The Problem with Social Entrepreneurship: Guest Post

Below is a guest post from Mat Despard, a teacher of nonprofit management and leadership at the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and coordinator of UNC’s Nonprofit Leadership Certificate program. Matt has a real interest in economic empowerment interventions to improve social, economic, and health outcomes among very poor women with children and writes a blog on nonprofit issues. Mat is a reader of the Social Velocity blog, and after a thought-provoking email exchange about social entrepreneurship, I asked him to put his thoughts into a guest blog post for Social Velocity. Here is his post.

OK, so first of all, let me be clear: the idea of innovation to tackle tough social problems like the lack of clean water in developing countries is a great thing. Yet I have some misgivings about the social entrepreneurial banner, from a nonprofit perspective:

1. Elevating the individual. Not all of us can be a Geoffrey Canada or Paul Farmer. And besides, as Dr. Farmer is nice to acknowledge, behind every social entrepreneur is a team doing some serious heavy lifting to implement the entrepreneur’s vision. Mr. Canada talks about the importance of community change in Harlem. Why not focus on entrepreneurial organizations or communities? After all, to solve tough social problems, we need collective action that can be sustained by communities (and supported by governments) over the long haul.

 

2. Poor economies of scale. Too often aspiring (and usually young) social entrepreneurs assume they need to start their own organization vs. partner with an existing one. This results in the need to raise unrestricted revenue to build infrastructure – bookkeeping/accounting, program evaluation, information systems, etc. albeit with poor economies of scale. Energy and resources get diverted from problem solving to organization building.

 

3. Ignoring current efforts. There is no shortage of nonprofits doing very innovative things that nonetheless fail to be recognized, perhaps because they lack a charismatic leader and/or partners who champion and market the innovations. I hear about and interact with organizations in developing countries with very innovative ideas that routinely go unheard.

 

4. Lack of evidence. Many social entrepreneurial ideas are largely untested. It’s great that these ideas represent new approaches to tackling social problems, but promotion of these ideas tends to be far out in advance of sufficient evidence that they merit promotion as “the next big thing”.

 

5. The commercial assumption. A strong bias exists in favor of commercial approaches to addressing social problems. It’s great to exploit market opportunities to make innovations more financially sustainable and/or create new economic opportunities for the poor, but often public or private subsidies are needed to catalyze change.

 

6. Lack of an ethical framework. It’s hard to imagine any social entrepreneur who would say that social and economic justice and human rights are unimportant. However, in addition to elevating the individual, the attention given to social entrepreneurship celebrates the ideas (i.e. the means) and not the commitments (i.e. the ends). As such, the focus is on entrepreneurship as a desired activity or way of being, not as a tool (among other tools such as political advocacy and grassroots organizing) to be used to advance human rights.

I think the enthusiasm around social entrepreneurship is great, especially if it means that more people are engaged in creating new ways of solving social problems. Let’s just be honest and humble about what we’re doing and recognize that social entrepreneurship is nothing more than an expression of the human impulse to seek greater peace and justice in the world.

Tags: Social Entrepreneurship, solving social problems, University of North Carolina School of Social Work

What Social Entrepreneurs Can Teach The Nonprofit Sector

I’ve written before that with the excitement around the social entrepreneurship movement there is a danger that we are abandoning the nonprofit sector. Indeed, there is sometimes a tendency to dismiss the sector that was working on social change long before it was “cool”. Often the older nonprofit sector is left behind, partly because the sector tends to be risk- and change-averse. Again and again, I’ve heard that innovation will never become part of the nonprofit system — that nonprofits are too set in their ways. Or that the sector is too broken to emerge anew.

That attitude, though, is unacceptable. The nonprofit sector is an enormous part of our economy and has a long history of working towards social change. If we were to cast it aside completely, we’d lose the tremendous resources (money, people, mind-share) that are being invested in that sector every day. The nonprofit sector has tremendous potential for innovation. Indeed, without innovation in the nonprofit sector, the broader movement to solve social problems is doomed.

So instead of tossing it aside, let’s remake it, re-envision, restructure and reinvent it.

To that end, Social Velocity is hosting a webinar on July 12th, titled “What Nonprofits Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurs,” which will help nonprofit leaders understand the new models, funding approaches, messaging, systems that social entrepreneurs are employing to create social change. If nonprofit leaders can understand this new movement and integrate some of the ideas into their work, they can achieve more social change.

