Your Best Social Investment Strategy? Find a Student

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2010-03-26 07:34:00 UTC
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Earlier this week at a ceremony in New York, the Financial Times and JustMeans announced their annual Social Innovation Award winners. Winning the Best Social Innovation Strategy award in the Finance category was Sparkseed, an investment and support program for college-age social entrepreneurs.

According to a press release issued by Sparkseed upon receiving the world, the recognition was a particular honor because the other finalists for the award were some of the best-known major corporations in the world. According to Sparkseed founder and CEO Mike Del Ponte, the award is emblematic of the growing recognition that we need to make broader and deeper investments in the next generation of change leaders.

It's not hard to find examples that reinforce that point. Through a process of network mobilization, the Unreasonable Institute recently accepted the 25 young entrepreneurs who will be traveling to Boulder for 10 weeks of social impact training, mentorship and fundraising. Not only are the attendees remarkable, but the whole thing -- the first recent, complete attempt to build a fully immersive social startup accelerator program -- was put together by a couple of energetic dudes in their early 20s.

What's more, we're smack in the middle of conference season for these young changemakers. The StartingBloc 2010 institute was held over the last month in New York City. In a couple weeks, the Global Engagement Summit will open the doors on its fifth immersion program and the Clinton Global Initiative University program will welcome a couple thousand undergrads.

The most exciting part of all of this is that these groups are talking with one another like never before. Not only are they sharing what they learn about how best to support students, they're weaving together a dense knowledge network that I fully expect will be soon translated into a funding pipeline essential for the further development of our field.

For now, I'm happy to celebrate Sparkseed's achievement, and look forward to seeing how their next cohort of investments evolves.

Photo Credit: dcJohn

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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