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Abstract: 

Program-related investments (PRIs) are widely understood as below-market investments made for charitable purposes. Many readers may have heard a lawyer at one event or another spout out the legal requirements of PRIs. What readers probably haven’t heard, however, is that PRIs are the absolute best way to spark and scale new ideas existing in social enterprises—to find and test groundbreaking work coming out of some of the most promising teams in the country. And that PRIs are actually quite simple to do, if you have the right help. The long and short of it is this: The world has a lot of problems that we want to solve. Social enterprise may be the answer to some. Despite well-intentioned efforts, the traditional tax-exempt model has offered only incremental change, while we want to see monumental, exponential change. Social enterprise provides higher-octane fuel for this quest. This article shows how private foundations can help by making more PRIs in social enterprise organizations.

Keywords: For-Profit Social Enterprise; PRI intermediaries

Affiliations:  1: Social Innovation Strategies.