Can PRIs Support Fundraising and Capacity Building?

Lucy Bernholz is hosting a great conversation on her Blueprint Research and Design website called “What Capital When?” As part of their work with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in their Digital Media & Learning initiative, Blueprint is hosting this online conversation around the theories and strategies of program-related and mission investing to advance knowledge and research in the field. They asked that I do a guest post on using PRIs (program related investments) to improve the fundraising effectiveness of nonprofit organizations. Below is that post. You can also read the post on their What Capital When site here, and you can read the whole series here.

I think there is a tremendous opportunity that most foundations and nonprofits are missing.  PRIs (program-related investments) are an under-used tool that could provide much needed capital for nonprofits to transform how they finance social impact.

PRIs are loans that foundations make to nonprofits at low, or no interest.  At the end of the loan period (typically 3-7 years) the loan is repaid, or forgiven.  PRIs are usually used for capital projects or land purchases in the nonprofit world.  But they could also be used to increase the fundraising capacity of a nonprofit organization, through increased fundraising knowledge, planning, tools and staffing.  The current economic climate seems like the perfect opportunity for this new use of PRIs when foundations are trying to hold on to their dwindling corpus while maintaining their past level of community support.

A nonprofit could use a PRI to improve their fundraising infrastructure in several ways:

• Create a strategic development plan. Many nonprofits don’t have the expertise or time to put together a strategy for how they will bring money in the door.  With funding to hire an outside consultant to put together such a plan, the nonprofit would have a much better chance of increasing their fundraising revenue.
• Get fundraising training for their staff and board. If a nonprofit staff and board have the tools and expertise for successfully raising money, they will be more likely to do so.
• Hire a seasoned Development Director. Many nonprofit organizations can only afford to pay the bare minimum for a Development Director, which means that they are often forced to hire someone with little experience who must learn on the job.  If instead they had enough funding to pay a market rate salary for a seasoned fundraiser, they could hit the ground running, increasing the likelihood of fundraising success.
• Purchase a new donor database. A key element to success in individual donor fundraising is an organization’s ability to capture and use data about donors and prospects.  A good donor database makes this effort easier and more successful.
• Upgrade their website, email marketing, social media efforts. As direct mail appeals (a nonprofit fundraiser’s traditional standby) continues to become less and less effective, nonprofits need to move effectively into the online world.  Funds for technology upgrades and staff could help them do this.
• Launch a major gifts campaign. The vast majority of private funding in the nonprofit sector comes from individuals (80+%), so to stay competitive nonprofits need to move into the world of major gift solicitation.  But that takes expertise, staff, collateral and other infrastructure elements.

These are just a few examples of how nonprofits could make investments to strengthen their fundraising efforts. But currently it is difficult to find funding to support things like this.

But a PRI could provide an initial investment that sets the nonprofit on a path toward more diversified, more sustainable fundraising for the social impact they are working to create.

There are tremendous benefits to a PRI program like this.  First, for the foundation:

• Increases their ability to meet past levels of giving, despite any losses they might have found in the market, because the loaned money will eventually come back to them.
• Encourages their nonprofit grantees to be proactive in creating fundraising streams that will make them more sustainable.  Thus, increasing the likelihood that their nonprofit grantees a) won’t have to come back to them year after year for ongoing support and b) will become more sustainable and thus achieve greater social impact.
• Stretches their capacity-building dollars further. Because PRI money eventually comes back to the foundation, they can increase their level of impact by helping more nonprofits improve their capacity than they could with grants alone.
• Increases the level of accountability among nonprofit recipients because of the expectation of repayment.

And second, for the nonprofit:

• More diversified and sustainable fundraising streams.
• Increased fundraising knowledge and experience.
• Increased ability to work towards social impact.

Although PRIs used in this new way seems, at least to me, to be an obvious win-win, very few foundations are doing it.  PRIs in general are used (according to the Foundation Center) by only a few hundred of the thousands of grantmaking foundations in the country.  And I know of only one example of a foundation using a PRI to upgrade the fundraisng capacity of a nonprofit (the KDK Harman Foundation in Austin just launched a program like this last Fall, but does not yet have any participants).

