Social Enterprise Partnership wins $1M in Bloomberg Mayors Challenge

Thanks to a $1 million award, the Philadelphia Social Enterprise Partnership, an incubator for socially-minded startups, is going to become a reality.

Philadelphia is one of five winners of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors Challenge, according to a release. It was named one of 20 finalists last fall, out of more than 300 submissions (and called among the most interesting this month). Among the five winners, Philadelphia’s proposal is the only one to focus on entrepreneurs.

The city will work with the Wharton Social Impact Initiative and social entrepreneurship accelerator GoodCompany Group on the project.

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The Philadelphia Social Enterprise Partnership will be run by the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and expects to have its first class of social entrepreneurs by the first quarter of 2014, Mayor Michael Nutter said on a conference call this morning.

It’s yet another one of Nutter’s public-private initiatives (see: Freedom Rings Partnership/KEYSPOT, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, StartUp PHL). Nutter explained it this way: the program will allow the city to benefit from the private sector’s “outside view” and also allow the city to “get out of the way” and not hinder innovation.

Along with PSEP, projects from four other cities won money, including Chicago, Houston, Providence, R.I., and Santa Monica, Calif.