Moscow just hosted its very first social innovation conference. Held between Stalin’s gothic skyscrapers and the city’s brand new financial district, where they’re throwing up twisted glass towers three at-a-time, the organisers did well for symbolism.
Human.Box, a newly launched Lithuanian social enterprise, brings to Vilnius the idea for so called “street magazines’ sold by homeless people as a way to help them find their way out of poverty.
You want to change the world through business. You live in Moscow. You have an unusual money-making idea that will also benefit society. Where do you go? Not long after launching their own entrepreneurial projects, three young Russian women and an Englishman found themselves asking the same question.
One of Russia’s few social enterprises is working to inspire kids to read by traveling the country in an old, book-filled bus.
In the 1990s, the plastic bag killed the Soviet Union’s disabled-run industries. Now one Russian social enterprise has brought it back to life, helping hundreds of the country’s blind and deaf with an idea made in the USSR.
With another generation of Russians and the international community becoming increasingly disillusioned with Russian democracy, a growing movement is pushing a novel solution: the right to vote online, led by Maxim Osovsky, a champion for “e-democracy”.
A strange mix of developing and developed country, social entrepreneurship in Russia will be like nowhere else, and the efforts to create it are only just beginning. We are recruiting two reporters to report at the helm of this phenomenon by covering the first international conference on social innovation in Russia, called “Social Innovations Russia”.