Headquartered in California’s Silicon Valley, the Skoll Foundation was created in 1999 by Jeff Skoll, the first employee and first president of eBay. The Foundation supports social entrepreneurship. Skoll chairs the Foundation, which today makes grants in excess of $40M per year. Its mission is to advance systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs. The Skoll Foundation invests in social entrepreneurs through its annual Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and grants to support the ecosystem around social entrepreneurs, including the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford. It connects social entrepreneurs through its online community, Social Edge, at www.socialedge.org, as well as via the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford. It celebrates social entrepreneurs through media projects such as a four-part "New Heroes" public television documentary broadcast in 2004; partnerships with other media outlets, including Sundance, NPR, PBS and Public Radio International; and the Skoll Awards ceremony at the Skoll World Forum each spring.
Through mid-2008, the Skoll Foundation had named 50 social entrepreneur organizations from around the world as recipients of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. These are:
Afghan Institute of Learning
Aflatoun (formerly Child Savings International)
Amazon Conservation Team
American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE)
Arzu
Barefoot College
Benetech
CAMFED
Ceres
CIDA City Schools
Citizen Schools
Ciudad Saludable
College Summit
Committee for Democracy in Information Technology (CDI)
Digital Divide Data
Escuela Nueva
Free the Children
Friends International
Friends of the Mothers
Fundacion Paraguaya
Global Footprint Network
Gram Vikas
Half the Sky Foundation
Health Care Without Harm
IDE-India
Inst. For Development Studies and Practices (IDSP Pakistan)
Institute for One World Health
International Bridges to Justice
Kashf Foundation
KickStart
Kiva
Manchester Bidwell Corporation
Marine Stewardship Council
Partners in Health
Peaceworks Foundation
Population and Community Development Agency (PDA)
Renascer Child Health
Riders for Health
Room to Read
Root Capital (formerly Ecologic)
Roots of Peace
Rugmark
Search for Common Ground
Sonidos de la Terra
TransFair
Verite
VillageReach
Visayan Forum Foundation
Witness
YouthBuild
In addition, Skoll has made ecosystem grants to The Acumen Fund, Ashoka, The Carter Center, Duke University's Center for the Advanced of Social Entrepreneurship, the Santa Clara College's Global Social Business Incubator, and a number of other organizations supporting social entrepreneurship.
In November 2003, the Skoll Foundation donated £4.4m to the Saïd Business School for the creation of The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in order to promote the advancement of social entrepreneurship worldwide. In addition to delivering an innovative teaching programme, the Skoll Centre has developed a portfolio of research which employs theory but that is also valuable to practitioners in the field. The Centre acts as a network hub for social entrepreneurship, linking together key actors in the sector and contributing towards creating new and effective partnerships for sustainable social change. It engages in social innovation and aims to have a decisive influence on policy.
RESEARCH AT THE SKOLL CENTRE FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The Skoll Centre’s research ranges across three main topic areas identified by practitioners as of key importance: governance; resources; impact. In each area, a variety of scholarly work is being undertaken. This is disseminated in both applied working paper formats and in peer-reviewed academic books and journals.
International Forum on Social Entrepreneurship
In the last week of May 2007, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship [1], based at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, and the Institute for Social Entrepreneurship at Zhejiang University in China, jointly organised an International Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. The International Forum on Social Entrepreneurship represents a first step in building ongoing links between Asian and western social entrepreneurship. "This Forum provided a venue for leading academics, policy-makers, and social entrepreneurs in China and other Asian countries to report on their work, share knowledge about best practices, and focus a research agenda,". "This Forum provided a venue for leading academics, policymakers, and social entrepreneurs in China and other Asian countries to report on their work, share knowledge about best practices, and focus a research agenda." Dr Alex Nicholls. International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship in India
The conference was oranised by UnLtd India in conjunction with the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Tata Institute of Social Sciences and Dasra (TBC). (Further partners may be added). The main objective of the conference was to promote and accelerate the development of social entrepreneurship in India. They achieved this by: - Celebrating social entrepreneurship as a tool for social change - Highlighting the developments in the field of social entrepreneurship in India and globally - Providing practical skills and knowledge that can be employed in the field - Creating links between social entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in India and internationally. Over the course of three days the conference was attended by 85 organisations from India and Europe.
EDUCATION AT THE SKOLL CENTRE FOR SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Skoll Scholarships
Each year, the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship awards five full scholarships to individuals working in the field who wish to enter the one-year full-time MBA programme. Each scholarship covers all the fees for the course, as well as providing an allowance for living expenses and travel. Skoll Scholars usually have a strong track record in social entrepreneurship and intend to return to work in this sector after their studies. They take all the social entrepreneurship elements of the MBA, which comprise three eightweek modules and two major social business projects designed to positively impact a specific social problem. This amounts to approximately one-third of the whole MBA course content. To be considered for a Skoll scholarship, candidates need to provide evidence of the personal qualities strongly correlated with social entrepreneurship, such as persistence in pursuit of a social benefit goal; willingness to face failure and start again; a bias towards action rather than reflection; a tendency to explore the environment for opportunities and resources; a willingness to take personal, and sometimes financial, risks; and a habit of developing a network and exploiting its members. In addition, candidates need to demonstrate how a business education can contribute to the wider development or the local community or community of interest they work with in the social entrepreneurship movement.
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