May 26th, 2006

2006 Fellow David Lehr has been accepted into the Acumen Fund Fellows Program, a competitive fellowship program for individuals with the dedication to serving the poor in the developing world and the business skills to effect change.

While capital is a constraint to building scalable and financially sustainable systems that make critical goods and services affordable and accessible to the poor, an even larger constraint is people. The world needs to build an “entrepreneurial bench” of top talent with strong financial and operational skills, as well as the moral imagination to build appropriate enterprises with local stakeholders. Acumen Fund hopes to contribute to this need for talent by creating what we hope will become the world’s leading fellowship for the social
enterprise sector.

The Fellows Program is a one-year, experience-based fellowship. The cohort of Fellows will first spend eight weeks in New York City in an intensive training program, where they will focus on valuation techniques, business models for the poor and risk analysis. They will meet with extraordinary leaders and examine issues related to our work from a sectoral and geographic perspective.

Fellows will also explore their own leadership through discussions, self reflection and feedback. At the end of this initial period, each Fellow will be assigned a specific investment and a concrete set of deliverables on which to concentrate for the next nine months. At the end of these assignments, Fellows will return to New York City for a final month to share experiences, exchange lessons learned and focus on potential job opportunities. Our aim is to build a corps of entrepreneurial leaders who will make major contributions to both the social and private sectors.

[From http://www.acumenfund.org/documents/AcumenFundFellows2006.pdf]

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