So what is holding foundations back from launching a PRI program like this?  A number of things:

1. Nonprofits lack the expertise to put a plan together and pitch it to foundations. This is where Social Velocity comes in to help nonprofits create a plan to upgrade their revenue function and pitch that plan to foundations and other funders.
2. Most foundations  have an aversion to capacity building funding and prefer that their money go to direct program service.  However, as more nonprofits can demonstrate to funders that capacity building actually results in even more impact, this aversion can be alleviated.
3. Foundations lack awareness of or experience with PRIs.  However, this is changing, especially in the last year when the poor economy has made foundations increasingly interested in finding alternative ways to maintain community investment levels.
4. Foundations that are experienced with PRIs are not aware of using them to improve a nonprofit’s fundraising function.

So there is a disconnect.  But I am optimistic that as nonprofits learn to put a plan together to upgrade their fundraising function and articulate to funders how PRI’s could finance it, more examples of this new use of PRIs will surface.

Tags: Blueprint Research and Design, Development, Foundation Center, Fundraising, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, KDK Harman Foundation, Lucy Bernholz, nonprofit, PRIs, program-related investments, What Capital When

Convergence Can’t Be Denied

There is a fascinating debate going on in the blogsphere touched off by Michael Edwards, author of  Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World and former director of the Ford Foundation’s Governance and Civil Society program.

In essence, the debate is about whether the convergence of the private (business) and the nonprofit sectors is a good or bad thing, whether market forces help or hurt social change efforts.  Michael kicked off the debate on Monday with the first in a week-long series of posts called “Should Civil Society Be Reduced to a Subset of the Market?” In subsequent posts he went on to attack the emerging social capital market among other things.  You can read the whole series here.

Sean Stannard-Stockton, of the Tactical Philanthropy blog, took up the charge and debated many of his points.  Then the two have gone back and forth over the issues. And the debate expanded on the New Philanthropy Capital blog where Tris Lumley wrote that Michael’s argument “boils down to social capital markets vs civil society – impact measurement vs social justice, data vs values, competition vs solidarity. And in this binary view of the world, he threatens to undermine the very real progress that’s being made towards a much more balanced and realistic perspective.”  Michael responds and so does Tris.

It seems to me that fundamental to Michael’s argument is his fear about the growing convergence between the nonprofit, private and government sectors.  That somehow the “market” will sully social change efforts.  Michael argues that civil society and the market are separate entities: “Civil society operates on solidarity and commitment—the willingness to hang in there for the long haul even if results don’t go your way. Markets work on the opposite principle, “exit”: consumers are free to move from one supplier to another whenever and wherever they like. Otherwise the efficiency of resource allocation would suffer.”

But the fact is that social change efforts and the nonprofits leading them have always existed within a market economy. Resource allocation to nonprofits is very much based on a market. If nonprofits can’t convince donors or governments that their work is important or has meaning, they won’t receive resources.  Nonprofit funders are consumers who are “free to move from one supplier to another whenever and wherever they like.”  It would be great if social change efforts could exist in some sort of vacuum where their good work automatically finds resources, but the world doesn’t work like that.  And as resources for social change efforts become increasingly competitive, nonprofits, and for profits working towards social change, have to become smarter about responding to the marketplace. And as the marketplace demands more social change efforts, which is increasingly the case, more resources will be brought to bear on those social change efforts, thus the creation of the social capital market.

The growing convergence among the public, private and nonprofit sectors is a reality we can’t avoid.  Nonprofits have to respond more effectively to market forces, governments have to be more efficient in their allocation and use of resources, and businesses, in order to survive in a marketplace that increasingly values social good, have to understand and respond to the effects their products and services and business model have on the broader society.

Binary systems and separated sectors just don’t exist anymore.  The lines are blurring.  The market is part of the reality of social change efforts.  To deny that is silly.

Tags: Ford Foundation, Michael Edwards, New Philanthropy Capital, Sean Stannard-Stockton, Small Change, Tactical Philanthropy, Tris Lumley

Social Impact Finance

It’s a new year and a new decade, and both hold tremendous promise for creating real social change.  And key to significant social change is a fundamental restructuring of how we finance that change.  I think (hope) that in the next decade we will see the emergence of a new Social Impact Finance.  And I imagine it will look something like this:

• Social Impact Funds Become Commonplace. Experiments like the Federal Social Innovation Fund (which combines government and private money to fund the growth of proven nonprofit models), Village Capital Fund (seed funding for social entrepreneurs, determined by social entrepreneurs), social investment funds like Good Capital, and venture philanthropy funds like New Profit and SeaChange Capital Partners are expanded and become commonplace.  Seed and growth funding for nonprofit, for-profit, and hybrid social impact organizations becomes more readily available and accepted.




