Tag Archives: social enterprise

The Blue Sweater — We’ll Give One of You Our Copy!

[Note: This blog post has been republished from its original location on our old blog platform -- comments have been lost, but Natalie MacNeil was the winner!]

Yesterday, we attended Columbia Women’s Business Society’s annual conference, and tweeted the action as much as possible. Although there wasn’t a hash tag to follow (we’ll suggest it to the organizers for next year!), this year’s conference was the best yet, with two strong keynotes — foreign & business news reporter Margaret Brennan of Bloomberg TV and former CEO of (RED), Susan Smith Ellis — and an outstanding Social Enterprise panel, featuring speakers from the Acumen Fund and FEED Projects. We’re fascinated by social-mission-driven organizations using business models to make a profit that is then reinvested into their cause, scaling scale social impact.

She’s the First received a special shout out on the Social Enterprise panel from speaker Selena Soo, who is pursuing her MBA and previously worked at the women’s non-profit Step Up! We also posed our own question to the panelists, asking them how they’ve utilized social media to achieve their missions. Kristina Fell, Director of Operations of FEED Projects, was first to jump on the question with anecdotes of how Twitter has helped her connect more personally with FEED supporters (and even to get the bags a cameo in a motion picture that was filming outside the office in NYC!)

Another bonus was the complimentary copy of The Blue Sweater given to every attendee of this panel. The Blue Sweater is an inspiring memoir by Jacqueline Novogratz, Acumen Fund’s founder and CEO, on how she came to discover the interconnected worlds between the rich and poor. We LOVE this book — it provides meaningful context on why we are so focused on girls’ education worldwide. For that reason, a copy of it already sits on our bookshelf! So we wanted to share this copy with one of our Aspire blog readers…leave a comment telling us about a partner in our Directory you would like to become more connected to. We’ll send the book to one of you this Friday!