Drucker Institute

DRUCKER NONPROFIT INNOVATION AWARD FINALISTS

• By druckeradmin

The Drucker Institute has named the 10 finalists for the 2012 Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation.

The three winners will be announced in September. The first-place prize is $100,000, thanks to a generous grant from The Coca-Cola Foundation. The second-place award is $7,500, and the third-place prize is $5,000.

The finalists are:

  • American Refugee Committee, which has engaged the Somali global diaspora to help shape and lead ARC’s humanitarian response in their native country.
  • Family Independence Initiative, which is using online technology to help low-income people share knowledge about how to solve problems in their communities and in their own lives.
  • Fresh Artists, which is leveraging the work of young student artists to fund local arts education.
  • Jhpiego, which has pioneered a new screening method for cervical cancer in the developing world.
  • Lutheran Community Services Northwest, which has developed a program to screen refugees and refer them to mental-health services.
  • National Tropical Botanical Garden, which is promoting the conservation and use of breadfruit for food and reforestation.
  • Participatory Culture Foundation, which has developed an open-source platform for adding captions and subtitles to web-based video, making it accessible to the hearing-impaired.
  • The Posse Foundation, which helps diverse groups of young people reach and successfully get through college.
  • The Taproot Foundation, which engages business professionals in pro bono service to the social sector.
  • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s National College Advising Corps, which is increasing the number of low-income, first-generation students entering and completing higher education.

In all, the Drucker Institute received 612 applications this year from nonprofits in 49 states and the District of Columbia. The annual budgets for these organizations ranged from less than $250,000 to well more than $10 million.

“Getting down to 10 finalists was no easy feat,” said Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute. “The quality of the pool was especially strong this year.”

Administered annually since 1991, the Drucker Award is granted to a social-sector organization that demonstrates Peter Drucker’s definition of innovation—change that creates a new dimension of performance. In addition, the judges look for programs that are highly effective and that have made a difference in the lives of the people they serve.

The final judges include Wartzman; Sumita Dutta, managing director at Golden Seeds; Geneva Johnson, former president and CEO of Family Service America and secretary of the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute; Donald Keough, the chairman of Allen & Co. and the former president of The Coca-Cola Co.; Michelle Nunn, the CEO of Points of Light; Susan Phillips, vice president at Omidyar Network; and C. William Pollard, chairman emeritus of ServiceMaster Co. and a member of the Drucker Institute’s Board of Advisors.