The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, face serious challenges over funding if they are to achieve their objectives by 2030. America’s editor William Dowell writes that a Swiss-backed initiative, Project 1800, could not only solve many of the SDG’s financial difficulties but also dramatically improve the funding equation for other development projects. The new concept shifts the focus to …
— Want to cut to the chase? Click here to download the concept note — Each year hundreds of millions of people work in tens of millions of organisations, and deploy trillions of dollars in an effort to solve the most pressing challenges of our time. Yet despite this vast commitment there remains an estimated $50 trillion funding gap required to …
With Audrey Selian and Jeff Tuller As the impact investing community processes the shuttering of ImpactUS, it’s time to acknowledge a painful reality: when it comes to building the definitive impact investment platform, we’ve dug too many graves. In the world of online marketplaces and platforms, system design is the equivalent of “location, location, location” in the real estate world. In order to move the proverbial …
Conscious Media Company publishes an annual list of women in conscious business, and this year Astrid Scholz, along with Jennifer Brandel, Aniya Williams and Mara Zepeda — co-convenors of Dazzlecon — were recognised for their contributions. An extract from this article appears below. Brandel, Scholtz, Williams, and Zapeda are all co-founders and CEOs of their own enterprises that each exist …
Sphaera was invited to attend a Silicon Valley roundtable with GAVI – the Global Vaccine Alliance – to explore how technology can support them in reaching the currently unreachable 240 million non-immunized children in the Global South. Catherine Cheney from Devex took interviews with some of the delegates, including Astrid Scholz. Astrid’s interview appears below. “While it seems clear why …
Astrid Scholz, CEO of Sphaera, was recently featured by Conscious Company as one of nineteen social entrepreneurs to watch for in the upcoming year. Read their summary below: As an economist and longtime nonprofit executive, Scholz began to notice some troubling patterns in how the social change industry works. The ways organizations raise money, design and implement programs, and measure …
This female founders’ story starts in a kitchen — but the women weren’t there to cook. Portland business leaders Mara Zepeda, Paige Hendrix Buckner, and Genevieve LeMarchal were sitting around the kitchen table discussing a familiar topic. They met regularly to talk about sales strategies for growing their companies. The conversation always came back to funding and how a lack of access …
The College of Natural Resources of University of California, Berkeley, in their Fall 2016 magazine, Breakthroughs, profiles the career of Sphaera’s Chief Everything Officer, Astrid Scholz. She is a 2001 PhD graduate of the College of Natural Resources’ Energy and Resources Group (ERG). Astrid Scholz spent her last two years of high school at an international boarding school in British Columbia …
As a social change practitioner like myself, you may have seen the recent Forbes article titled: Is Impact Investing A Solution To Global Problems? Without going into a rant about click-bait title writers, my unequivocal answer is “no”. Impact investing is not a solution to the social problems listed in this article (i.e. climate change, resource scarcity, exploding global population …
Sphaera is curating what works around #ImpTech. Come explore the collection of ideas and approaches to put technology (and tech companies) in service of the public good and the change we seek. Sphaera’s CEO Astrid Scholz has put together an initial solutioning board, and is inviting change-agents to come create additional building blocks or solutions, and share them here for all …