Venture Philanthropy's Limited Geography

They are not the Oscars, but the magazine FastCompany makes its social capitalist awards in its first issue of the year.  These are to organizations that best represent some sort of innovative solution to social problems, mostly via charities with an entrepreneurial element. 

Venture philanthropy, which views giving as another form of start-up venture capital, is a hot topic these days, with a new journal, the Stanford Social Innovation Review.  Generally, these are charities that have a self-sustaining income component. 

What I find peculiar with the 2006 FastCompany winners is their geographic distribution.  With one exception, just a handful of large metropolitan areas produced all of the top 25: 

Boston metro	6
New York metro	5
Bay Area metro	5
DC metro	5
Seattle metro	3
Little Rock	1

Yet this seems about right.  Venture philanthropy often seems more akin to a "dot com" buzzword rather than a viable social phenomenon—longer on hype than on help. Anyone have any evidence that  "social entrepreneurs" have significantly penetrated to any cities with a shortage of trendy restaurants?  Why are the winners in so few cities?

Comments

[Rob Johnston]

I agree that the selection is somewhat strange. As I posted on my site http://4nonprofits.org/2006-Social-Capitalists I think they would be much better served if they didn't name repeat winners. In three years they could have identified a total of 70 organizations. With the repeats, they have named only 43. With a changed policy they would have to make a wider sweep and we'd all see more examples of effective organizations (they're out there.)

[Perla Ni]

Dan, I appreciate the mention of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. One note is that we're not a magazine focused on venture philanthropy - we're actually a publication trying to explore the gamut of innovative solutions to social problems. (We need to work harder on our branding!) We live in a dynamic exciting time in the nonprofit world and I'm really glad that there are active voices like yours to chronicle the wealth of directions and ideas that will hopefully lead to solutions to our many social problems.