A Winning Strategy that Helps Millions

Mercy Corps is among an elite group of organizations to win Fast Company and Monitor Group's 2008 Social Capitalist Awards for its innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to tackling some of the world's most challenging problems. The winners are featured in Fast Company's December/January issue.

"This is a huge honor for Mercy Corps," said Neal Keny-Guyer, Mercy Corps' chief executive officer. "Across the agency, we are wholly committed to the principles of social entrepreneurship. Fast Company's recognition confirms that our risk-taking, innovative values make us better able to help people overcome huge obstacles like poverty, conflict and natural disasters."

For five years, Fast Company has partnered with global consulting firm Monitor Group to identify, evaluate and celebrate top-performing nonprofit organizations. The Awards assess social entrepreneurial organizations of different sizes and ages across social sectors, measuring performance and accountability in a highly rigorous, data driven and comparative approach.

Organizations are rated on five critical components: social impact, entrepreneurship, innovation, aspiration and growth, and sustainability.

"This year we've seen an explosion of diverse experiments, many of them engineered by onetime Wall Street heavies, that attempt to bring new capital - and capital-market dynamics - to the realm of social good," said Fast Company Contributing Writer Keith Hammonds. "Through these deals, social entrepreneurs and businesses are raising the stakes, creating both business and social impact, and changing old-style capitalism as we know it."

The 2008 Awards feature 45 non-profits who use the tools of business to solve the world's most pressing social problems - ranging from poor healthcare in developing nations to unequal education access, homelessness and unemployment - and who have demonstrated a consistent and unusually large impact on society.

This is the first time Mercy Corps has won a Social Capitalist Award.