Tag Archives: Boston

Agenda details for ForSE 2008

ForSE 2008, Forum for Social Entrepreneurs, has a number of interesting features and topics this year.

We will start the day with a plenary session consisting of a Keynote Panel discussion led by Nishith Acharya, Executive Director, Deshpande Foundation. He will be joined with Naveen Jha, Director of Programs, Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Meenakshi Verma Agrawal, Program Officer, Global Exchange Programs, Deshpande Foundation and leading Deshpande Fellows.

After the plenary session, the Forum will break into multiple tracks to maximize interaction between attendees. Within each track we will have: Continue reading

September 27 ServiceNation Day of Action

Twenty years ago, Alan Khazei started a youth movement in Boston called City Year, a service corps that helped inspire Americorps. Alan has since moved on to take his passion for citizen engagement forward and started another organization, Be the Change, Inc that strives to get citizens participating in the conversations, discussions and debates that affect us as a democracy. One of the initial programs of this organization is ServiceNAtion.org – a movement to promote a culture of service among Americans. Continue reading

ForSE 2008 signups off to a great start

We finally opened registration for ForSE 2008:Forum for Social Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, September 10th. The response has been terrific!! We had over 60 people register within 48 hours. This is shaping up to be a great gathering of like minded people interested in social entrepreneurship.

Last year we had hoped to have 150 attendees, instead over 250 signed up and we had to shut down registration. At the rate we are going, it looks like we will quickly reach the registration limit for this year’s Forum also.

We have tried to keep ForSE very affordable for our attendees, many of whom are students or starting non-profits and social entrepreneurs. The registration fee for attendees is nominal ($20 for students /$35 for affiliates of BU and TIE /$/75 for all others) for a full day conference including meals. However these discounted fees will only be available for the first 180 registrants. If you are interested in attending I would encourage you to register soon. The fees will go up substantially after we have 180 attendees signed up.

To help encourage dialog and discussion among the conference attendees and to build a community around social entrepreneurship, we have added an interesting attendee email feature on our conference website. Registrants who opt in are listed on the “Participants page“. Attendees can contact others thru a blind email system to discuss issues, tracks themes or other conference topics prior to and after the conference. At no point is your email displayed to others on the website. When someone contacts you, the system forwards you their message with their email contact and it is up to you to choose to respond to the message. We hope this gets people talking to each other before we meet.

Registration Opens for ForSE 2008-Forum for Social Entrepreneurs

In 2007, I helped found an annual conference on Social Entrepreneurship in partnership with Boston University and the Deshpande Foundation called the Forum for Social Entrepreneurship or ForSE for short. ForSE brings together social innovators with leading business professionals, investors, donors, government officials, academics, and students to facilitate the sharing of new technology and business ideas along with hard-earned management learnings to foster informed discussion and action on new social venture concepts. Continue reading

Prof. Yunus continues to speak on Social Business

Prof. Yunus continued to speak about his vision of creating social businesses to help address some of the pressing issues facing us. He was hosted by the MIT-Bangladesh Students’ Association and Bhin-Golardho – a Bangla-centric group – during his visit to Boston.

He challenged the youth to start social businesses by saying. “I would like to say that while we at Grameen have done a few things, there are many causes that are waiting for you to take up”

You can read Ranjani Saigal’s write-up of his visit here on Lokvani