Ashoka and Google's Million Dollar Friendship

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-08-28 19:51:00 UTC
Topics:

Ashoka is one of the leading organizations supporting innovative social entrepreneurs. Google is one of the most innovative for-profit organizations of our time, and although their focus isn't explicitly social, their mission to get the world's information online has had a dramatic impact on the way the world's have nots access knowledge. Given that, maybe it's not a big suprise that Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his wife Anne Wojcicki have donated $1,000,000 in matching funds to Ashoka.

The announcement was made earlier this week and promoted as a matching contest to get more people to contribute. I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons:

The current explosion of social entrepreneurship is funded in large part by tech entrepreneurs. Jeff Skoll and Omidyar have been some of the most important actors in promoting social enterprise over the last five to ten years. Bill Gates is obviously heavily invested in this space and Google.org and now, Brin's individual philanthropy are also aimed on social enterprise. I continue to believe that there's an even more fluent conversation that can happen between the social and tech entrepreneurship worlds, and these funding relationships can help that happen.

I think it's an interesting case study in the obligations of wealth. Google.org is the primary way in which Google as a company expresses its financial commitment to social good. But the question becomes, does that take those who have made money with Google off the hook for their own individual obligations? I'm excited to see Sergey invest in a totally unrelated organization; I think this sends the right message.

Help Ashoka access these funds by donating here.

(Photo: Starmedia)

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
PREVIOUS STORY:
Pushing The Field: A Series on SoCap09
NEXT STORY:
Facing Forward: The End of the Social Entrepreneurship Blog on Change.org

COMMENTS (2)

    Comment Policy

    · All fields are required to comment.

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.