• Foundations Get Risky. Foundations deny their risk-aversion heritage and provide risk capital for social innovation, whether through their customary 5% cap for nonprofit donations, or social investments from their corpus, or by foregoing dreams of perpetuity and giving all their money away on a big bet or two.  See Nathaniel Whittemore’s great post on this.




• Individual Donors Become a Powerhouse. Technology finds a way to harness the power of individual donors toward significant social change. Currently, individual donations make up the vast majority of funding entering the nonprofit sector, yet their gifts are fragmented. With the potential of a new nonprofit rating system on the horizon, and social media’s growing ability to gather and marshal individual participants, there could be a pivotal shift in how individual donations flow to the nonprofit sector, and how significant those individual donations become to nonprofits creating demonstrable social impact.




• Nonprofits Understand the Power of Finance. Nonprofit organizations understand and become successful at financing their overall operations, instead of fundraising for them.  And they begin to think bigger about their work, the overall outcomes they are trying to achieve and how finance fits into that (The GiveWell blog did a great series on the “Room for More Funding Question.”)

The end result of these and other changes will be, I hope, that “Social Impact” and “Finance” are no longer separate terms that have no bearing on each other, but instead inextricably linked concepts that create a better world.

Tags: GiveWell, Good Capital, Nathaniel Whittemore, New Profit, SeaChange Capital Partners, Social Innovation Fund, Village Capital Fund

The Simplicity of Social Change

Given that Thanksgiving is this week, I wanted to share a great video from the Washington Area Women’s Foundation, a Washington DC area foundation that fosters women philanthropists to improve the lives of women and girls (HT PhilanTopic blog). It’s a really cool organization, doing some interesting things to encourage more giving overall, and more giving to nonprofits that improve the lives of women and girls.

They recently launched a new campaign to support their work. I thought this video was a really great demonstration of how solutions to social problems are often incredibly simple and can unleash the potential for communities and individuals to heal themselves and each other.

So, in the spirit of Thanksgiving and all that it encompasses about giving back and building community, here is the video.  Have a great Thanksgiving!

Tags: PhilanTopic, Thanksgiving, Washington Area Women's Foundation

But Change We Must

The social sector, or perhaps more appropriately, those writing about the social sector, seem particularly analytical and reflective this past week. Perhaps its the looming end to a horrible year for the general economy, and nonprofits in particular.  Whatever the reason, the nonprofit sector and the philanthropy that funds it are at an important crossroads.

First, the picture for the current state of the social sector continues to be bleak. A recent Foundation Center advisory reports that foundation giving will decline 10% this year and more next year. And a new survey by Opportunity Knocks reports that more than half of nonprofit organizations froze the salaries of, or laid off employees this year. You begin to see a bad situation getting potentially worse.

But at the same time, there is the flip side of adversity: the opportunity. The nonprofit and philanthropic worlds, and the fundamental shifts occurring in both, are becoming a topic of broader discussion and understanding. First, the Wall Street Journal, in a great display of how the changing landscape of philanthropy has finally hit the consciousness of mainstream media, devoted an entire section this week to improving philanthropy, with the editor’s note: “If there ever was a time to get smarter about philanthropy, this is it. The question is: How?”  And the lead article “What’s Wrong With Charitable Giving and How to Fix It” is noteworthy in its examination of philanthropy, even if its proposed solutions are a bit weak.

And second, the James Irvine Foundation and the Fieldstone Alliance just released a report, “Convergence: How Five Trends Will Reshape the Social Sector,” conducted by La Piana Consulting that details an emerging restructured nonprofit sector. They argue that the nonprofits that will succeed in this changing sector are those that:

• Share leadership across generations, cultural perspectives and styles
• Use technology strategically to engage wider audiences to advance their mission
• Understand and harness new networks, collaborations and partners, both individuals and organizations
• Become skilled at tapping into a larger pools of individuals who want to volunteer in meaningful, skill-specific and diverse ways
• Understand the convergence of the nonprofit and private sectors and embrace new opportunities there
  

The point of the report is that the status quo is no longer an option.  Those nonprofits that recognize and embrace change will survive and thrive: “In this changing environment, transformation is not optional. The future will demand a collective rethinking of what it means to be an organization, how individuals define their work and how best to both compete and partner across many permeable boundaries.”

