The Skoll Foundation in Palo Alto, California, has announced awards totaling more than $3.8 million to five recipients of the 2010 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. The awards will provide unrestricted, three-year grants of $765,000 each to social entrepreneurs driving large-scale change on critical issues around the globe. The 2010 awardees include organizations working to tackle climate change by preserving tropical forests in the Amazon, Indonesia, and elsewhere; provide an integrated approach to empowering rural farmers in Africa; and leverage human rights as a framework for community development.
This year’s Skoll Award recipients are Forest Trends, which works to highlight the market value of natural ecosystems to promote their conservation; Imazon, an independent deforestation monitoring system for the Brazilian Amazon; the One Acre Fund, which provides farming input, training and capacity building, and market access for rural farmers in Kenya and Rwanda; Telapak, which reports on illegal logging in Indonesia’s national parks; and Tostan, which implements three-year, non-formal education programs for adults and adolescents to pave the way for community-led shifts in social norms. “As we’ve grown the cadre of global social entrepreneurial leaders in the Skoll Foundation family, we’re seeing increasing opportunities for cooperation and leverage among groups tackling similar challenges,” said Skoll Foundation president and CEO Sally Osberg. “The addition of three organizations working on forest conservation strengthens an already strong group of environmental social entrepreneurs within the portfolio, increasing the potential for impact in this critical realm. One Acre Fund and Tostan also bring new ideas for attacking the intransigent challenge of social and economic development in Africa — approaches that will be of great interest to social entrepreneurs and other innovators working on related problems.”
“Skoll Foundation Announces New Investments in Leading Global Innovators.” Skoll Foundation Press Release 3/31/10. Primary Subject: Philanthropy and Voluntarism Secondary Subject(s): International Affairs/Development, Environment Location(s): California, International, Palo Alto FC014684.
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