Organized by Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology and Society (CSTS), and by the Leavey School of Business Administration, the GSBI will cover critical areas of business planning, including technology and service innovation, target marketing, business models, finance and organizational capacity building. ifPeople was among the twelve finalists and after going through a competitive selection process was granted a $20,000 USD scholarship to attend the Global Social Benefit Incubator from July 29 – August 12.

GSBI and SCU
The program is part of Santa Clara’s mission of integrating “rigorous inquiry and scholarship, creative imagination, reflective engagement with society, and a commitment to fashioning a more humane and just world”. This Jesuit University is California’s oldest campus of higher education and has been historically committed to responsible citizenship, while the CSTS was created to identify and support social ventures that use technology to address unmet human and environmental needs.

The GSBI serves the growing trend of social enterprises that are incorporating responsible practices with services that address pressing social challenges. In the US and abroad, social enterprises are taking on issues of social and economic justice, environmental sustainability, and quality of life. While these organizations may take form as a non-profit or for-profit enterprise, they all have in common a value-generating activity that also contributes to improving quality of life.

ifPeople: Innovative Social Enterprise
ifPeople was selected as a proven young enterprise that is well-positioned for strong growth as well as generating social benefit. ifPeople provides technical solutions and strategic solutions for communication and collaboration to values-driven enterprises. From web sites to collaborative portals and custom software, ifPeople combines a strong software development team with business process insight to generate longterm value for our clients.

ifPeople's business model reflects its role as a social enterprise on three levels: clients, internally, and with suppliers. ifPeople targets other social enterprises as clients, and, by enabling them to be more successful is contributing to a more sustainable and just world. Internally, ifPeople strives to advance the sustainability of its service-based company. ifPeople is a carbon neutral enterprise (offsetting Carbon Dioxide impacts by planting trees), active contributor to local communities and Free Software projects.   With ongoing research and advances, ifPeople is a leader and innovator in the fields of sustainability, social enterprise, social responsibility, and open source information technology.

ifPeople's strongest innovation has been in its organization of suppliers through its FairSource program. FairSource is fair trade software. ifPeople has developed a standard for engaging microenterprises in South America to provide software programming while improving socially responsible practices and overcoming barriers to entrepreneurship. Currently the program has been used with seven enterprises with a total of nearly thirty members. Over the two years of the program, the enterprises have grown their staff, obtained offices, secured microloans, and improved their management. ifPeople continues to grow the program by working with more microenterprises in South America in order to increase its service offerings to US clients.