The GLOW PRIZE for Social Ventures provides seed grants of up to $10,000 to nonprofit, for-profit, and hybrid early-stage social and environmental ventures. Social or environmental ventures are defined as those working to solve a social or environmental problem. In general, social and environmental for-profit ventures produce products and/or services that either focus on addressing the needs of low-income communities or customers with an explicit purpose of increasing the welfare of these groups, alleviate a market failure and create significant public goods or benefits that are not wholly captured in the price charged by the business, or have attracted funding for the business by investors or grant makers who are seeking measurable social or environmental impacts.

Ventures and plans must be led by students, or be advised and have significant involvement by High School or University faculty or researchers. One founding member or significantly involved person should be a woman.

To be eligible for the GLOW PRIZE for Social Ventures, ventures must not have closed their seed-funding round at the time of application. Current students may enroll in the Investing in Social Ventures course in the same semester in which they apply to the Fund for their venture. Preference will be given to ventures that have the potential to be financially self-sustaining in the longer term. This preference includes nonprofits that can be sustained by generating revenues via fee-for-service models, for example.