It's a nonprofit association.

This isn't just about nonprofit.

Being a nonprofit is absolutely fundamental.

The Skeptics is a nonprofit educational organization.

A nonprofit like ICANN, supported by the U.S. government?

TED is a nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading.

And that's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in.

And the reason being a nonprofit is important is actually twofold.

But the nonprofit is not stopping there or here. JOI ITO

I'm not doing this as some type of nonprofit or charity work.

So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded, a nonprofit organization.

Everybody advised me not to be a nonprofit, but they were all wrong.

Do you want to start a nonprofit? Do you want to find love?

It's a nonprofit, venture capital fund for the poor, a few oxymorons in one sentence.

TEDx is an initiative of the TED conference, a nonprofit devoted to ideas worth spreading.

Again, when you're a nonprofit, you look at children as a mission, not as a market.

We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world.

And you know, when you give to a nonprofit, you might have 50 cents on the dollar.

It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the nonprofit sector in five different areas, the first being compensation.

These leading, innovative, nonprofit folks, who are using business skills in a very leveraged way to solve social problems.

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit that's built a giant math system that's waiting for data, but there isn't any.

Their fantastic philanthropic investment made this possible, and this is really a nonprofit education center which is just about to open.

The Cochrane Groups are an international nonprofit collaboration that produce systematic reviews of all of the data that has ever been shown.

So we started a nonprofit venture which, linking data to design, we called Gapminder, from the London Underground, where they warn you, mind the gap.

Twice a week, Emma Gonzalez, of the nonprofit Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, comes to PS 24 to train teachers and students in conflict resolution.

So maybe I would start a nonprofit to kind of help consult and get this idea going along with the government, but then I was told,

So the for profit sector can pay people profits in order to attract their capital for their new ideas, but you can't pay profits in a nonprofit sector, so the for profit sector has a lock on the multi trillion dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital.

But before I do that, I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world.

I also run a nonprofit called the Institute of Play, which is a games and learning space where we develop all kinds of stuff around games and learning.

And somebody like Dr. Victoria Hale, who started the world's first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, and whose first drug will be fighting visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever.

The only criticism, and people really don't want to criticize this, because it is a humanitarian effort, a nonprofit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid, actually.

That's an important fact, because it tells us that in 40 years, the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for profit sector.

Since then, I've used about 30 kinds of submarines and I've started three companies and a nonprofit foundation called Deep Search to design and build systems to access the deep sea.

So, we began through our nonprofit institute's training hospitals around the country, and we found that most people could avoid surgery, and not only was it medically effective, it was also cost effective.

Now, this is all a nonprofit enterprise, and so the money that we raise, after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components, gets plowed back into the project.

It's a nonprofit, a community biotech lab in Brooklyn, New York, and the idea was people could come, they could take classes and putter around in the lab in a very open, friendly atmosphere.

One can do it as a tech person, or as a finance person, or a nonprofit person, or as an entertainment person, but every one of us is all of those things and more.

And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation.

I'll do phone call meetings for my nonprofit and work in broy phrases like dude and bullshit because in that part of my life, and I hate to admit it, expressing masculinity is a pretty big benefit.

I want to talk about how the things we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector, are actually undermining the causes we love, and our profound yearning to change the world.

First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way, and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon.

We also have a classroom hives project, where this is a nonprofit venture we're spreading the word around the world for how honeybee hives can be taken into the classroom or into the museum setting, behind glass, and used as an educational tool.

But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years, no money was going to go to the needy, it was all going to be invested in building this scale, we would expect a crucifixion.

Serious book stores are losing their franchise, nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory, symphony orchestras are diluting their programs, public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of British sitcoms, classical radio stations are dwindling, museums are resorting to blockbuster shows, dance is dying.

It essentially raises charitable funds from individuals, foundations and corporations, and then we turn around and we invest equity and loans in both for profit and nonprofit entities that deliver affordable health, housing, energy, clean water to low income people in South Asia and Africa, so that they can make their own choices.