1. Intel and Grameen Trust Join Forces to Get World’s Poor Online

Dr. Muhammad Yunus—2006 Nobel Prize winner, founder of the Grameen Trust, and progenitor of microcredit—will join forces with Intel Chairman Craig Barrett in a venture to provide information and communications technology (ICT) and microcredit services to the world’s poor. With Intel contributing its technological expertise and with the Grameen Trust contributing its prowess in microfinance and community and economic development, the partnership seeks to equip the impoverished with the ICT and entrepreneurial opportunities to help alleviate a battery of social ills. The Grameen Trust has served nearly 8 million people in over 70,000 Bangladeshi villages through its entrepreneurial and microfinancial development, while Intel will expand its humanitarian Intel World Ahead effort as the first big-tech corporation to implement a social entrepreneurial model. Read more.

2. Entrepreneurs Cook Up Employment for Cambodians

Students and graduates from the Singapore Management University (SMU) concocted a social enterprise to help nourish solutions to Cambodian poverty. Equipped with $130,000 from independent investors, the young entrepreneurs surmounted technical and culinary challenges to establish Camroy Food Industries, a for-profit cookie shop that employs underprivileged natives in the tourist hotspot of Phnom Penh. Continuing employment for the Cambodian workers, profits for investors, and the expansion of distribution are billed for the venture’s future menu, as will be support from SMU, which nurtures a number of other social entrepreneurial initiatives around Southeast Asia. Read more.

3. Commission Makes Music to Make a Difference

In need of capital to fund the poverty-fighting services of the Milwaukee-based Social Development Commission, director Deborah Blanks became a believer of the power of social entrepreneurship when she envisioned Believin the Power of You, a CD/DVD set that features local music and the Commission’s work throughout the city. United by anthems calling for change, the eclectic package sells for $10, with profits benefiting the Commission’s major programs, including the educational outreach of Head Start, which serves 3,000 Milwaukee children, and the Family Support Center, a homeless shelter housing and job-counseling 44 children and 27 adults. Read More.

4. UCONN Scholarships to Support Social Entrepreneurs

The University of Connecticut (UCONN) offers two new scholarships to promote non-profit and social entrepreneurial experience and careers: the Ed Satell Non-Profit Internship Program and the Ed Satell International Social Entrepreneurship Fund, each endowed with $50,000. 1957 UCONN business school alumnus Ed Satell—founder, president, and CEO of Progressive Business Publications in Pennsylvania—created the funds to help cultivate global citizens and global contributors out of socially conscientious UCONN students. The Non-Profit Internship Program supports students in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences who are working in poverty-fighting non-profit institutions. The Social Entrepreneurship Fund will support students who are studying abroad to participate in social entrepreneurial projects. Satell has also established two charitable foundations, the Satell Family Trust and the Progressive Business Publications Charitable Trust Fund, both of which are philanthropic ventures addressing medical research, education, community organizations, and disadvantaged children. Read More.

5. Socially Conscious Marketing Agency Enriched by New Hires

Based in New York City and San Francisco, BBMG, a branding and integrated marketing agency connecting socially responsible companies to socially conscious consumers, has hired brand strategists Eve Smith and Benita Singh. With her work at The CSR Group, a management and communications consulting firm focused on corporate social responsibility, Smith implemented studies for Dell, assessed ethical sourcing models for Whole Foods Market, and helped engineer the Brown-Forman Corporation’s first sustainability report. Since joining BBMG, Smith has helped produce BBMG’s first Conscious Consumer Report, which fuses field research and national polls to evaluate consumer attitudes towards corporate social responsibility and the environment. Benita Singh, as marketing Vice President of Lotus by League of Artisans, helped develop marketing platforms for sustainable enterprises among India’s artisans. Singh also co-founded Mercado Global, a non-profit organization specializing in fair trade that helps connect women artisans in Guatemala to larger global markets. Singh’s rich record in fair trade and social entrepreneurship has already helped launch BBMG’s new business strategy, aided the health start-up JIVA Supplements, and crafted the Eve of Sustainability event with the Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. Read more.

6. Former Executive to Serve as Major Foundation’s CEO

The Russell Berrie Foundation of Teaneck, New Jersey—promoting the philanthropic initiatives of the Jewish Renaissance, innovations in diabetes and humanistic medicine, interfaith dialogue, heroic community givers, and professional sales—has named former JPMorgan Chase executive Ruth Salzman as the foundation’s new CEO. With JPMorgan Chase, Salzman proved her business and humanitarian prowess by her management of the company’s lending to non-profit organizations, small business, and community development financial intermediaries. She also oversaw the company’s socially responsible investment program. After her work with JPMorgan Chase, Salzman owned a private consulting firm that helped financial institutions develop business strategies for small businesses, non-profits, and social enterprises. Her position fills the yearlong CEO vacancy of the Russell Berrie Foundation, the largest private foundation in North New Jersey and the ninth largest in all of New Jersey with over $155 million in assets. Read more.

7. Texas Foundation Gains Veteran Humanitarian

Dedicated to providing educational opportunities to impoverished women and families, and committed to creating financial opportunities for educational non-profits, the Central Texas-based KDK-Harman Foundation opened its board to Eugene Sepulveda, CEO of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas. Sepulveda has a rich humanitarian history, working with over 50 non-profits over the past quarter century, including his service on the boards of the Austin Community Foundation, the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, the Austin Museum of Art, as well teaching social entrepreneurship and global business at the University of Texas’ McCombs School of Business. Read more.