The Venture Philanthropist and the Social Entrepreneur

I've actually spoken to a few organizations this week. iMentor is an online mentoring program that receives funding from Blue Ridge Foundation of New York. I interviewed Caroline Oh Kim, iMentor's president, who had quite a few interesting comments about Blue Ridge Foundation. She said that from her experience, more traditional funders are less willing to gamble on a non-profit until its established itself, and that iMentor probably wouldn't have grown as fast and achieved as much without Blue Ridge, which has continued to fund the company plus give it access to its other partners. She also mentioned that Blue Ridge really supported the organization from the very beginning, not only finacially but also in devising systems to see results and really setting up iMentor to succeed.

Lara Galinsky, VP of Strategy at Echoing Green, another venture philanthropist, also talked to me about how the companies it's funded have produced such good results. As one would expect, the selection process is very important, but the Echoing Green also holds many activities to help its fellows, as the funded groups are called, network and form connections, which is terribly useful as they can share informatoin about fundraising and in general support each other. Oh Kim of iMentor also said that the network at Blue Ridge was a vital part of their support.