Pop!Tech Gives Social Innovators a Boost

The annual conference trains nonprofit leaders, who often lack entrepreneurial knowhow, in branding, impact, and making connections

Pop!Tech Fellow Brian McCarth founded the organization PFNC (Por Fin Nuestra Casa), which has developed a process to recycle abundant shipping containers into affordable, modular, housing units. Kris Krüg

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By Jessie Scanlon

December 2, 2008 at 12:21 AM UTC

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Melanie Edwards had worked for JPMorgan Chase (JPM), AT&T (T), and the U.N. But none of those jobs exactly prepared the 45-year-old to run Mobile Metrix, a nonprofit market-research firm she founded in San Francisco in 2006 to collect data on the estimated 20 million "invisible" inhabitants of Brazil's ghettos. At an autumn retreat in Maine, Edwards picked up some of the business basics she had been missing.

Edwards was among 18 social innovators chosen from among more than 110 applicants from 33 countries for the inaugural Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellowship. The leaders of Pop!Tech, an annual conference about ideas shaping the future, saw the fellowship, which is funded by the gathering's $3,500 ticket price, as a way to support social innovation. "We chose high-potential leaders whom we thought could make transformational impact," says Andrew Zolli, Pop!Tech's curator, who develops programs for Pop!Tech Institute. "This is about giving them the nuts-and-bolts training they need to build successful organizations."