This is akin to the “resetting” of the nonprofit sector discussed before.  This is not a blip; things are changing in very fundamental ways and the WSJ and others are recognizing that.  And nonprofits must recognize, understand, and embrace those changes.

I am glad that the WSJ thinks philanthropy such an important topic that they have devoted an entire section to analyzing what could make it better.  And I applaud the Convergence report for pointing out what’s changing and what it will take to survive amid these changes.

But I’d like to see this all go even further. Now is the time for nonprofit organizations to overcome their inherent risk aversion. Experiment with new funding models; try social media and other new technologies; analyze and refine your impact; get rid of low ROI fundraising activities; shake up your board; ask hard questions; encourage dissenting opinions and open discussion; let go of the status quo and embrace the opportunity of change.

And on the philanthropy side, I would like to see more risk taking, harder questions, more discussion.  Ask the nonprofits you fund what they really need to succeed; invest in organizations, not just programs; combine strategy and passion in your giving; make gifts based on results, not marketing; leverage your giving with other philanthropists; make investments, not just donations.

Fundamental shifts are occurring in how we approach social problems, how we communicate, how we build support, how we access resources. Those solutions that are bold, courageous and open to change will ultimately survive.

Tags: Fieldstone Alliance, Foundation Center, James Irvine Foundation, nonprofit, Opportunity Knocks, Philanthropy, social sector, Wall Street Journal

Philanthropy Drives Arts Education Forward in Austin

The kick-off of Austin’s MindPop collaboration was this morning.  MindPop, which I’ve written about before, is a collaboration of a handful of leading Austin philanthropists hoping to improve access to arts education for all Austin children.  They want to understand what is holding our kids back from learning about and experiencing the arts and what needs to change in the infrastructure of the city in order to fill those gaps.

The project has 3 phases:

1. Gap Analysis to determine what is missing in the arts education ecosystem in Austin
2. Creation of 4 bold goals to solve those gaps
3. Distribution of close to $180,000 in grants to fund capacity building of the overall system and of individual nonprofit arts organizations

So today was the launch of the project with about 75 of the who’s who in Austin’s philanthropic, education, and arts worlds in attendance.  The keynote speaker was our new Austin Independent School District superintendent, Meria Carstarphen, who obviously has tremendous passion for the importance of arts education.  Her recent arrival in Austin is itself a real opportunity for change to the system.

As inspiration for Austin’s foray into building this collaboration, Gigi Antoni, CEO of Dallas’ Big Thought, was there to explain how her organization led Dallas from a community that dismissed most of their art and music teachers in the 1970s, to a comprehensive, fully funded in- and out-of-school arts learning environment.  Over the course of the last 12 years, Big Thought has brought together philanthropists, educators, arts organizations, schools, parents, and community leaders to create an ecosystem for arts education that ensures that all Dallas children have a rich art-centered learning environment both in school (90 minutes of arts instruction for every student every week) and in their communities (music camps, rehearsals, rec center activities, etc).  For Gigi, the big transformation was that Dallas went from a bunch of individual solutions and organizations that were providing “random acts of change” to a “completely changed environment that works as a SYSTEM” to create arts education for every child in Dallas.

I have to admit that I am a bit skeptical about whether what worked in Dallas will work in Austin.  We have a tendency in this city that I love to talk and plan and envision a future, but sometimes find it difficult to move towards action, perhaps part of that stems from a lack of infrastructure and capacity.  So what I am really excited about with MindPop is not the gap analysis and the creation of 4 ideas for solutions.  I have no doubt that the gap analysis will be thorough and the ideas for solutions creative and exciting.  I am most interested that a group of five very influential philanthropists (family foundations, a corporate foundation, and the Austin Community Foundation) is pooling their resources and efforts toward a common goal, and more importantly, toward building infrastructure and an ecosystem for the arts education sector.  Often it is the infrastructure that is missing in true solutions.  Ideas are great, and so many fabulous ones exist.  But the real hurdle is taking a great idea and building the infrastructure, support, ecosystem behind it to create results.

The other exciting thing about this project is that it could become a model for funder collaboration and ecosystem creation that could be replicated in other nonprofit issue areas.  What if all of the education, or healthcare, or youth development, or environmental funders in town got together and decided that they wanted to create an ecosystem of money, expertise, organizations, solutions that could work together towards system-level, not individual program level, change?  That would be pretty interesting.

