Hard-wire Ethical Values in Nonprofits: Stanford Social Innovation Review Article Offers Ways to Promote Ethical Conduct

Also in the current issue of SSIR, Kiva’s path to nonprofit status is the featured “Case Study.” One of the fastest-growing nonprofits in history, the world’s first online peer-to-peer microcredit marketplace carefully weighed the pros and cons of nonprofit status, according to Stanford Graduate School of Business coauthors Bethany Coates, case writer in the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, and Garth Saloner, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Electronic Commerce, Strategic Management, and Economics, and director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, who will become the new Dean of the Stanford Business School in September. The article quotes Kiva cofounder Jessica Jackley (Stanford MBA ’07): “It’s a tax code, not a religion. … We do think like a business wherever it makes sense, and we have tried hard not to get sucked into any sort of false limitations of being a nonprofit.” Coates and Saloner describe the events that led to the mid-November day in 2005 when Kiva became a phenomenon, and they outline the lessons learned about the advantages and the costs of being 501(c)(3).