2026 Grunin Prize for Law and Social Entrepreneurship Announced
New York, NY, June 3, 2026: The Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship at NYU School of Law announced the recipient of this year's Grunin Prize for Law and Social Entrepreneurship. The prize is awarded annually to lawyers working to further the goals of sustainability and human development, and rewards innovative projects and solutions developed by lawyers to advance the fields of social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and sustainable development.
The 2026 Grunin Prize for Law and Social Entrepreneurship was awarded to the lawyers of multidisciplinary teams from B Lab Europe, Alliance Business Counsels, Earth Law Center's Nature Governance Agency, Nyenrode Business University, the Global Alliance of Impact Lawyers (GAIL), and a network of jurisdictional legal partners for their work developing the Onboarding Nature Toolkit and building a global movement and community of legal practice around it.
The toolkit underscores the importance of Nature as a stakeholder and offers four nature-inclusive governance models (Nature as Inspiration, Advisor, Director, and Shareholder) that give organizations a shared vocabulary for embedding nature into corporate decision-making. The legal teams have made nature governance feel possible rather than radical by building an open-source, multi-jurisdictional resource paired with an active community of practitioners. The lawyers anchored a deeply multidisciplinary effort, convening academics, sustainability practitioners, corporate leaders, and civil society partners around a shared framework that no single profession could have built alone. By doing the field-building work, not just the deal work, the legal teams are helping move nature governance from an outlier idea to a viable option. (Learn more here.)
“The Onboarding Nature toolkit shows why and how companies and organizations can and should embrace Nature as a formal stakeholder, granting her a voice and vote in long-term strategy and daily decision making. Through GAIL we subsequently engaged the wide community of legal impact professionals bringing this initiative and its implementation to a next level. Winning the 2026 Grunin Prize for Law and Social Entrepreneurship is an important acknowledgement of the crucial role lawyers play in scaling this toolkit across jurisdictions and in mainstreaming Nature inclusive governance as the new norm in corporate and public governance models,” said Jacobien Viets (Alliance Business Counsels), Emiliano Giovine (GAIL, RPLT), and Tessa van Soest (B Lab), co-authors and initiators of the toolkit, accepting the award on behalf of the full team.
The 2026 Grunin Prize finalists were also recognized at the 2026 Annual Conference on Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing on June 2 at Vanderbilt Hall.
Finalist Boston Impact Initiative Fund II is a collaboration between Morgan Lewis and BII that structured a community wealth-building fund. Finalist Integrating Social Impact into Public Asset Management is a collaboration between RPLT RP Legalitax, the City of Torino, the Cottino Social Impact Campus, and academic partners that developed a public-private framework considering social and environmental commitments in municipal asset management. (Learn more here.)
Also announced was the 2026 Grunin Prize for Sustained Commitment, which was awarded to Jonathan Ng for his extraordinary career using the law to advance impact investing, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable development across the private, NGO, government, and academic sectors. Ng's career has spanned project finance at White & Case, service as the first global legal director of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public (where he helped co-found the Grunin Center at NYU Law), close to a decade at USAID including a posting as supervisory foreign service lawyer in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and teaching a course on law and social entrepreneurship at Georgetown Law over several years. He is currently a Co-Founder and Co-Managing Partner of Mission Driven Counsel LLP, a law firm that specializes in global development made up of former senior USAID lawyers.
Accepting the award, Ng reflected: “Like me, many of us self-identified as 'impact lawyers' (or something similar) long before there was a widely recognized term for it. We often found ourselves in traditional legal settings, but with a persistent sense that the law could be used for something more—that it could be a powerful tool to advance positive social and environmental impact even from places like large law firms, and traditional corporate and finance practices. We were the lawyers who were drawn to building, questioning, connecting, and creating. We were the restless intrapreneurs and legal changemakers who didn't always fit neatly within existing practice areas or organizations because the field was still emerging.
The Grunin Center helped give definition, legitimacy, and community to something that many of us instinctively knew was possible. What has been most rewarding is not only seeing the growth of the Center, but the growth of a community of practice that continues to shape, challenge, and inspire one another. That community, and the future generation of lawyers it will continue to influence, is the true legacy of this work.”
Reflecting on Ng's receipt of the Grunin Prize for Sustained Commitment, Deborah Burand, Professor of Law Emerita and Faculty Director of the Grunin Center, remarked: “There is something especially fitting about recognizing Jonathan as we enter our tenth year. He was there at the beginning, helping to imagine what a law school center dedicated to social entrepreneurship and impact investing could be. Since then, his career has modeled what we hope every lawyer in this field will aspire to: a willingness to move across sectors, to ask harder questions, to teach the next generation, and to keep finding new ways to put the law in service of the common good. Jonathan's sustained commitment, in every sense of those words, has shaped this field and shaped this center.”
The Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship is the first law school-based center dedicated to enhancing the community of lawyers and legal institutions engaged in social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and sustainable development. It was established in 2017 with a generous endowment from NYU Law graduates Jay Grunin '67 and Linda Kalmanowitz Grunin '67, along with the Grunin Foundation.
Jay Grunin, Co-founder and Chairman of the Grunin Foundation, said: “NYU School of Law is not only where I received my degree but where I met my late wife, Linda, a fellow classmate. One of the last gifts we planned together was this Center, and I could never have imagined the incredible journey that has ensued. It was our hope that social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and sustainability would together become a truly significant sector of the law, and those aspirations are being realized more and more every day. As a judge in this year's selection process, I am in total awe of all those who submitted their legal work, not just the finalists. May this legal sector and its practitioners continue to increase in numbers and influence, and continue to make our world a better place for all.”
“This year's finalists for the Grunin Prize represent the best of what lawyers bring to the fields of social entrepreneurship, impact investing and sustainable development. Bringing stories of their work to light shows what is possible when lawyers collaborate and bring their expertise and creativity to the table and, in the case of our winning team, to the board tables of companies around the world. It also is an honor to celebrate the distinguished career of Jonathan Ng who has brought his skills and passion to his work in the private sector, public sector and nonprofit sector,” said Deborah Burand.
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