Alberto Marten Prize for Social Entrepreneurship
The Alberto Marten Prize for Social Entrepreneurship honors non-profit organizations that link ideas and actions. This Prize rewards organizations for their promotion of, and cooperation with, grassroots and civil society institutions in Latin America.
Think tanks will be more effective and successful when they can link the ideas of a free society with practical efforts in their local civil societies. Social entrepreneurship is defined as voluntary, private solutions developed by citizens in response to social problems.
The Alberto Marten Prize for Social Entrepreneurship recognizes organizations that not only build bridges with social entrepreneurs, but also make a serious effort to measure the effects (changes in attitude and behavior) of their work. While it is tempting to believe that it is self-evident that a given activity is good and important, true intellectual and social entrepreneurs will seek out independent, objective criteria to measure whether their work is achieving its desired result.
This Prize carries the name of the economist Alberto Marten Chavarria for being the founder of the solidarism movement in Costa Rica in 1947, as well as for finding the means of introducing this movement to enterprises. The solidarism movement is relevant to the ideas of social entrepreneurship as its goal is to increase productivity by promoting solidarity in the workplace, a fair and just treatment to employees through worker savings plans and equal counterpart employer contributions.
Past Winners
- Fundacion Libertad of Argentina (2005)
- Liderazgo y Vision of Venezuela (2006)
- Innovations for Poverty Action (2007)
- Centro para la Apertura y el Desarollo de Latino America- CADAL (2008)
