About Us
Spreading Social Innovations
Across the country, social entrepreneurs are creating powerful solutions to the most daunting challenges of our time. However, the spread of these innovative, high-impact nonprofit models does not happen quickly or efficiently enough. Communities do not hear about innovations in other places that could effectively address the challenges they face. Often communities have little say in whether a new organization comes to their city or how it is adapted to the local environment. At the same time, social entrepreneurs face overwhelming barriers to replicating their innovations in new cities.
The spread of social innovations is limited because there is no vehicle – no infrastructure on the community landscape – dedicated to identifying unmet local needs, finding and replicating innovative approaches to meet these needs, and adapting the approaches for success in the local community.
The GreenLight Fund is a community-based, community-focused solution to this challenge of growth in the nonprofit sector. GreenLight provides a vehicle to catalyze and support successful, sustainable replication that allows nonprofit solutions to be adapted, owned, and sustained locally in Boston.
Our Goals
Founded in 2003, the GreenLight Fund set the following five-year goals:
- Develop a strong model to achieve the GreenLight mission
- Bring four to six high-impact nonprofit programs to Boston that are successful and sustainable
- Inspire the replication of one or more “GreenLight Funds” in other cities
- Contribute knowledge to the field about successful replication of nonprofit organizations from a community perspective
