how social entrepreneurs are transforming society’s unjust equilibria. Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally Osberg and strategy…
The Skoll World Forum is coming up very soon (in fact, most of the Skoll Foundation staff is heading to Oxford this week!) so here are some highlights from 16 new…
The Global Innovation Summit – one of a seemingly endless number of meetings in the Bay Area with the name “innovation” in the title – might well serve its namesake. …
I just wrapped up a 1.5 day training seminar at MIT in Boston with individuals from around the world who are adopting, adapting and running social progress networks in their cities, countries…
The Global Innovation Summit – one of a seemingly endless number of meetings in the Bay Area with the name “innovation” in the title — might well serve its namesake. …
In 1994 I was a foreign correspondent covering the genocide sweeping Rwanda. My radio stories shared the voices of people — Hutus and Tutsis alike — who were caught up…
Sundance, so glitzy on top, is constantly and astonishingly substantive underneath. The best films are often documentaries and the best conversations, at least last week, were about social entrepreneurship not…
Snow-covered mountains, celebrities, and long lines in the streets of Park City can only mean one thing: the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. The Skoll-Sundance partnership is a natural one. The…
Sally Kassab - Skoll Foundation , January 11, 2015
It’s official – the Skoll Foundation/Sundance Stories of Change short film OPEN HEART has been nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Short category. Here’s a synopsis: Open…
On December 5th, the second annual Social Entrepreneurs Challenge, hosted on CrowdRise, came to an end. And what an ending it was! The goal was for social entrepreneurs to raise…
Years of hard work building a thriving social enterprise are starting to pay off for VisionSpring. This year, we expect to generate an estimated $1.6 million in earned income from the…
Sally Kassab - Skoll Foundation , October 13, 2014
Every so often, we have the pleasure of a visit from a Skoll Awardee. One of our most recent was Cecilia Flores-Oebanda, founding president and executive director of the Visayan…
Last year, the government of Paraguay adopted a new way of measuring the state of the nation, called the Social Progress Index (SPI). Both government and business leaders were concerned…
“The Revolutionary Optimists,” a film which was part of the Skoll Foundation/Sundance Stories of Change, was nominated for a 2014 Emmy in the category “Outstanding Business and Economic Reporting, Long Form.”…
We recently shared some top media coverage from the 2014 Skoll World Forum—here are some highlights from major blogs. Kimberly Sedmak, executive producer of Jane Pauley’s AARP show, focused on…
I’ll Tell You a Story A week spent at the Sundance Film Festival usually includes photo opportunities in your best mountain chic, mingling with celebrities, and getting a sneak peak…
The Sundance Film Festival is best known as the land of filmmakers and celebrities, mountain chic clothing and glamorous parties. But over the last few years, there’s been a new…
Sally Kassab - Skoll Foundation , November 13, 2013
Our founder, Jeff Skoll, just wrote an essay on Forbes reporter Kerry Dolan’s page about the power of a good story. An excerpt: “When I was a kid, I read…
In my time as a human resources director at the Skoll Foundation, I have talked many social entrepreneurs and one question that seems to come up often is: How do…
I just returned from Brazil, where I visited partners in the Amazon states of Para and Mato Grosso. Before I get into the nitty-gritty, let me reflect on the big…
I just returned from the Oscars, where a film we funded, “Open Heart,” was up for an Academy Award. The film did not win, but the impact has already been…
Our team bounced along the dirt road in Samistipur district in rural Bihar, India, who knows how far from the nearest paved road, until we finally arrived at the beautiful and peaceful…
I spent last week in Ghana with Camfed, learning more about the return on investment to girls’ education and young women’s economic empowerment. On a hot afternoon near Tamale, as…
We often hear the term empowerment, but wonder what it really actually means. When I recently visited Skoll Awardee Fair Trade USA in northern Colombia, I saw it firsthand. Landless…
At a 2012 Giving Pledge learning series event called “Connecting for Good: How Social Media is Driving Social Good,” our very own senior manager of digital technology Phil Collis (third from…
The idea was appealing from the start: convene a group of older but far from doddering global leaders, women and men justly renowned for their integrity and achievement, and ask…
Reflections from Skoll 2011 Alumni from Water For People on Vimeo. Surprises are always fun. Unbeknownst to us, last year’s Skoll Awardees created a “reflections” video for us at the…
I am honored to be a part of The Elders delegation visiting Israel and the Palestinian Territories from Aug 24-28. We are meeting with a number of civil society and business leaders, as…
Bruce Lowry - Skoll Global Threats Fund , July 1, 2009
Skoll Foundation CEO Sally Osberg writes from Washington after attending the social innovation event yesterday at the White House: Pretty great day—for social entrepreneurship, community-based solutions, what works! A great…
