nexus.som.yale.edu/pse/...............
.......................................................
SOM Social Enterprise Fellow: Debra Schwartz
During this past summer, SOM welcomed Debra Schwartz to SOM as its first Social Enterprise Fellow.
Schwartz is Director of Program-related Investments (“PRIs”) for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, an international, independent, grantmaking institution headquartered in Chicago. PRIs are below-market loans and investments made for charitable purposes. The Foundation is a longtime leader in this innovative form of philanthropy and has allocated $300 million to a self-financing PRI pool that primarily supports community development and affordable housing organizations across the United States.
Schwartz used her time at SOM to begin a research project exploring the organizational characteristics of successful "hybrid" businesses -- those that pursue a "double bottom line" of financial and social returns. Schwartz is exploring the ways in which these social enterprises manage to find workable combinations of legal form, capital structure, business strategy and governance, as they seek to generate significant social impact while deriving most or all of their financial support from earned income. Schwartz plans to continue her research over the coming year and will take a second, longer sabbatical next summer in order to write a paper documenting her findings based on case studies of several well-established nonprofit and for-profit "hybrid" businesses in the U.S. and abroad.