This webinar will help nonprofit leaders understand the social entrepreneurship movement and the innovative people, organizations and funding vehicles that are solving social problems in new, exciting ways. It will help nonprofit leaders understand what they can do to keep up, and how to make their own organizations more innovative, attract new kinds of funding, and achieve their social change goals more effectively.

The webinar will include:

• Case studies of nonprofit and for-profit social entrepreneurs
• Examples of philanthropists and social investors who are funding social change in new ways
• How social entrepreneurs are becoming more effective at making a case for support
• What the social capital market is and how it’s evolving
• What new foundation funding vehicles like “mission-related” and “program-related” invesments are
• What “venture philanthropy,” “philanthropic equity,” and “growth capital” are and how to organizations are using them to grow their organizations
• New models nonprofit growth
• New legal structures for social change organizations
• Inspiration for taking your organization to the next level

What Nonprofits Can Learn From Social Entrepreneurs
A Social Velocity Webinar
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
12 noon – 1:00 pm (EST)
Registration Fee: $40

Register Now

I hope to see you there!

Photo Credit: katrinalopez

Tags: abandoning the nonprofit sector, innovation in nonprofit sector, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit learning from social entrepreneurs, philanthropic equity, social capital market, Social Entrepreneurship, social innovation, Social Investing, Social Velocity webinar, Venture Philanthropy

10 Great Social Innovation Reads: May

In our ongoing blog series, 10 Great Social Innovation Reads, below are my top 10 picks for the best reads in the world of social innovation in May.

But I’m sure I missed some great stuff, so please add your favorites from the past month in the comments.

1. Three new books released recently argue in various ways that philanthropists need to get better at giving money away. The Economist gives us the skinny: Giving for Results.
2. News organizations are having to reinvent their funding models, some of their innovative ideas for bringing money in the door could spark some thinking in the nonprofit world: Going beyond grants: Eight new ways news nonprofits are raising revenue.
3. The Dowser blog argues that recent efforts to re-imagine the great American city aren’t bold enough: Creating the Sustainable City: Are Imagination and Leadership Enough
4. Newsweek investigates the philanthropic investments billionaires have made in American public schools and claims that the results of those investments have come up quite short: Back to School for the Billionaires
5. New Google research on people’s use of smartphones holds some interesting lessons for nonprofits.
6. Any entrepreneur, social or not, has to fight moments of depression on the road to social change, the A Smart Bear blog tells us how to Fight Mini-Burn Out.
7. From Amy Sample Ward, nonprofit social media maven, comes a great post about crowdsourcing versus community-sourcing and how and when nonprofits should take advantage of each.
8. In a recent interview, Robert Egger, founder of DC Central Kitchen, argues that nonprofits need to rethink how they position themselves in order to really “move the needle”
9. Nonprofit Tech 2.0 gives us Six Online Fundraising Tools You May Never Have Heard Of
10. The Nonprofit Finance Fund is doing something pretty exciting with capital. They are directing $10 million in “change capital” to 10 performing arts organizations to help them “prepare for future growth and make changes to the way they operate.” NFF has a special page with resources and case studies about what they are doing: The Case for Change Capital in the Arts.

Photo Credit: Robby van Moor

Tags: 10 Great Social Innovation Reads, American cities, Amy Sample Ward, DC Central Kitchen, funding for arts organizations, new ways to fundraise, nonprofit change capital, nonprofit crowdsourcing, Nonprofit Finance Fund, nonprofit growth capital, nonprofit use of mobile, online fundraising tools, philanthropists, Philanthropy, Robert Egger

A New Model For Ending Inner City Poverty: An Interview with Ted Howard

In this month’s Social Velocity interview we are talking with Ted Howard. Ted is the driving force behind an exciting experiment in social innovation going on in Cleveland. Evergreen Cooperatives are employee-owned, green, start-up, for-profit companies that are designed to completely revamp inner city Cleveland’s economy by drawing on assets already there. Ted is one of the principal architects of Evergreen Cooperatives through his role as Senior Fellow for Social Justice at the Cleveland Foundation. He is also the executive director of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland. I found out about Evergreen Cooperatives at this year’s Social Capital Markets Conference and was so blown away, I asked to interview Ted.

Nell: Like any social entrepreneur, Evergreen Cooperatives has huge plans for growth. The goal is to create 5,000 jobs in inner city Cleveland, and you currently have created about 50. How do you plan to scale Evergreen Cooperatives to that level?

