Con-way Inc. Honored with Social Innovation Award from Justmeans and Financial Times

Tesla Motors, Cisco Networking Academy, Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Women initiative and eBay's Green Team were among the organizations and initiatives taking home awards March 24 from the Justmeans.com/Financial Times 2010 Social Innovation Awards dinner in Manhattan.

A nonprofit organization, the San Francisco-based TechSoup Global, received the event's Citizen's Choice Award. TechSoup Global -- which convenes weekly nonprofit strategy meetings in Second Life -- has provided technology assistance to more than 100,000 nonprofits and libraries in North America and globally. Its more than 30 corporate partners include Cisco and Microsoft. TechSoup Global was voted the most worthy of the citizen's choice award by a majority of some 12,000 citizens voting online during the past two months.

Martin Smith, founder and CEO of Justmeans, said: "We wanted to showcase companies that are helping us innovate out of the challenges that face us today. Award-winners are not those companies and organization trying to mitigate their social and environmental impact," Smith said, "but are those that are creating the processes, systems, programs, and initiatives that we hope will be replicated across their industries and across business over the coming years."

Over one hundred companies participated in the awards program and all categories, except the Citizens' Choice award, were judged by a panel of experts.

Award Winners Included:

Most Innovative Nonprofit: LIFE/LanX Local Investment Project, a social venture to establish a local stock exchange for U.S. companies too small for national listing. The goal: to make more equity finance available to local communities across America and help them build out of the current recession.

Most Innovative Small For-Profit: Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish company that, for 40 years, made uniforms for hotel workers and retailers. Now it makes textile-based, life-saving products, including ZeroFly, a durable plastic sheeting for sheltering refugees that also kills disease-spreading insects, and LifeStraw, a water filtration tool the size of paper-towel cylinder that helps thousands who are deprived of clean drinking water, helping them to turn polluted water into drinkable supplies.

Most Innovative Large For-Profit: Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Women initiative, a five-year investment by the Wall Street firm to provide 10,000 under-served women around the world with business and management education.