award

• Investee VisionSpring will be honored with the CASE Award for Social Enterprise Innovation from Duke University.
• IDE India, the organization behind our drip irrigation investment GEWP, will be featured in an upcoming BBC World News series. More details on where/when to watch, but in the meantime, you can catch a preview here.
• If you’re in the New York area, Jacqueline Novogratz will be speaking at the New School on February 17. The event is open to the public; RSVPs are required.

The Skoll World Forum always culminates in the granting of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship on Thursday evening. I came late, so I headed to the upper level, where broad wooden steps were vastly more accommodating than the benches downstairs.

Among this year’s award winners was Jordan Kassalow of VisionSpring, a social venture that Acumen Fund has supported since 2005. Jordan is truly a visionary, pioneering social franchising in India, wholesale partnerships with established organizations in Latin America, South Asia and Africa, and a lean supply chain to India. He is a new global capitalist, combining his business skills with his training as an eye doctor to reach the 400 million people in the world who suffer from being near sighted. The story that he told of when he restored vision to an older woman in Mexico, who had come to him clutching her bible wanting to some day read it again, brought tears to my and many other people’s eyes.

There were too many other memorable moments, including a stunning Jordanian women Soraya Salti, who is bringing business education to young people throughout the Middle East and a pair of human rights activists, Juan Mendez and Paul van Zyl, who have put their lives on the lines for the rights of the oppressed in their home countries, Argentina and South Africa, respectively, and 30 other countries transitioning from conflict to reconciliation.

But to prove Acumen Fund Sustaining Partner Donald Rubin’s point that you need both bread and roses (although it is hard to think of the Skoll Awardees as mere bread), the art stole the evening. KT Tunstall’s stunning voice and innovative rhythmic style lifted everyone’s spirits to join the angels on the ceiling of the theater.

Each year, the Tech Museum of Innovation honors 25 innovators who are applying technology to benefit humanity through the Tech Awards program. The program honors 5 Laureates in each of the award categories — Health, Education, Environment, Economic Development, and Equality — and selects one Laureate in each category to receive a $50,000 prize. Candidates may be individuals, non-profit organizations, or for-profit organizations, and past Laureates have included innovative organizations such as DonorsChoose.org and KickStart, as well as some Acumen Fund investees such as International Development Enterprises-International (IDE).

The nomination period for 2009 is now open, and submitting a nomination only takes a few minutes. So, if you know someone who might be deserving of the award, consider making a nomination.