Furthering the CAUSE
CAUSE serves as a hub for entrepreneurs who are interested in using business to meet societal and environmental needs and helps anyone with a creative mindset bring their enterprise ideas to life through workshops and guides that offer more opportunities in social entrepreneurship.
Social Entrepreneurship Resources
Interested in learning more about CAUSE and social entrepreneurship? Check out the resources listed below and contact CAUSE for more information.
EMES Network
The EMES Network is a network of researchers and established university research centers whose goal is to gradually build an international corpus of theoretical and empirical knowledge, pluralistic in disciplines and methodologies, around the concepts of social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, social economy, solidarity economy and social innovation.
Service Learning
UAlbany Opportunities
Please visit the UAlbany Community & Public Service Program for UAlbany opportunities.
Social Impact Fellowship Opportunities
Acumen Fellowship
Focus: Poverty, Injustice
Description: A one-year leadership development program designed to connect and cultivate a pipeline of social changemakers who understand what it takes to create change in our complex, interconnected world and are committed to tackling in their communities.
Ashoka Fellowship
Focus: Civic Engagement, Economic Development, Environment, Health, Human Rights, and Learning/Education.
Description: The Ashoka Fellowship begins with a rigorous nomination process that only accepts those who fulfill the five criteria. This enduring selection process challenges Changemakers to scrutinize their own work and develop personally and organizationally. Once accepted, fellows have access to the expansive Ashoka Fellows network and targeted funding support for life.
Echoing Green Fellowship
Focus: Social Innovation, Economic Development, Education, Environmental Sustainability, Health, Justice and Human Rights, Hunger and Poverty Alleviation, Racial and Gender Equality
Description: The Echoing Green Fellowship is a two-year program for emerging social innovators in which fellows are given guidance, mentorship, and professional consulting in order to propel their organization to success. Echoing Green fellows reject the status quo by innovating the world around them in order to create positive social change. Fellowships are awarded annually to individuals with innovative ideas for creating new models for tackling seemingly unsolvable social challenges. These fellowships offer them the opportunity to develop and test their ideas.
IDEX Global Fellowship
Focus: Social Intrapreneurship
Description: The IDEX fellowship is a six-month immersive experience in the social enterprise/development world where aspiring social intrapreneurs get selected from across the globe. Fellows get placed with a social enterprise in their sector of interest (such as education, healthcare, impact investing, gender, etc.) and get an opportunity to build their skills, networks and a professional portfolio through an intensive curriculum and a strong element of peer engagement. The fellows are placed mostly in Bangalore, India. Each year IDEX runs two fellowship cycles of six months each: January-June and July-December.
Kiva Fellowship
Focus: Microfinance, Social Impact
Description: Kiva Fellows serve as Kiva’s eyes and ears on the ground, helping extend limited resources to maximize impact. Fellows have a unique opportunity to witness the realities of microfinance firsthand by working directly with Kiva’s international field partners in over 80 countries. The fellowship is designed to increase Kiva’s global impact.
ProInspire Fellowship in Digital Finance
Focus: Social Innovation
Description: The ProInspire Fellowship develops leaders at all levels for organizations addressing the world’s greatest challenges by placing professionals in existing nonprofits and social enterprises in the Washington DC area and the San Francisco area. The fellows lend their expertise to their respective organization for a twelve-month period. In return, they are given a generous salary, health benefits, a professional development course, a mentor, and access to the ProInspire network.
The Global Good Fund
Focus: Innovative social entrepreneurs who are scaling their enterprises and looking to develop leadership skills to best drive their businesses and teams to success.
Description: This program is for emerging leaders, entrepreneurs who are 40 or under, with diverse ethnic, religious, economic, geographic and gender experiences. Ideal entrepreneurs are in a leadership role and are dedicated full-time to their organization that’s over 1-year-old.
Venture for America
Focus: Startups, Community Building
Description: Venture for America is a nonprofit fellowship program empowering recent college graduates to launch their careers as entrepreneurs and revitalize American cities. After five weeks of training, VFA Fellows spend two years working for a startup in a U.S. city with an emerging startup ecosystem. Throughout the fellowship, they learn how to contribute to a high-growth business and gain access to mentorship, ongoing training, and the nationwide VFA community. When Fellows and alumni are ready to build companies of their own, VFA provides the resources they need to become entrepreneurs.
Wild Gift Fellowship
Focus: Social Entrepreneurship, Climate Change Mitigation, Climate Adaptation
Description: The Wild Gift Fellowship is focused on kindling the wild spirit and raw energy it takes to be a social entrepreneur. The fellowship begins with a three-week wilderness expedition to unplug and re-center. Then they enter into a sixteen-month program where they are given support and guidance to jump-start their own social venture with help from their own mentor and the Wild Gift network at large. They also receive $10,000 in seed money.
Education Abroad
The Center for International Education and Global Strategy’s Education Abroad office can try to accommodate additional education abroad programs with a social enterprise component. To learn more about UAlbany education abroad programs, please visit UAlbany Study Abroad & Exchanges.
