Stanford Social Innovation Review

World of Good brings female artisans’ wares to global markets.

How Room to Read created more than 5,000 libraries in less than eight years.

Grassroot Soccer uses the world’s most popular sport to battle a deadly virus.

Financial aid discourages innovative solutions to poverty. 

In new democracies, right-leaning elections attract foreign investors.

In most parts of the world, strangers helping strangers is strange.

Conservative Protestants are poorer partly because of their religion.

Why grassroots design will determine the winners in developing markets.
by Joshua Weissburg

The most trusted employees cash in on lax internal controls to fleece nonprofits.

The Regeneration Project helps the environmental movement get religion.

MomsRising is tapping a vast resource to improve the lives of American families.

Dancing Deer Bakery helps most when it keeps its eye on the bottom line.

(left): CEO Patricia Karter (right) and employees ice cookies. The company hires heavily from its surrounding low-income neighborhood of Roxbury.

When the Salk polio vaccine proved to be effective in 1955, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis had to choose whether to close up shop or to pursue a new agenda. The foundation first broadened its mission, but lost donations, volunteers, and public support. After honing its mission to birth defects, however, it recovered. Here’s how the organization that eventually became the March of Dimes planned – and survived – its transitions.

For much of its history, Wal-Mart’s corporate management team toiled inside its “Bentonville Bubble,” narrowly focused on operational efficiency, growth, and profits. But now the world’s largest retailer has widened its sights, building networks of employees, nonprofits, government agencies, and suppliers to “green” its supply chains. Here’s how and why the world’s largest retailer is using a network approach to decrease its environmental footprint – and to increase its profitability.