New documentary about the Acumen Fund on PBS June 15

The New Recruits is a Skoll Foundation-funded film being broadcast on June 15th on PBS about three Acumen Fellows who are working to bring a new approach to tackling poverty through business.

From an interview with Seth Kramer of Ironbound Films, who produced and directed the film:

KRAMER: We wanted to see if we could represent this [Acumen Fund Fellows] program well, and really get sort of the diversity of the participants. So we ended up choosing three of the fellows. There's a guy named Suraj who is from India, and he finds himself in the middle of Kenya working for a company that's trying to build pay-per-use toilets in the slums, where you have a million-and-a-half people that are living without sanitation systems. Then you have a guy named Joel. He is a bonafide member of the religious right from Tuscaloosa, Ala., who finds himself in, of all places, Pakistan trying to help this company that's selling drip irrigation systems to poor farmers who have no idea about this new technology. And then there's Heidi. She's a Stanford business-school graduate. A tall, blonde, Californian, who finds herself in a string of remote Indian villages trying to sell solar-powered lights to people who don't have electricity.

Trailer:



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