 | - According to a recent Harris Poll, a whopping 97% of Generation Y are looking for work that allows them "to have an impact on the world."
- In recent years, courses or centers in social entrepreneurship have been created in over 250 universities and colleges such as Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Duke, NYU's Stern & Wagner, Wharton, Oxford, and Stanford.
- Teach for America received 25,000 applications for 3,700 slots in 2008, an increase of more than a third over 2007. In Ivy League schools such as Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth, close to 10% of all graduates applied to the program.
- In the past two years, the Acumen Fund, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs who solve major problems through business solutions (eg. malaria nets, water purification, loans for housing), received more than 1,000 applications from top ranked business students for just 15 fellowship positions.
- The list of top business entrepreneurs who are focusing either full time or a considerable amount of time on social entrepreneurship is highly impressive:
- Pierre Omidyar, founder of ebay, created Omidyar Network to "enable individual self-empowerment on a global scale."
- Jeff Skoll, cofounder of ebay, also runs Participant Productions, which makes socially conscious films including An Inconvenient Truth and Goodnight and Good Luck.
- Bill Gates has left Microsoft to pursue a full-time career in philanthropy.
- Warren Buffett recently donated $30 billion to the Gates Foundation.
- William Draper, one of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, created the Draper Richards Foundation to support social entrepreneurs.
- Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (Davos), founded the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
- Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, created Google.org, which supports social entrepreneurs and has raised over $1 billion.
- Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr is leading an effort to raise $100 million for microcredit loans.
- The Grameen Bank, the leading example for social entrepreneurs worldwide, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
- The Bridgespan Group, a consulting group that advises social entrepreneurs, received 1,800 applications for 18 job openings in 2006.
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