Fast Company magazine and Monitor Group announced last week that they awarded one of its fifth annual Social Capitalist Awards to the Housing Partnership Network, marking the fourth consecutive year that the Network has been selected one of the top social entrepreneurs in the country. This year’s awards feature 45 non-profits that use the tools of business to solve the world’s most pressing social problems – ranging from poor healthcare in developing nations to unequal education access, homelessness, unemployment and substance abuse in the United States – and who have demonstrated a consistent and unusually large impact on society. Among this year’s winners are three members of the Housing Partnership Network: Common Ground Community of New York City, the Community Reinvestment Fund of Minneapolis, and IFF of Chicago.

“This year we’ve seen an explosion of diverse experiments, many of them engineered by onetime Wall Street heavies, that attempt to bring new capital – and capital-market dynamics – to the realm of social good,” said Fast Company Contributing Writer Keith Hammonds. “Through these deals, social entrepreneurs and businesses are raising the stakes, creating both business and social impact, and changing old-style capitalism as we know it.”

For five years, Fast Company has partnered with global consulting firm Monitor Group to identify, evaluate, and celebrate top-performing nonprofit organizations. The Awards assess social entrepreneurial organizations of different sizes and ages across social sectors as an explicit effort to further performance measurement and accountability in the social sector in a highly rigorous, data driven, comparative approach. Organizations are rated on five critical components: social impact, entrepreneurship, innovation, aspiration and growth, and sustainability, based on an application that included two years of operating and audited financial data, a statement of mission and objectives, and answers to a survey to assess strategy and activities. Winners were selected by an independent advisory board of sector experts. In addition to the winners, the board also picked four high-potential organizations as “rising stars.”

The winners are featured in Fast Company’s December/January 2008 issue (on newsstands December 4 - Jan. 22, 2008) and will be recognized at a ceremony at the Westin Washington D.C. city Center on Jan. 8, 2008. The keynote speaker will be Adam Werbach, sustainability adviser to Wal-Mart and subject of Fast Company’s September cover story. The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship will honor J.B. Schramm, founder of College Summit as the winner of its 2008 “Outstanding Social Entrepreneur” award. The event will be sponsored by Dow.

This year, Fast Company also launched an experiment to assess the social performance of for-profit companies, using Monitor’s methodology. This experiment recognizes the reality that social entrepreneurship is not limited to the non-profit sector, and that companies are increasingly acting to have and measure positive impact on society, the environment, and their workforces. The magazine selected 10 companies to highlight.