The Skoll Foundation has announced that it is now accepting applications for its next round of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. The Awards are an opportunity for organizations led by social entrepreneurs “whose work has the potential for large-scale influence on critical challenges of our time.” ‘Social entrepreneurs’ are those who work for changing the face of business with a strong motivation to improve society and they usually do this by applying innovative and sustainable solutions. A more in-depth definition about this term is provided in the glossary page of Skoll Foundation’s website. Social entrepreneurs who have been working to address the challenges in the areas of tolerance and human rights, health, economic and social equity, peace and security, institutional responsibility, and environmental sustainability can apply for the awards.
Social entrepreneurs applying for the programme should be innovators “who have tested and proved their approach, are poised to replicate or scale up their work to create equilibrium change and engage others with a message that resonates with individuals whose resources are crucial to advancing these solutions.”
Skoll Awards provide grant support to such innovators and their organizations based on certain conditions. Social entrepreneurs can receive what is called later-stage or mezzanine funding, which means a kind of funding for the new organizations that have started its social entrepreneurship operations by testing their ideas successfully and having documented them with a plan to scale them up as well but have not yet achieved large geographical scale. This is perhaps one of the rare grants funding support offered to new NGOs who have tested their ideas in an innovative manner. However, there will be payment limitations as per the Budget Guidance of the Awards. New ideas that have not been tested are not allowed to apply for the awards.
The grant offered by the Skoll Awards can be used as a core support by the organization “to help organizations expand their programs and capacity to deliver long-term, sustainable equilibrium change.”
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