“From the beginning, REDF has been a pathbreaking organization, a leader in the field of social entrepreneurship. I am delighted to formalize my friendship with this organization that I have admired for so long.” — Greg Dees

This past summer, REDF introduced six Farber Interns to social enterprise at Ashbury Images, Community Gatepath, Grow Café, Pedal Revolution, Rubicon Bakery, and Rubicon Landscape Services. In just ten weeks, these interns made invaluable contributions to our portfolio, and their work lives on in the form of business plans, market intelligence, new customer accounts, and streamlined operations.

High schools figured particularly prominently in one Farber Intern’s work this summer. Grow Café, which opened at the California Academy of Sciences in May 2004, has wanted to expand its catering business. Through REDF’s Farber Program, an MBA intern spent the summer analyzing the school catering market — identifying and interviewing schools in San Francisco, assessing the attractiveness of catering opportunities, developing food service options and menus, planning for new operations, analyzing financial requirements, and crafting sales and marketing materials. Now at the end of the summer, Grow Café has a contract in place to provide lunch to a San Francisco high school, as well as plans and materials for launching and monitoring this new catering program — due in part to the hard work of Grow Café’s Farber Intern.

This is just one of six examples from this summer; thanks to the generous support of the Phalarope Foundation and its trustee Stuart Davidson, REDF’s Farber Program has been able to offer this type of MBA assistance on critical business projects to our portfolio for the past nine years. We are grateful to all our past Farber Interns and Fellows for the time and talents they’ve shared with us!

REDF’s ventures into international academia don’t end there. Interest in our approach to measuring SROI (Social Return on Investment) continues, and our SROI Methodology Paper was recently translated into German for use at the University of Applied Sciences in Austria. In addition, this summer REDF staff members have responded to inquiries about our work from individuals in a variety of countries, including Korea, Australia, Japan, and France.

In total, over a dozen universities have incorporated REDF’s methodology and publications into their curriculum, both here and abroad. Our approach is taught in the business schools at Stanford and Harvard, as well as London Business School, among others.