Over the past couple weeks, I’ve had the privilege of working with some exceptionally innovative and inspiring social entrepreneurs as part of Pitch Some Good. 

What started off as an idea to bring together the social entrepreneurship community at SXSW Interactive and empowering social entrepreneurs culminated in one night of charismatic and thoughtful pitching by seven incredibly talented ventures from across the country. The quality and passion of the pitches was absolutely awesome!

 Out of 25 submissions leading up to SXSW seven ventures were selected, including:

• The Meta-Activism Project meta-activism.org
• FourTeachers Project fourteachersproject.org
• Cost of Freedom Project Facebook.com/CostofFreedom
• OpenCurriculum theopencurriculum.org
• Pocket Hotline pockethotline.com
• Real Good Food realgoodfood.org
• HourSchool hourschool.com

Pitch Some Good was a night of innovation, social entrepreneurs and change-makers. NTEN’s Membership Director, Amy Sample Ward offers a great overview of the night.

The event was abuzz with these great ideas, as well as countless other projects starting up locally in Austin, and beyond. Conversations tended towards opportunities to connect people directly with each other, a theme of many of the conversations about new tools throughout SXSW hallways. As technology continues to advance, we, the developers and users, continue to look for opportunities to use technology to help us more directly and seamlessly find each other and the things we are interested in - whether it is local food or resources to do our job (from NTEN’s Membership Director, Amy Sample Ward on TheNonProfitTimes).

Again, I cannot stress enough how impressed I was by the evening’s ventures. It was no doubt a difficult decision for the attendees who were responsible for selecting the winner. Each attendee was given a ticket when they arrived to be used as a means of voting for their personal favorite. The night’s winner was Austin-based, HourSchool! The project, co-founded, by Rudy and Alex won a $1,000 prize from rackspace and a one-year free organizational membership to NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network).

Learn more about the evening and winner HourSchool from the local Austin area news:

Thank you again to everyone who participated in Pitch Some Good. You’re an inspiration! 

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Vanessa Rhinesmith is StartSomeGood’s Director of Outreach.