PSI Wins 2nd Social Capitalist Award

NEW YORK, NY, Dec. 4, 2007 — Fast Company magazine and Monitor Group announced today that they have awarded one of their fifth annual Social Capitalist Awards to PSI. This marks the second consecutive year that PSI has won the award.

This year’s awards feature 45 non-profits who use the tools of business to solve the world’s most pressing social problems — ranging from substandard healthcare in developing nations to unequal education access, homelessness, unemployment and substance abuse in the United States — and who have demonstrated a consistent and unusually large impact on society.

“This year we’ve seen an explosion of diverse experiments, many of them engineered by onetime Wall Street heavies, that attempt to bring new capital — and capital-market dynamics — to the realm of social good,” said Fast Company Contributing Writer Keith Hammonds.  “Through these deals, social entrepreneurs and businesses are raising the stakes, creating both business and social impact, and changing old-style capitalism as we know it.”

PSI, founded in 1970, has long believed that one of the best ways of improving the health of low-income and vulnerable people is by leveraging the vitality of the existing private, commercial sector in developing countries. PSI does this principally through social marketing, but PSI defines and implements social marketing far more broadly than is generally known. For example, in malaria prevention, PSI distributes long-lasting insecticide-treated nets for free in conjunction with measles vaccination campaigns at the same time that it also sells nets with varying levels of subsidies. In both cases, the goal is to get nets to people who need them by whatever means are necessary.
 
For five years, Fast Company has partnered with global consulting firm Monitor Group to identify, evaluate, and celebrate top-performing nonprofit organizations. The Awards assess social entrepreneurial organizations of different sizes and ages across social sectors as an explicit effort to further performance measurement and accountability in the social sector in a highly rigorous, data driven, comparative approach. Organizations are rated on five critical components:  social impact, entrepreneurship, innovation, aspiration and growth, and sustainability, based on an application that included two years of operating and audited financial data, a statement of mission and objectives, and answers to a survey to assess strategy and activities. Winners were selected by an independent advisory board of sector experts.  In addition to the winners, the board also picked four high-potential organizations as “rising stars.”

The winners are featured in Fast Company’s December/January 2008 issue (on newsstands now until Jan. 22, 2008) and will be recognized at a ceremony in Washington D.C. on Jan. 8, 2008. The event will be sponsored by Dow.

This year, Fast Company also launched an experiment to assess the social performance of for-profit companies, using Monitor’s methodology. This experiment recognizes the reality that social entrepreneurship is not limited to the non-profit sector, and that companies are increasingly acting to have and measure positive impact on society, the environment, and their workforces. The magazine selected 10 companies to highlight.

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