Social Entrepreneur: Conscious Companies | Benefit Corporations | Impact Investing

Think Different. You probably remember that as an Apple motto. But Andrew Stern of Global Development Incubator (GDI) applies the think differently model to the social impact space. It takes a different kind of thinking to apply the incubator model to nonprofits, but that’s what GDI does. You have to think differently if you want to help social enterprises go from startups to scale, but that’s what GDI does. You have to think differently about multi-stakeholder initiatives in which philanthropists, government agencies and private organizations team up take on Sustainable Development Goals. Again, that’s what GDI does. One of the initiatives GDI launched in 2016 is Convergence. Convergence is a platform that connects and supports private, public, and philanthropic investors for blended finance deals in emerging and frontier markets. Blended finance uses public and philanthropic funds to attract private capital, in order to achieve positive development outcomes. In other words, blended finance is: Government mo