While visiting a small village in Vietnam, Vanessa met a woman who had discovered that by adding the small shrimp that grew in rice paddies to her family's meals, her children became healthier, more energetic, and less likely to get sick. And when she shared her cooking insights with the rest of the village, soon all of the children there began to thrive.

Surprisingly, when Vanessa traveled down river to the next village, she found that the children there were malnourished, even though the same shrimp could be found in their rice paddies. Yet while this village and others along the river lacked access to a simple and inexpensive dietary innovation that could improve their children's health, each village had an ample supply of Coca-Cola.

Seeing this disparity in person, Vanessa began to imagine a world where all social entrepreneurs had access to the right combination of financial and strategic resources to spread their innovative solutions to social problems to the people who needed them the most.

Building New Profit
As Vanessa returned from her travels, she shared her vision with an "idea team" of social entrepreneurs, academics, philanthropists, and others, who together explored ways to create a new capital market for social innovation. Their research developed into an idea to combine multi-year grants with organizational consulting in order to support social entrepreneur-led nonprofits as they sought to expand their programs into new areas. In 1998, after finding a signature partner in Monitor Group, Vanessa and a small team put their vision into action by launching New Profit Inc., one of the first venture philanthropy firms in the United States.

In 1999, New Profit began to support our first set of portfolio organizations—Jumpstart, Citizen Schools, and Freelancers Union (then Working Today)—and then focused on selecting additional grantees in the areas of education, workforce development, public health, and poverty alleviation. We also devoted our early years to building a community of highly-engaged investors who were passionate about doing more with their philanthropy.

Building the Field
As New Profit began to see strong program results from our first group of investments, we learned that simply supporting a set of organizations was not enough to overcome the barriers to growth that innovative nonprofits face. In fact, we saw that the environment in which organizations operate often inhibits social entrepreneurs as they strive for significantly greater impact on the problems they aspire to solve.

To learn more about these challenges, we brought a group of social entrepreneurs together in 2005 to discuss the biggest obstacles their organizations faced. This initial convening developed into an annual event called the Gathering of Leaders, where social entrepreneurs come together to catalyze the development of new ideas, relationships, and resources so that they can scale social innovations and transform public problem solving on a broad scale.

We also launched the Action Tank, a group within New Profit that works beyond the bounds of individual organizations to reshape America's institutions and more effectively allocate resources for scaling organizations. Through the Action Tank, we have developed initiatives like the America Forward Coalition, a bi-partisan initiative that works with policymakers, legislators, and thought leaders to identify ways to combine public and private resources with the effectiveness and impact of America's social innovators.

For the past 11 years, New Profit has worked to help scale a select group of innovative nonprofit organizations while pursuing efforts to engage the policy and market forces that have the potential to dramatically increase the impact of all social entrepreneurs. We have invested in 27 organizations that have in turn served over 1.4 million people. Today, we are funded by a community of nearly 50 passionate individual and family philanthropists, and nearly 300 Monitor Group consultants have worked closely with New Profit and our portfolio on a pro-bono basis to overcome the strategic issues facing nonprofits.

As we look to the future, we remain committed to our mission to help innovative social entrepreneurs and their organizations dramatically improve opportunities for children, families, and communities.