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« “Faces of Social Entrepreneurship”: A photo essay by the New York Times | March 17 at Duke’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy: “The New York Times and John McCain” »

A fresh presidential approach to ‘national service’: Obama’s support of social entrepreneurship

Check out “Obama Promises Government Help for Nonprofit Groups” — Suzanne Perry’s piece in The Chronicle of Philanthropy. For years, I’ve had very mixed feelings about Federal public service programs. While the value of John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps speaks for itself, most other programs proposed by federal politicians somehow remind me of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era - in other words, ‘make work’ programs. Indeed, many of these programs seem to me to be simply politically opportunistic - something that sounds good and that politicians on both the left and the right feel obligated to propose during election cycles - but without real substance. Senator Barrack Obama is the first presidential candidate in my memory to actually recognize social entrepreneurship as an approach for civil participation and social change.

Obama has proposed the creation of a ‘Social Investment Fund Network’ and a ‘Social Entrepreneurship Agency for Non-Profits.’ The Social Investment Fund Network would be organized similarly to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, using “federal seed money to leverage private sector funding to improve local innovation, test the impact of new ideas and expand successful programs to scale” (for the whole policy paper, see http://obama.3cdn.net/3b3158f85f69a39217_hydpmvzbb.pdf). It would also bring many of the research tools that The Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy and The Center for Effective Philanthropy bring to existing philanthropic efforts.

This entry was posted on March 8, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Philanthropy & Social Entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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