Calendar of Events

10.11.2010

Can Business Save the World?

Join Bay Area EPIP for a conversation around philanthrocapitalism and whether this approach is well-suited for social and environmental change.

Featuring former Ford Foundation Director Michael Edwards
Author of Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Mitchell Kapor Foundation
543 Howards Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco
3:30 - 5:45 PM
Discussion will begin at 4:00, preceded and followed by time to meet other attendees

Small Change has stirred up some discussion in our field about the concept of philanthrocapitalism, calling into question the idea that philanthropy pursued in business like fashion can in solve the ills of today's world.  In his new book Michael Edwards challenges the notion that the market is capable of solving social inequities; he writes about how a market approach hurts more than it helps and that in fact real change will come when business acts more like civil society, not the other way around.

Michael Edwards is an independent writer and activist based in upstate New York who is affiliated with the New York-based think-tank Demos, and the Brooks World Poverty Institute at Manchester University in the UK. From 1999 to 2008 he was the Director of the Ford Foundation's Governance and Civil Society Program in New York, having previously worked for the World Bank, Oxfam-GB, Save the Children-UK and other NGOs in Washington DC, London, Colombia, Zambia, Malawi, and India. His writings have helped to shape a more critical appreciation of the global role of philanthropy and civil society, and to break down barriers between researchers and activists across the world. Michael was educated in England at the universities of Oxford and London, and now lives with his wife Cora in the farmhouse they renovated together in the foothills of the Catskill mountains.

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