Center on Business and Poverty

Many of you know that John Hoffmire, the director of the Center on Business and Poverty has been based in Oxford, England for more than a year.

One of the great collaborations between UW-Madison and Oxford has come about as 36 students came last summer from Wisconsin to participate in a UW-Madison sponsored class in social entrepreneurship at Oxford University.

I just read a blog post from Jorn Lyseggen. You can find his post at www.shack15.com/entrepreneurship. I want to expand on Jorn's thoughts about the importance of correctly defining entrepreneurship. In essence, what exudes from the original post is a passion for learning, for making a difference, for using business and the internet for all that they can be.

This four week, four-credit, summer course counts toward the International Business students’ degrees at the University of Wisconsin School of Business.
- If you are interested in value creation as opposed to value appropriation
- If you want to examine how innovative social ventures are tackling some of the world’s most pressing problems
- If you want to study why social entrepreneurship matters
- If you want to investigate how market-oriented activities can produce transformational goals that improve the lives of people

Then see www.cals.wisc.edu/ip/ProgramTypes/UK.html

The final of the 6th Annual Oxford International Youth Business Development (YBD) Competition was held on Tuesday, 6th September 2011 at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. Created by the Oxford MBA Class of 2006, YBD is a global competition that calls for young entrepreneurs, aged 16-25, to develop business ideas that address real economic, social, and environmental challenges.

Patrick Fisher, Creation Investments Capital Management, LLC

While Creation is NOT invested in this region, we closely follow all incidents in the microfinance industry. Over the past month, in a reaction to the SKS IPO, the media has reported that Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in India
• “…have made huge profits but have no social mission to help the poor”
• “…charge usurious interest rates”
• “…use coercive methods to collect the interest”
• “…are responsible for 30 to 75 suicides due to over-lending”

January 14th, 2011 | Author: Patrick Fisher

Creation Investments Social Ventures Fund I, a global Microfinance private equity fund, completed its final closing on December 15, 2010 with total committed capital of $31.8 million USD. The Fund’s investor base is composed of 74 US and European institutional investors along with many family offices and high net worth individuals. The Fund is governed by an independent Board of Directors and managed by Creation Investments Capital Management, LLC, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

Sunday, January 9, 2011
International Herald Tribune

In the 1970s, when I began working here on what would eventually be called ''microcredit,'' one of my goals was to eliminate the presence of loan sharks who grow rich by preying on the poor. In 1983, I founded Grameen Bank to provide small loans that people, especially poor women, could use to bring themselves out of poverty. At that time, I never imagined that one day microcredit would give rise to its own breed of loan sharks.

Please click the link below and read our description of how two credit unions, the UW Credit Union in Wisconsin and SECU in North Carolina, have set up free and low-cost tax preparation services. https://filene.org/publications/download/taxprep

Written by Stacy Forster of UW Communications

Classes are done for the day at Emerson Elementary School, but a few parents — with their children in tow — head back into the building.

Clutching manila envelopes filled with W-2s, 1040s and other tax forms, they enter into the bright fluorescent light that spills from the rooms in the 1920s-era school on Madison’s east side.

From the The Employee Ownership Update
Corey Rosen
February 1, 2010