Yale Prize To Support Eco-Ventures

An annual $25,000 Sabin Environmental Venture Prize has been established at Yale to stimulate entrepreneurial environmental ventures by the University’s faculty and students.

The Sabin Prize will support the creation of new nonprofit and commercial organizations, business models or other innovations that address pressing environmental challenges. Examples of proposed ventures could include a new technology for desalination, a startup to distribute existing technologies such as solar-powered lanterns to rural villages lacking electricity, or a venture arising out of an existing Yale center or program.

The first Sabin Prize will be awarded next April by the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale. Faculty and students interested in competing for the Sabin Prize must submit a letter of intent by January and attend a training session on starting new ventures in February.

Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Dean Gus Speth said the Sabin Prize will provide a new intellectual challenge for the Yale community to elevate environmental innovation in society. “This prize will jump-start new ideas, practices and products toward a better environment and a more sustainable future,” he said. “I am grateful for the support of the Andrew Sabin Family Foundation in sponsoring this new prize at Yale.”

The Sabin Prize was made possible through a generous gift from the family foundation of Andrew Sabin, who said he decided to sponsor the prize because of his concerns about today’s environmental threats to the planet and their consequences for future generations. “Everyone has a moral obligation to protect our natural world for our children and those who follow,” he said.

Sabin noted that he chose Yale as the host of his sponsored prize because he felt it was the most appropriate institution to field such an undertaking. “Yale is widely recognized as one of the leading institutions in the world on environmental and sustainability issues, and I am confident that the ideas arising from this competition will spur many exciting new ventures,” he said.

The Center for Business and the Environment at Yale will also host the Sabin Prize Speakers Series, a public lecture series on environmental entrepreneurialism that will feature several successful entrepreneurs. Each lecture in the series will be recorded and made available on YouTube through a link from the center’s website at http://cbey.research.yale.edu/.