Stanford Social Innovation Review

Google’s philanthropy, dubbed DotOrg, launched in 2004 with bold ambitions and almost $1 billion in seed funding. But the corporate culture built by engineers proved challenging for the development experts brought in to run DotOrg. Six years later, the philanthropy’s leadership has been replaced and its ambitions have shrunk.

The way the United States determines who is poor and who is not—a measure based solely on the cost of food—is broken. A new approach is needed, one that measures poverty through multiple factors such as housing, transportation, and regional economic differences.

Funders, nonprofit executives, and policymakers are very enthusiastic about measuring social value. Alas, they cannot agree on what it is or how to assess it. Their main obstacle is assuming that social value is objective, fixed, and stable. When people approach social value as subjective, malleable, and variable, they create better metrics to capture it.

THE CLIMATE WAR: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth by Eric Pooley

We are honored to bring you the last article written by one of the world’s most prominent climatologists, Stephen H. Schneider, who died of an apparent heart attack while flying from Sweden to London on July 19. The article is a review of the new book, The Climate War, by business journalist Eric Pooley.

Sustainability is not only the best way to describe how to integrate social, environmental, and economic impacts into all corporate decisions, it is also the best way to manage a business to achieve those same results.