I’m thrilled that these philanthropists are working so closely together, putting money and resources behind this collaboration, and being very public and transparent about the process.  I would love to see more philanthropists putting their resources behind big picture, infrastructure-building solutions.

I plan to keep my eye on this project, and I’ll keep you posted.

Tags: AISD, Austin, Austin Community Foundation, Big Thought, Capacity Building, Dallas, Gigi Antoni, Meria Carstarphen, MindPop, philanthropists

Making Donors Organization Builders

The “starvation cycle” of nonprofit organizations doing more and more with less and less has to end.  But how can nonprofit organizations break out of this cycle when donors won’t fund nonprofit capacity?

The news last week that the Boston Foundation will shift the majority of their competitive grants to unrestricted operating support, which in reality means capacity building, is fantastic.  The Boston Foundation is one of the few foundations that understands that strengthening nonprofit organizations, through money to support technology, infrastructure, fundraising, top talent, management expertise, strategic planning, evaluation, research and development, is absolutely key to making social change possible.

But the Boston Foundation is just one in a sea of foundations and individual philanthropists who have yet to understand the importance of money to build nonprofit organizations.

But perhaps there is hope.  Social Velocity has seen some great early signs that when approached in the right way, foundations and individual donors, who previously may have only provided direct service funding, can become organization builders.

I have discussed before Social Velocity’s work to help Heart House, an after-school program for at-risk kids in Austin and Dallas, strengthen their plan to grow statewide and create a pitch for growth capital.  Heart House could not pay for this planning work through their operating budget, so they went to a foundation that was already supporting their program and asked them to invest in this growth planning.  When the foundation understood that a small investment in organization building would help this organization that they love improve the lives of even more children, they were happy to invest.

Another example is Social Velocity’s newest client, English at Work, a nonprofit that teaches ESL classes to the employees of restaurants and hotels.  English at Work is a subsidized social enterprise where the hotels and restaurants pay them a fee to run these classes.  The nonprofit is demonstrating great results and has real potential to replicate the model.  First, however, they need to strengthen their overall revenue function to position them for growth, which is where Social Velocity comes in.

But again, English at Work didn’t have the operating revenue to pay for that outside expertise. So they approached a foundation in their fold and made the case for how a strengthened revenue function would put English at Work in a position to start planning for replication. And that replication would mean that their results-achieving model could provide more people with stronger English language skills.  Stronger English language skills mean better, higher paying jobs, less stress on the social safety net and a stronger, healthier community.  And what English at Work helped their donor understand is that to get to that positive outcome, English at Work as an organization has to be more effective.  They have to learn how to create a stronger, more sustainable revenue function that can support a larger organization over the long term.  And figuring that out costs money.

Some foundations and individual donors are more predisposed to understand the connection between stronger organizations and greater social impact.  But those donors are in the minority.  It is fabulous when a large donor like the Boston Foundation makes a dramatic shift toward organization building.  That will certainly help raise awareness among the philanthropic community about organization-building investments.

But perhaps another route toward more philanthropic money invested in organization building is if nonprofit organizations start approaching the donors and board members who are already supporting their programs and make the case, in an articulate, reasoned, but passionate, way that in order for more of the outcomes they seek to happen, they have to invest in their organization.  And they need those closest to the organization to make those investments.  It is a process of educating those nearest and dearest to the organization about the power of a stronger internal organization.  It’s a new conversation, but an important, and potentially game-changing, one.

Tags: Boston Foundation, capacity, English at Work, Foundations, Heart House, nonprofit, organization-building, Philanthropy, Social Velocity, starvation cycle

A Philanthropic Experiment in Collaboration and Capacity Building

I mentioned earlier that a group of Austin philanthropists is working on a collaboration around building the capacity of local arts education organizations.  I now have more information on the project, and as an example of philanthropic collaboration and capacity building it’s pretty interesting.  The project, called Mind Pop, is a $225,000+ collaboration among Still Water Foundation, Webber Family Foundation, Applied Materials, Tapestry Foundation, the Education Foundation of America and additional funders who they are still working to secure. The leaders of Mind POP hope to improve the unequal access Austin students have to high quality arts education and the lack of capacity and collaboration among arts education organizations in town.

