Benetech Wins Giant Federal Competition

Benetech is a widely-lauded nonprofit run by Jim Fruchterman (pictured left), a leading light who has been named 2006 MacArthur Fellowship, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2004 and 2006, and a Schwab Social Entrepreneur of 2003.

Benetech concentrates on applying technology to challenging problems facing our society, including literacy for people with disabilities and human rights monitoring and analysis. It was recently awarded $32 million over five years U.S. Department of Education had awarded for the Bookshare.org project
that will allow the nonprofit organization to scan and add more than 500 new books per week to its site, which already makes more than 34,000 volumes available for blind and dyslexic U.S. students from kindergarden through graduate school.

If anybody could make a buck off social change, it would appear to be Fruchterman. That's why his recent blog post, "For-profit or nonprofit: what's the issue?," feels so credible:

We have a vibrant for-profit sector that works pretty well. We have a large non-profit sector that has many zones where it does not work well (measured by long-term addressing the social mission). Our work is bringing more businesslike approaches to the non-profit sector, rather than fixing the for-profit sector with more socially oriented approaches. To my mind, that's where the low-hanging fruit are in the technology fields. And, as a nonprofit, I can pursue society's interests with a clear conscience.

The headlines are full of folks grabbing for the low-hanging fruit in the tech sector. Is this really where it's at? What do you think?

Susan Herr