HASA (Harvard Alumni for Social Action) was started by a bunch of ‘81 alums to advocate the use of the university’s enormous endowment (estimated to go from $35 to $100 billion in the next ten years) for social good. From the site:

Harvard Alumni for Social Action (HASA) is an independent organization open to all Harvard alumni who seek to encourage the University to use donations for social good. HASA members believe that Harvard’s prominence and wealth make it uniquely able to support educational and research institutions in developing countries. HASA therefore works to fund scholarships for African graduate students at Harvard and also to fund infrastructure improvements at needy African universities.

At the moment, the mission sounds like it’s limited to educational grants. I hope they think bigger as more people take interest in the idea and join the org (I just did.) Harvard is a university which presumably has a huge number of innovative ideas around development. Example: the Kennedy School alone probably has half a dozen graduate students thinking about how unhealthy political structures cause the “resource curse” in developing countries (see this TED talk for an interesting discussion on that topic.) Now, imagine if there were huge grants for those graduate students to do research abroad. “Business plan” competitions for social ventures. New departments, even.

I hope HASA expands into a general-use fund directed globally at fixing the social problems that current markets can’t fix on their own. If such things already exist at Harvard and at other schools, I hope HASA finds ways to support them. This is a topic of such enormous interest (academically, politically, and meathook-future realistically.) If they aim higher, perhaps they can draw many orders of magnitude of funding more than they’re currently raising.

Related Posts:

• TED Talks: African Fractals, Meditation, and the Oil Endgame (December, 2007)
• house of cards (April, 2006)
• Nightlife as a measure of development (July, 2006)
• China-Congo Lovefest (September, 2007)
• Kiva vs. Microplace (November, 2007)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under developing world, economics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.