Cheryl Dorsey, Echoing Green

Failure is a regular part of Cheryl Dorsey’s work. An even bigger part is success.

Since 2002, Cheryl has been president of Echoing Green, which offers multi-year fellowships to emerging leaders so they can develop innovative solutions to difficult problems. Over the past 20 years, Echoing Green has awarded over $23 million to more than 400 social entrepreneurs, who use their grants as “start-up capital” for programs in areas such as education, civil rights, the arts, and community development. Cheryl sees supporting new ideas as one of the strengths of the nonprofit sector -- the best place to “champion and nurture social innovation.”

That view comes from experience. In the early 1990s, she took a break from medical school and used an Echoing Green Fellowship to help start the Family Van, a mobile health clinic that to this day serves some of Boston’s poorest residents. The experience helped her recognize that while caring for individuals was important, her greatest interest was “working with entire populations, since that was a more effective route to social change.”

Risks -- and the failures that invariably accompany them -- are central to the success of Echoing Green. In order to find innovative people and ideas, it thinks like venture capitalists, standing “on the edge to see what’s coming down the pike.” While not all the fellows succeed, careful risk management means that most do, and even those who don’t provide opportunities to learn.

Echoing Green, which takes its name from a William Blake poem, highlights another key for nonprofit organizations: sharing knowledge. The organization is committed to circulating the case studies of its fellows as a way to inspire groundbreaking leaders and, she notes, “We’re always looking for like-minded organizations.”

Learn more at www.echoinggreen.org.