Their goals for the project are to:

• Establish a baseline for measuring improvements in access and quality
• Pinpoint inequities in the community to design targeted solutions
• Strengthen relationships between key community partners
• Fund four pilot projects designed by the key partners to address systemic change
• Improve the capacities of 25-40 arts education orgs and provide seed funding to strengthen their programs
• Act collaboratively, laying a foundation for ongoing coordination and potential  national funding going forward

The project has three phases over the next year.  Phase One is an analysis to understand gaps in resources in the current arts education landscape.  Phase Two is a series of professional development sessions for arts education organization leaders to address the four most critical barriers to capacity that they see. These two phases will happen concurrently. Then, Phase Three will be the distribution of $150,000 in grants to the arts organizations that participated in the capacity building sessions. This money is comprised of four systemic change grants at $25,000 each and 40 mini-grants at $1,000-2,500 for organizational change projects.

The details, partnerships and funders are still being worked out, so this is all subject to change, but I imagine the basic overall design of the project will stay the same.

Although the scope and dollar amount of the collaboration and capacity building project is relatively small, it is impressive for two reasons.  First of all, I like to see philanthropists pooling resources for greater leverage.  Particularly in Austin, where our foundation assets are small compared to the foundation assets of other cities, collaboration is crucial to achieve broader and deeper social impact.  So the fact that these family and corporate foundations are creating a pooled fund of money means a greater amount of capital working for the same goal, which hopefully means a greater chance that the goals are realized.  And secondly, this project is interesting because it seeks to understand AND remedy problems of capacity within the nonprofit sector.  I have talked at length about the need for greater capital to fund organization building in the sector.  Philanthropists are often hesitant to see their money go anywhere other than direct program services.  But when philanthropists like those in Mind POP recognize how important capacity and organization building is to addressing the root cause of social problems (like unequal access to arts education) they are moving the sector forward.  They are recognizing and demonstrating to their colleagues that capacity can and should be supported.

It will be interesting to see how this project progresses and the outcomes it achieves.  I’ll keep you posted.

Tags: Applied Materials, Austin, Capacity Building, Education Foundation of America, Mind POP, philanthopists, Still Water Foundation, Tapestry Foundation, Webber Family Foundation

A Gathering of Funders

I was invited to speak at the Central Texas Education Funders monthly meeting about social innovation yesterday morning.  It was an honor to talk to this engaged, savvy, thoughtful group of philanthropists who are passionate about making education better in Central Texas.  Some of the foundations present were: Webber Family Foundation, Aragona Foundation, RGK Foundation, KDK Harman Foundation, Applied Materials Corporate Giving, United Way, Impact Austin, Still Water Foundation, among others.

My presentation provided an overview on social innovation (social entrepreneurship, growth and capacity capital, social investing, etc.) occurring nationally and here in Austin.  After the presentation there was a great discussion among the group that covered exciting experiments in growth and sustainability in our region, why Austin seems to be behind other cities in social innovation activity, the impact of the recession on growth, and the need for collaboration and mergers, and much more.

Ellen Ray from the Still Water Foundation announced an experiment that she and a few other local foundations have launched to grow the scope and capacity of arts education organizations in town.  I hope to have more information on this exciting project in a later post.  In addition, Jessica D’Arcy from the Webber Family Foundation explained how the Central Texas Education Funders group is putting together a funding matrix so that the group can understand which of their membership is funding which projects in town.  Compiling this knowledge could be the first step in understanding how to leverage the resources of the group to make a greater impact.  And Chris Earthman from the Aragona Foundation shared some interesting data about how hypercompetitive Austin really is in terms of foundation funding for our nonprofits.  Austin has one of the highest nonprofit to foundation ratios in the country, which furthers the argument that we have to expand the social capital market here.

So much money exists in Austin, yet at the same time those organizations working towards solutions to our social problems are tripping over each other to get enough capital.  That is a huge disconnect.  If we can learn from other cities about the new financial vehicles that are emerging to help social entrepreneurs, we might begin to see more of Austin’s wealth transfer into the social impact space.

This was a great gathering of funders talking about how to move the needle forward and get Austin more prominently in the social innovation game.  I’d love to see more discussions about how we do just that.

Tags: Applied Materials, Aragona Foundation, Austin, Central Texas Education Funders, Impact Austin, KDK Harman Foundation, nonprofit, RGK Foundation, social capital market, Still Water Foundation, United Way, Webber Family Foundation