Purpose Meets Profit

If you're ready to quit your day job to focus full-time on your social entrepreneurship, apply to GoodCompany Ventures, a free, intensive, three-month program.

GoodCompany Ventures, a volunteer-run program headed by veteran entrepreneurs, investors, and lawyers, was founded under Resources for Human Development, a 40-year-old social enterprise from Philadelphia

 

To read the full article, please visit:

http://www.generocity.org/news/467

The City of Philadelphia Selects PublicStuff to Build Philly311 App

PublicStuff Founder and CEO Lily Liu said, “We are thrilled to work with the City of Philadelphia to build out their 311 service request tool. The project is especially meaningful to us since we launched our company, PublicStuff, in the City of Philadelphia and consider it home...The organization began in a Philadelphia business incubator, Good Company Ventures, which was sponsored by the Nutter Administration.

One-Stop Incubators Hatching Social Enterprise Startups

All startups are alike–and that includes social enterprises
Well, sort of.
Depending on the business, founders pretty much all need  help fine-tuning their plan, figuring out the best way to market, creating their technology platform. Or maybe they just want a place to work that’s not in a Starbucks.

To read the entire article, please visit:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/annefield/2012/04/20/one-stop-incubators-hat...

Press Release: Merger and Call for Applicants for 2012 Ventures Program

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PRESS RELEASE:  Philadelphia, PA – April 12, 2012  –  GoodCompany Group is pleased to announce the launch of nation’s most comprehensive resource for social entrepreneurs.

GoodCompany Group Merger.  GoodCompany Group, a 501(c)(3), is the result of the recent merger of two non-profit organizations dedicated to serving social entrepreneurs, Green Village Philadelphia and GoodCompany Ventures.  Green Village has developed a residential incubator consisting of 5,000 square feet of Class A office space to house up to 40 social entrepreneurs and offers mentoring and consulting services to non-resident entrepreneurs.  GoodCompany Ventures is the creator of the country’s leading accelerator program for social entrepreneurs, as described below.

Phila. Water Dept. system derives building heat from wastewater

A wastewater geothermal system for providing building heat was scheduled to be unveiled at 1 p.m. Thursday at the Philadelphia Water Department’s Southeast Water Pollution Control Facility.The system, which has an output of 1 million British Thermal Units per hour, is located in the building’s basement, so it can access and transfer heat from the adjacent sewage channel. It was made by Philadelphia-based NovaThermal Energy using technology developed in China. NovaThermal holds an exclusive license to the technology, as well as U.S. patents on improvements it has made to the system.

Hot Poop! Sewage heat to warm building

Last month David Henderson, managing director of XPV Capital in Toronto, told me about the overlooked value in wastewater, otherwise known as sewage: “Wastewater is a terrible name for wastewater. There are incredibly valuable resources in a wastewater flow: energy, nutrients, other materials, water itself,” he said. “There are phosphates in there, there’s energy in there.”Today a Philadelphia-based company, NovaThermal Energy, announced its first U.S. project to warm a building with heat from sewage.

Tapping into a constant resource: sewage's heat

Among the many renewable energy sources — wind, solar, hydroelectric, biofuels — there is one to which we all contribute that has not yet managed to attract the romantic advocates who have embraced other forms of green energy. We’re speaking about the gray river of warmth flowing right beneath our feet: sewage.

A Philadelphia company, NovaThermal Energy L.L.C., wants to heat and cool buildings by tapping into the constant, guaranteed heat contained in wastewater. The process is called sewage geothermal.

Summer 2012 Ventures Program accepting applications until April 30

Applications for the GoodCompany Group summer 2012 Ventures Program are open until the end of the month.

Neighboring business incubators on Arch Street

To fit my story on incubators in Friday’s paper into the allotted space, I had to leave out some interesting details. The most important was that the incubator that soon will no longer be known as Green Village Philadelphia and Seed Philly’s incubator are adjacent to each other in the same building.

 

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GoodCompany highlighted in Philadelphia Business Journal

The article, which is paywalled for subscribers, featured GoodCompany Group prominently in a discussion of the growing number of incubators in Philadelphia. A portion of the article follows: