I think the single most important thing for our field to be engaged in is creating the institutions of self-propogation. Put differently, I think we need to be investing heavily in universities, incubators, and other programs which make careers in social innovation and entrepreneurship both more realistic and more likely to make a difference. For that reason, I was incredibly excited to see that Legacy Ventures has entered into a strategic partnership to support Ashoka U.
Ashoka U is the university-focused program of Ashoka, one of the longstanding leaders of this field. For the last two years, it has been convening students, staff, and faculty at just under a dozen universities around the country in order to build their capacity to work with their administrations to design social entrepreneurship programs that meet the particular needs of their disctint campus environments.
I think it’s infrastructure approach is the right one. When we started building out our programs at Northwestern around 2004, it took a broad range of students with connections to array of staff and faculty who were starting a diversity of different but related initiatives to really push the campus from thinking about our work as neat but small to an essential category of student activity to embed at the core of the NU experience. That sort of shift only happens when you have the right insiders empowered, and the Ashoka U program is in a particularly good place to help students learn how to do this most effectively.
Legacy Venture is a fund-of-fund that invests in a cohort of top tier for-profit venture firms and then delivers those returns to specific philanthropic causes. In this way, it not only creates a differentiated pool of resources for philanthropic investment, but creates a specific pipeline conversation between the for-profit venture space and the social venture world that I think is as, if not more, valuable, at this early stage in the industry.
Legacy is making a $100,000 investment in Ashoka U. The money will help Ashoka U triple the size of it’s consortium of Changemaker Campuses over the next five years. That would mean expanding from it’s current crop that includes: Babson, College of the Atlantic, Cornell, George Mason, Johns Hopkins, the New School, Tulane, UC Boulder, and the University of Maryland. This is one more example of the expanding focus on human capacity that I think is driving the startup space.
To learn more about Ashoka U, visit their website.
Photo Credit: soot+chalk
Legacy Ventures and Ashoka U Partner to Amplify the Human Capacity Pipeline
