Kim Alter, Visiting Fellow to the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Kim Alter has endeavored for 18 years to employ business tools and market-based approaches in the social sector to create social change and alleviate poverty. Alter began her career as a social entrepreneur, as well has having worked in corporate marketing and as a technical advisor for international agencies, Save the Children and Catholic Relief Services. In 2000, Alter started Virtue Ventures LLC, a small, innovative management consulting firm committed to furthering the field of social entrepreneurship through action-research, technical services and its own initiatives. 

Alter’s expertise is in designing and implementing mission-focused social enterprises and incorporating business practices into nonprofit management to strengthen institutional capacity, engender an entrepreneurial culture, and increase financial sustainability. She has spoken widely on the subject of social entrepreneurship and several of her clients and projects have won awards for innovation. Alter has worked in 35 countries in: Europe, Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East and in a wide variety of industries and sectors.  <!--break-->Alter is author of several works on social entrepreneurship including, Managing the Double Bottom Line: A Business Planning Guide for Social Enterprises (Pact 2000), the first book of its kind on social enterprise business plans. As well, she conceived and wrote the seminal Social Enterprise Typology (IADB 2003), and online version (Virtue Ventures 2004); she is contributing author of, Generating and Sustaining Nonprofit Earned Income, (Jossey-Bass 2004), and contributing author of, Nicholls, A. (2006), Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Innovation, Oxford University Press, (Oxford University Press 2006). Forthcoming are current projects for publication: Social Enterprise Legal Structure and Status: A Scan of the Field, (Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, Oxford University, 2007) and Social Enterprise and Base of the Pyramid: Market Based-Solutions to Poverty, co-authored with Ted London, University of Michigan (2007)  In 2004, Alter was appointed Visiting Fellow to the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford where she teaches a course on “High-Impact Social Enterprise Design.” She is a founding member of the Social Enterprise Alliance, and served on the board of directors for three years. She is currently on the advisory board of Scojo Foundation, a Fast Company Social Capitalist Award winner and Development Marketplace winner; an editorial advisor for Social Enterprise Reporter; and an advisory board member for SIES University’s (Mumbai, India), post graduate diploma program in Social Enterprise Management. Alter was also recently appointed as Fellow of the Cornell Univesity-Indian School of Business Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab in Hyderabad India.  She as a Bachelors degree in International relations and an Masters of Business Administration from Boston University Brussels, Belgium and Vrij Universiteit Brussel.