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“Behaviours change slowly. Time is often the most important investment you can make. It’s going to take more than one try to make an impact and it will take more than one success to make a difference.” This is one of the social impact principles that we, at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, use Read more…

In Grambling, Louisiana, it’s hard to stock up on the basics. Families have to leave their community to get everything they need, including their weekly groceries, because retail options in Grambling are limited. At the same time, opening and maintaining a viable grocery retail business – especially in communities where businesses often shutter – is risky, tough work. Making it Read more…

After nearly ten years supporting working adults in Central Texas to earn a college degree, PelotonU faced a mission-critical question shared by many nonprofits: how could we build on our learnings to tackle this challenge on a larger scale? In the United States, there are 36 million people with some college credits but no degree. Read more…

See how a development impact bond is improving learning outcomes for students who study in government and low-fee private schools in India.

From the early days of the foundation, we haven’t been afraid to set big goals. Our impact is about creating and accelerating human opportunity across the world — and that is work worth pushing toward. Each year, our team collaborates with dedicated partners to make the following measurable progress.

At the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, ensuring our efforts have lasting, positive outcomes for the families and communities we serve is core to our mission. As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of our guiding principles is “staying the course,” which means that we invest not only financial resources in companies that are Read more…

During the course of our work in India, we have learned that the best way to identify opportunities – particularly those that aren’t the most obvious ones – is to listen to and learn from the people in the communities we serve. Data and trends are important for validating and sizing opportunities, but only by Read more…

In India, an estimated 80 percent of all employed people are in the informal sector, meaning they lack the wage security and other benefits that typically come from the formal sector. Instead, those in the informal sector rely on self-employment or odd jobs to keep themselves and their families afloat. Informal employment also means that Read more…

In India, college education is hugely important to families and students. Entrance exams to college are a key part of the trajectory of a young person’s job and career – and competition is fierce.  At the same time, most exam prep courses are very expensive, and families living in urban poverty do not have easy access Read more…

St. Mary’s High School is in a dusty industrial suburb in Bangalore, in a neighborhood that is a gleaming contrast to the towering IT parks and upscale offices that dot this growing city. The school is a converted three-story building with cramped classrooms and narrow corridors. But when I walked into the fifth-grade classroom, I Read more…

When the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation approached the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service’s Social Innovation & Investment Initiative (SII) to review its decade-long history with impact investing, there was a clear alignment on objectives of documenting best practices in impact investing in order to strengthen this emerging sector. One of SII’s main Read more…

As a foundation committed to transforming lives of children living in urban poverty, we’ve always anchored our work around three parameters – impact, scale, and sustainability. With our mission as our north star and our core social impact principles as our anchor, we have experimented with several approaches, structures and tools to achieve large-scale and Read more…

“I am not stressed about finding work, I am earning enough money to pay for my studies, and I am able to work around my studies ‒ so I can achieve my dreams.” This quote is from Sihle, whose path was changed because she had access to an employment opportunity. However, Sihle’s sentiments are not Read more…

The concept of traditional investment is rooted in an expectation of some benefit in the future. Investors balance potential risk with potential return, and then choose how to allocate their money. Impact investing moves us from a model focused on balancing risk and return to one that focuses on risk, return, and measurable social impact Read more…

If you visit the MasteryConnect headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, you’ll see a 42” television screen jam-packed with ever-moving numbers and graphs. This is the MasteryConnect operations dashboard, with real-time reports from teachers about key metrics in their classrooms, completed assessments, and the number of new teacher sign-ups in our community. But one metric best reflects our success in scaling our work to more classrooms and more students: Read more…

CredRight has developed an innovative underwriting model that expands access to financial services for nano entrepreneurs, who are often unable to provide collateral or credit history. Using information gathered through various physical and digital touchpoints, including chit fund data, the company can assess a borrower’s ability to repay a loan – expanding access to the Read more…

Discover how the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living is actively bridging the gap between health and our community.