Big Ideas as Echoing Green Announces 2010 Winners

Winning an Echoing Green fellowship is one of the great aspirations of young social entrepreneurs. After months of applications, interviews, and a finalists weekend, they've just announced the 16 entrepreneurs or teams who make up this year's fellowship class.

Echoing Green has been around since the late 1980s, but has evolved over time into one of the premier fellowships for young entrepreneurs. The award comes with $60,000-$90,000 (depending on whether you apply as an individual or team), a community of supportive people, and significant brand cache for other funders.

I was excited to see some companies I've been following for a while on the list. FrontlineSMS:Medic gets a well-deserved spot on the list, for example. We named cofounder Josh Nesbit an "Entrepreneur on the Verge" last year, and they've been keeping busy since then, such as playing an integral role in establishing a short code for Haitians to report emergency information after the January Earthquake. Unreasonable Institute entrepreneur and Pop!Tech fellow Jason Aramburu's re:char made the cut, as did citizenship education program Generation Citizen founder Scott Warren, who wrote about student leadership on this site earlier this year.

Echoing Green has taken a nice approach to announcing them, creating a video site with 1 to 2-minute clips of the entrepreneurs talking about their projects. It's a nice way to get a sense of their style and passion. While the whole list is worth taking a few minutes to peruse, there are a couple ideas in there that I think are particularly interesting.

Ashni Mohnot's Enzi is on to something that I think is going to be big, whether it ends up working or not. The idea is basically switching the approach to financing education from the current debt model to an "equity" model. Enzi will allow people to help fund student's higher education in return for a percentage of their future income. This is part of the broader trend of "investing in people" directly that is behind the Thrust Fund, Presumed Abundance, and more. I have no idea if this generation of companies is going to nail the model, but I think it's something we're going to be seeing a lot more of.

The other idea that caught my eye was the the approach to rural power taken by Jamie Yang and EGG-Energy. There is no shortage of companies trying to solve rural electrification with everything from solar to wind and beyond. What caught my attention was the fact that they are using a subscription model to distribute batteries that can be used. It caught my attention in large part because of how much of our economy is shifting to a subscription model. From Zipcar to Spotify, there is a new resource efficiency economy taking hold. It will be interesting to see how EGG-Energy's model works out in practice.

Congrats to the whole class of fellows! Learn more about all of them here.

Photo credit: Echoing Green 2010 winner and PopTech fellow Jason Aramburu, via PopTech