Are you reading the Acumen Fund Fellows’ blog?

Are you reading the Acumen Fund Fellows’ blog? If not, you may want to start - subscribe to it, bookmark it, put the URL (www.acumenfellows.org) on a Post-It - whatever it takes.

Yes, I am biased. I know this year’s class of 10 Fellows reasonably well from their 2-month training in New York (and I’ve known one, Joel, longer than that through our mutual interest in business approaches to poverty alleviation.) Regardless of bias, I feel like there’s a lot of great content over on the Fellows’ blog that we’re not cross-posting here, and I want you to know about it.

Why aren’t we cross-posting everything from the Fellows’ blog? We want the Fellows to have an open forum to post their thoughts, reflections and observations during their 12-month Fellowship, and want to ensure that they aren’t hemmed in by the “official” Acumen Fund blog. Does that mean we’re dishonest or opaque here on the AF blog? Certainly not - at least not with Mariko and me editing here - but we want the Fellows to be able to express their opinions independent of the official Acumen Fund line. For example, you might see the latest marketing pitch for Dial 1298 for Ambulance:

Side note: This is also a good place to encourage you to read Sasha Dichter’s blog, which is related to but not sanctioned by Acumen Fund, as well. (Seriously - Sasha is an incredibly smart, creative and insightful writer, and you’d do yourself a favor to read his stuff.)

It’s hard to choose the best posts from the Fellows’ blog, but a few recent ones were particularly good:
- Premal Desai on Ajmal Amir’s story (Amir was involved in the Mumbai attacks on November 26th; he was the only one captured.)
- Joel Montgomery on spending a day in the streets of New York
- Joanna Harries on marketing 1298’s services (features a great 30-second video clip, shown above) and on 1298’s CEO’s response to the Mumbai attacks.

Happy reading.