Best Business Models & Start-Up Capital for the Social Enterprise

Joining us this week on Planet Good Radio, is Cheryl Dorsey, President of Echoing Green and an accomplished social entrepreneur with expertise in health care, labor issues, and public policy. Cheryl vets applicants to the Echoing Green Fellowship program which receives more than 1000 applications/business plans per year; and she’ll be offering her perspective how to get funding for the newest and best business models of social enterprise. Cheryl is the first Echoing Green Fellow to lead the global nonprofit, which has awarded more than $27 million in start-up capital to over 450 social entrepreneurs worldwide since 1987. Cheryl received her education at Harvard-Radcliffe Colleges where she earned a degree in history and science in 1985. In 1992, while training to be a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School, she received an Echoing Green Fellowship. With it, she launched the Family Van, a community-based mobile health unit that provides basic health care and outreach services to at-risk residents of inner-city Boston neighborhoods. As a public policy innovator, Cheryl served as a White House Fellow from 1997-1998, serving as Special Assistant to the U.S. Secretary of Labor, advising the Clinton Administration on health care and other issues. She was later named Special Assistant to the Director of the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Labor Department, where she helped develop family-friendly workplace policies and spearheaded the labor secretary’s pay equity initiative.