Skoll Foundation launches $1.5m field-building partnership with Acumen Fund. The Skoll Foundation and the Acumen Fund have entered into a three-year, $1.5-million partnership intended to enhance their common objective of using entrepreneurial methods to create sustainable solutions to poverty in the developing world.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based Skoll Foundation advances the work of social entrepreneurs. The New York-based Acumen Fund is a nonprofit venture that harnesses the power of entrepreneurial strategies.

"[The] Acumen Fund focuses on critical global issues that closely align with our program areas in health, environment, and economic and social equity," says Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation. "By partnering with Acumen, the Skoll Foundation can increase its knowledge of what social entrepreneurs need to create successful ventures, what models work best and what constitutes success."

Fact finding

The Acumen Fund will use the money to develop metrics for understanding the financial and social impacts of social enterprise, identify and encourage high-performing entrepreneurs, provide skill building support and management assistance, and, more generally, to disseminate knowledge and information.

This isn't the first time the two organizations have worked together. In 2002 the Acumen Fund received a $505,000 development grant from the Skoll Foundation. The Acumen Fund it used to double the size of its investor base and establish significant institutional partnerships.

"Expanding our partnership with the Skoll Foundation will enable us to more effectively do our part to advance the field of social entrepreneurship -- giving the world's poor the opportunity to make their own decisions by engaging them as active consumers rather than passive recipients of charity," says Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of the Acumen Fund. "We are committed, as is the Skoll Foundation, to learning how philanthropic capital and entrepreneurial approaches can be best combined to create innovative solutions that lift people out of poverty and serve as models for the rest of the world."

In another development in the "venture philanthropy" realm New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has unveiled what his administration is calling a "nationally unique" poverty-prevention program that will function as a hybrid venture capital company with a philanthropic aim. The program will have a $150-million annual budget, with about $25 million of it coming from the private sector. -FWR

.