One Acre Fund

Since its founding in 1987, this organization has focused on finding individuals with bold ideas, deep community ties, and the potential to drive meaningful social change.

Over nearly four decades, Echoing Green has supported over one thousand social innovators, including the founders of Teach For America, City Year, One Acre Fund, and Last Mile Health.

At its core, Echoing Green is an early-stage investor in people, not just ideas.

It supports entrepreneurs at their earliest stages, often before they have funding, teams, or the kind of track record that traditional investors typically require.

Another great organization, I know you're a fundraising podcast, taking it sort of like totally different from, okay, programs, but also then thinking about the fundraising side of it.

Another group, the great group that is also working with smallholder farmers is One Acre Fund.

Now, they work in 10 countries.

They've got hundreds of projects.

You can see a few quotes from different Bridgespan clients of the past.

The one that I'll talk about on the bottom is The One Acre Fund, which is an organization that I've been involved in since it was founded by one of my classmates at Kellogg.

And the One Acre Fund, what they do, is anybody here familiar with the One Acre Fund? All right, so a little bit.

So the One Acre Fund works to help small landholder farmers, those that typically farm one acre of land.

It's kind of one of the great ironies of our world that almost a billion of the world's poor are farmers.

Their job is to create food, and they actually don't even have enough food to eat.

So Andrew Yoon, the founder, came up with this idea as he traveled rural parts of the world, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, that these farmers had been left behind by agricultural innovation, things like commercial-grade seed, how to use fertilizer, even simple things like how to space your crops in a field to maximize the yield.

So he created this market bundle, which included a loan in the form of seed, fertilizer, and training from locals in Kenya, where it started, and now in other countries in southern Africa to help improve yields.