The Skoll Foundation presents the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship each year to a select few social entrepreneurs whose proven innovations have demonstrated impact on some of the world’s most pressing problems. The Skoll Award recognizes organizations with the potential to not only be individually successful, but also to catalyze large-scale, system-level change.
Skoll Foundation fund organizations that focus on one or more of the following issues:
- Deforestation
- Education and Economic Opportunity
- Effective Development
- Healthcare Access and Treatment
- Smallholder Productivity and Food Security
- Peace and Human Security
- Sustainable Markets
- Water and Sanitation
Skoll provides a grant to the select organizations, along with connection to its portfolio of social entrepreneurs and its network of 900-plus other social innovators who attend the annual Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford. This connection of social innovators extends year-round through the Skoll World Forum Online.
Criteria and Eligibility for a Skoll Award
Please read the criteria below thoroughly and review this eligibility quiz to determine if your organization is eligible to apply for a Skoll Award.
The selection process for the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship is competitive. Hundreds of applications are submitted for the fewer than 10 Awards given annually. Not all organizations that meet the eligibility requirements and align with our criteria will receive an Award.
Qualifying organizations will be evaluated against the following criteria:
- Impact potential: Organization’s innovation is positioned to directly affect policy, behavior and/or infrastructure/system(s) on a large scale and can show evidence of significant impact already achieved.
- Inflection: Organization has a proven approach that has already been implemented with success and is now ready to apply the approach on a much larger scale.
- Innovation: Organization has an approach that fundamentally disrupts the status quo to solve social and/or environmental problems.
- Issue: Organization works on an issue that is identified by the Skoll Foundation as one of world’s most pressing problems.
- Skoll leverage: Organization will benefit from engaging with Skoll Foundation beyond a purely funding relationship, such as collaboration with our network of entrepreneurs or access to media opportunities.
- Social entrepreneur: Organization is led by a visionary social entrepreneur
- Sustainability: Organization has a clear, compelling plan for expanding impact and achieving long-term financial and operational sustainability.
Skoll Award recipients typically exhibit many of the following characteristics:
- Led by a visionary, effective social entrepreneur serving as a spokesperson for their issue
- Strong leadership team and board
- Clear mission and implementation model
- Unwavering focus on mission
- Well-established, strong partnerships
- Commitment to systems, including those for measurement and learning
- Diversified and mission-aligned funding sources
Guidelines for the 2014 Skoll award process will be available on January 15, 2013.
For More Information Visit the Skoll Foundation’s Skoll Awards For Social Entrepreneur Website.