"Our action and our inaction can impact people we might never know and never meet every day of our lives all around the world," says Jacqueline Novogratz, Acumen Fund’s Founder and CEO, as she discovered first hand how very small our world is.

As a high school freshman, Jacqueline was prompted by the teasing of her classmates to donate her favorite blue sweater - decorated with zebras and a landscape of Mount Kilimanjaro - to Goodwill. 5,000 miles and 10 years later, after leaving a career on Wall Street, Jacqueline founded Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution that made small loans to women in Rwanda. One day, she noticed a very small boy wearing the beloved blue sweater - and on running up to him to check the back of the sweater, she found her name on the tag. The blue sweater serves as a metaphor of how interconnected we all are.

Since the launch of Acumen Fund in 2001, Jacqueline has worked to make philanthropy become more strategic. Through patient capital, which is understood as a debt or equity investment in an early-stage enterprise - Acumen Fund has extended the benefits of the global economy to the majority of the world’s population that lives on less than four dollars a day. The low-income consumers who most need access to healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy, or agricultural inputs are receiving these critical services.

Acumen was originally focused on a grant model - granting funds to innovative products. From a scale perspective, this was limiting. Acumen Fund quickly focused its energy on distribution and business models - switching from the grant model to a loan and equity model.

"This calls for bigger stakeholder relationship accountability," said Mariko Tada, Communications Manager, "Investing in an organization provides a different and equal relationship. You are not an anonymous benefactor - you are an equal stakeholder."

Acumen is thinking strategically on how best to spread their ideas to the decision makers and influence where and how funds are being deployed, but since 2006, Acumen has been training decision makers of their own - recruiting talented and passionate young professionals to join the Fellows Program.

Following intensive training in New York, Fellows begin a nine-month field placement with Acumen Fund investees, whom they support in tackling critical business issues.

"Who would have thought an African American (parents first generation Ghanaian immigrants) Christian female from Los Angeles would be able to candidly talk with a Muslim Pakistani from the Southwest Frontier Province about the impact of 9/11. These are the conversations that transform individuals and can transform a society," said Acumen Fund's Talent Manager, Blair Miller, of this year’s class of Fellows.

"After having spent the last month and a half traveling around the world to work with our Fellows and alumni," said Miller, "it is clear to me that investing in the individuals who can see through the eyes of the poor, can imagine a new world, and can execute with real business acumen can perhaps be one of Acumen's greatest legacies."

Alumni of the Fellows Program continue to make an impact in the sector, from building operating systems for Bridge International Academies, the first ever chain of franchise private schools in the slums in Kenya, leading IDEO's entry into the social sector, raising a venture capital fund at Mercy Corp to invest in innovative ideas in the Palestinian territories, and organizing TEDX events in Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa.

According to Tada, "Early on, we were the among few organizations experimenting with patient capital as a solution to the problems of poverty. Nearly ten years later, we see more  organizations adopting similar approaches - this is a huge validation for the value of this work and for the sector overall."

For more information, contact:

Mariko Tada
mtada@acumenfund.org

*Photograph 1: Acumen Fund Fellows have gone on to launch Acumen funded enterprises of their own, like Jawad Aslam who is working to build housing for low-income customers in Pakistan. *Photograph 2: Acumen Fund’s investments include LifeSpring Hospitals, which is revolutionizing maternal healthcare in India.

Depend on Diversity

Life relies on diversity to give it the possibility of adapting to changing conditions. If a system becomes too homogenous, it becomes vulnerable to environmental shifts. If one form is dominant, and that form no longer works in the new environment, the entire system is at risk. Where there is true diversity in an organization, innovative solutions are being created all the time, just because different people do things differently.

When the environment changes and demands a new solution, we can count on the fact that somebody has already invented or is already practicing that new solution. Almost always, in a diverse organization, the solution the organization needs is already being practiced somewhere in that system. If, as leaders, we fail to encourage unique and diverse ways of doing things, we destroy the entire system's capacity to adapt. We need people experimenting with many different ways, just in case. And when the environment then demands a change, we need to look deep inside our organizations to find those solutions that have already been prepared for us by our colleagues.

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