Words matter. These are the best Jacqueline Novogratz Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Philanthropy is no longer about writing a check for $10,000 to the opera.
As a 25-year-old banker, I decided to leave my career and change the world. This sounds like a move that a 25-year-old banker might make today – to escape the chaos.
Grief releases love and it also instills a profound sense of connection.
Sproxil will help combat the multi-billion dollar counterfeit drug market, empower customers, and give them the resources to make informed pharmaceutical purchasing decisions.
On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day.
Monsters will always exist. There’s one inside each of us. But an angel lives there, too. There is no more important agenda than figuring out how to slay one and nurture the other.
I dream a world in no one feels the need for or fear of predatory behavior, in which each of us walks with the knowledge of how beautiful – and valuable – is each human life.
We see very, very high rates of C-sections, Cesarean sections, in India. Lots of reasons for it, high levels of malnutrition have meant that women have very small pelvic areas often, so if they have larger babies, it’s very hard to deliver.
The poor don’t live in functional market economies as the rest of us do, but in political economies where corruption and broken systems extend from local government to moneylenders.
When Jeff Sachs says every poor person should receive a free bed net, I agree – but in reality, many end up not receiving one. And I don’t live in a world of shoulds.
Rockefeller viewed his philanthropy through the lens of his business, and it really mirrored the Industrial Revolution. It was highly centralized, it was top down, it was based on experts, and it was big-picture.
I think we so often equate leadership with being experts – the leader is supposed to come in and fix things. But in this interconnected world we live in now, it’s almost impossible for just one person to do that.
Changing the world is not easy.
Today, 30-year-olds are becoming social entrepreneurs.
I wrote ‘The Blue Sweater’ to inspire more people to become engaged in working to solve the problems of global poverty.
By helping a woman, you help a family.
What farmers gain most of all from the increase in agricultural productivity, of course, is choice.
For too much of history, we’ve viewed the world’s precious resources – both environmental and human – as things to extract, to make the most of in order to maximize their potential.
This idea of universal access to basic healthcare has to be figured out as a world. No country has figured it out in part because it is driven by ideology.
A sustainable world means working together to create prosperity for all.
Despite the hundreds of non-governmental organizations and the continued outpouring of foreign aid, East Africa remains as a region overwhelmed by extreme poverty.
Human beings tend not to spend money on health preventionally. We tend to spend it on top treatment.
Where micro-finance focuses on small loans to individual, low-income women, think of Acumen Fund more like a venture capital fund.
I think I still have a great sense of adventure and trust, and am surprisingly idealistic given all the horrible things I’ve seen since I was 25. I think how I have changed is that I have a much deeper understanding of the dark forces in the world, of power.
In the case of maternal health care, you look at, well naturally, it’s the mother who’s the customer, who makes the decisions. But in truth, the mother in many areas, in certain parts of India, the mother has very little decision-making power at all. The real decision-maker is the mother-in-law.
As both developed and developing nations search for alternative sources of energy in response to the growing energy crisis, we at Acumen Fund believe that investing in entrepreneurs who provide innovative energy solutions is an increasingly critical part of the solution.
Standing with the poor means walking away from unethical leaders, even when their companies are ‘succeeding.’
Not surprisingly, most people feel most beautiful when they are involved in an act of service, or are doing something that makes them feel generous, connected, or seen by others.
We live in a world in which we’re seeing an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Many business leaders are seeing the relationship between long term success and sustainability, and that’s very heartening.
When we deny the poor and the vulnerable their own human dignity and capacity for freedom and choice, it becomes self-denial. It becomes a denial of both our collective and individual dignity, at all levels of society.
Acumen Fund’s patient capital investment in Western Seed is intended to enhance the food security and economic independence of Kenya’s smallholder farmers.
Companies like Husk Power Systems are working to impact positively not only the environment, but to ensure that someday everyone, including the poorest of the poor in rural India, will have access to clean and affordable electricity.
When I see people that are my age and reaching 50, the ones that are really sparkly and full of joy are the ones that are committed to something bigger than themselves.
Our actions – and inaction – touch people we may never know and never meet across the globe.
Freedom is what beauty feels like when it can most express itself.
Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo.
Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us.
You have to learn to ask questions in a way that will elicit more nuanced answers, rather than the answers you would like to get.
People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.
People across the world are yearning to be connected to stories of hope.
Leaders can get stuck in groupthink because they’re really not listening, or they’re listening only to what they want to listen to, or they actually think they’re so right that they’re not interested in listening. And that leads to a lot of suboptimal solutions in the world.
Through the Fellows Program, Acumen Fund prepares future global leaders with the tools necessary to drive significant social change.
In India, we now see many highly qualified professionals ready to work in the rural hinterland and in their own towns and cities to tackle development issues directly without depending much on the government.
I studied international relations and economics at the University of Virginia. I paid my way by working as a bartender in the summer and at three part-time jobs during the year.
