Awards and prizes

Award and recognition prizes are intended to celebrate or mark a person or organisation’s achievement. These tend to be awarded after the fact, such as the Nobel Prizes. These prizes have become increasingly popular over the last decade for rewarding social entrepreneurs, non-profits and others working in the field of philanthropy. There are now some 25 philanthropic organisations offering awards worldwide such as the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship, the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award organised by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and the MacArthur Fellows Programme which grants $500,000 to recipients over five years. They can be an effective means of distributing funds to already established social entrepreneurs. A criticism sometimes made of these methods is that they tend to favour internationally networked individuals rather than grassroots innovators.