Contact Us & FAQs

Contact Details

The three Founders of the Social-Impact Initiative came together around the core belief that social entrepreneurs are playing a key role in changing the world. They often start doing this at a local level in a deprived rural or urban community. Some of them go on to have impact at a regional, national, or even global level. Government, the Business Establishment and Capital Markets in the their current form all have a key role to play, but cannot alone solve the problems the world faces today. The Social Entrepreneur is a key ingredient in many of those solutions.

Social entrepreneurship is not a new phenomenon; in the past several years, however, there has been increased attention on these individuals and their power to create social change. While a plethora of training opportunities exist to help private sector entrepreneurs start and expand their businesses, until recently there has been very little in the way of targeted professional development opportunities available for social entrepreneurs.

Social-Impact Initiative was founded in 2004 to help address this gap in professional development opportunities for social entrepreneurs. After a comprehensive field study including extensive interviews with many social entrepreneurs, academics, funders, and other experts, the Social-Impact Initiative is now developing a programme that combines mentoring with skills training and access to funding. Social-Impact is a global initiative taking a local approach, and is currently searching for partners and powerful social entrepreneurs. The initial focus is in India where Social-Impact has applied for charitable legal status and launched the first pilot in June 2006 in Hyderabad.

Pilot in Hyderabad

We have been working intensively in Hyderabad and surrounding Andhra Pradesh to launch our programme. We began in Hyderabad after reviewing several options in India and elsewhere based on a number of factors: the prevalence of urgent social needs in both urban and rural communities; the presence of many small to medium-sized NGO and other voluntary organisations seeking to address these needs; a vibrant business community with strong social interests; an academic infrastructure of the highest quality; and a warm and collaborative welcome from the community as we began to explore the opportunity to develop our ideas and launch Social-Impact there.

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Email : socialimpact@dasra.org

Frequently Asked Questions

What is this all about?

Finding 'social entrepreneurs' in the local community who have already started to make their mark and helping them move up to the next level. We are looking to help enable those who have the potential to have impact at scale on big social problems in the rural and urban communities in India.

Why is it needed?

There are loads of great people from the local communities working on social needs in India in all types of organisations - NGOs, government programs, local community groups - but compared to their counterparts in the West they receive ridiculously little support. We are not just referring to money (though that too). We are primarily focussed on training, mentoring and building a network that these individuals can leverage to maximize their impact. A more detailed outline of the characteristics of our target social entrepreneurs can be found in the Programme or Apply & Recommend sections.

Why us?

Why not? We think as foreigners we bring some big advantages (as well as disadvantages!). All three of the Founders have worked with spectacular social entrepreneurs elsewhere in the world, and have learned something. Over several visits in the past year, the local communities have welcomed our developing plans and will be collaborating very closely in our project. They agree that 'something is missing'. We are in a position to provide the seed capital to get this going. We are prepared to be on the ground ourselves often enough to give it the best chance of succeeding.

Why India as the first programme?

The first Social-Impact programme could be in any of ten different major cities in India. We chose Hyderabad because it has plenty of urban and rural problems that need tackling, a thriving voluntary sector setting about it, some very socially minded business people and a great breadth of academic capability which is showing interest in these matters.