Uncovering the Acumen Fund and moving beyond the blank check

Posted on 19. Mar, 2009 by Chathri Munasinghe in Events

Imagine you had sweater and donated it to the Goodwill. Now imagine you went to Africa more than a decade later and came across a boy who was wearing it. This story actually unfolded for Acumen Fund founder and CEO, Jacqueline Novogratz. In the new book The Blue Sweater and a recent Forbes article, Novogratz discusses leaving Wall Street to travel to Africa to help save the world. During her journey she concluded that “most people don’t want saving…they want to make their own decisions and solve their own problems.”

Years later Novogratz founded Acumen, which according to Novogratz’s TED profile, has more in common with a venture capital fund than a typical nonprofit. One inside fact: her husband is TED curator, Chris Anderson, who runs a non-profit entity the Sapling Foundation, which donates proceeds from TED to fund Acumen’s extraordinary work.

Last month, Opportunity Green attended a presentation at the UCLA Anderson School Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies where Novogratz hosted and discussed her unique business model with MBA students, entrepreneurs, and affiliates of the business school. It is positive to see her organization moving beyond the blank check and into building an infrastructure and management expertise. Mike Flynn, Co-Founder of Opportunity Green, honed in on one of the main take-aways from the presentation: “What’s most important about an organization is the commitment of the organization, and whether they are acting towards that commitment.” Increasingly, Opportunity Green sees a merge between non-profit and for-profit, pioneering entrepreneurs towards the solutions to poverty.