Ted: The Evergreen strategy is based on leveraging the economic strength of Cleveland area anchor institutions – hospitals, nursing homes, universities, museums, cultural centers, and the like. We tend to think of these types of institutions in terms of their social missions – providing health care, educating students. But they are also important businesses – albeit usually nonprofits. In Cleveland, three of the city’s biggest anchors – the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and Case Western Reserve University – annually procure more than $3 billion in goods and services. This is in addition to their very substantial personnel and construction budgets. Yet virtually none of that $3 billion of annual spend makes its way into the low-income neighborhoods that surround the campuses of the institutions.

Our strategy is to work closely and in partnership with these anchors to identify supply chain purchasing opportunities that could be sourced locally. For example: laundry services, food, renewable energy, recycling, and so forth. Evergreen then develops locally-based businesses matched to these procurement needs. The goal is to drive as much of this $3 billion into the community as possible, and in the process, catalyze a network of locally based businesses that hire their workforce directly from the neighborhoods.

In truth, we don’t know how to move from a few companies with 50 or 100 employees to a robust network of dozens of companies that can employ thousands. But clearly the opportunity exists due to the presence of these anchors. The institutions aren’t going anywhere (unlike corporations, universities and hospitals almost never move) and their need for goods and services continues to grow.

Nell: There have been countless attempts over the years to solve inner city poverty. Why do you think this model could be the solution? What makes it different and more promising than past attempts?

Ted: Evergreen represents a new “paradigm” in community economic development. By that, I mean to suggest several important elements in the Evergreen design that are significantly different from traditional anti-poverty approaches.

First: this is not a welfare or subsidy strategy. We are building a network of for-profit businesses committed to hiring their workforce from among local low-income neighborhoods. Each business is closely linked to area anchor institutions that can provide ongoing contracts to support the company.

Second: because our workers live in low-income households (the median annual household income in our target area is below $18,500), we believe that jobs alone are not enough, even when those jobs offer a living wage and no-cost health benefits, as our jobs do. People need to be supported in building their family assets and wealth beyond their weekly paycheck. The way we are addressing this is by incorporating Evergreen companies as worker-owned cooperatives. Once someone has joined the coop, they become eligible for annual profit distributions into their capital accounts. The goal of our business model is to generate enough profit in each company so that a worker who has been with Evergreen for 8 years has amassed $65,000 in his or her account. This is their property, their asset, and when they leave the company, they take this money with them. While most of us can’t imagine retiring on $65,000, in our neighborhoods, this amount of money can be life-altering.

Third: the long-term goal of the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative is not simply to create business or provide jobs, not even to build the work of workers and their families. The ultimate commitment is to stabilize and then revitalize six neighborhoods that are home to 43,000 residents. In the past decades, these communities have been radically disinvested as jobs and business have left the area. We are trying to rebuild community, and a key to that is creating new capital (in the form of Evergreen businesses) that won’t get up and leave the community (as so many individual entrepreneurs and businesses often do). By broadening ownership of our businesses to the workers who live in the community and are employed in the company, it becomes much less likely that these companies will exit the area.

Rather than a trickle down strategy, Evergreen focuses on economic inclusion and building a local economy from the ground up. Rather than offering public subsidy to induce corporations to bring what are often low-wage jobs into the city, the Evergreen strategy is catalyzing new businesses that are owned by their employees. Rather than concentrate on workforce training for employment opportunities that are largely unavailable to low-skill and low-income workers, Evergreen first creates the jobs (in our network of companies), and then recruits and trains local residents to take them.

Nell: The financing to get the Evergreen Cooperative up and running was a pretty innovative mix of public, private and nonprofit capital. How were you able to get those three players to the table and investing?

Ted: Access to low-cost capital is one of the great challenges faced by low-income communities. Typically, they are starved for investment – banks don’t want to make loans and investors don’t tolerate the risk level. We think we are beginning to crack the code on this problem – we still have a lot to learn, but we are making progress. To date, we have raised about $6 million in grant funding which in turn has helped unlock an additional $35 million (approximately) in long-term, low-interest federal loans (such as HUD108), tax credits (including solar and New Markets Tax Credits), state grants and loans, and even growing participation from commercial banks.

What has helped bring all of this to the table has been the leadership of local philanthropy (in particular, the very strong commitment made by the Cleveland Foundation) and by partnership among the city’s large anchor institutions. By putting their reputations, relationships and resources on the line, they have been able to reassure public and private investors that investing in Evergreen is a sound investment. I should also say that the very strong support from the Mayor and the City’s Department of Economic Development have been crucial in building a funding bridge between Evergreen and Federal and State sources.

Some might ask: why are local universities and hospitals and other anchor institutions so intimately involved in the Evergreen strategy? Why are they at the table at all? The answer is simple, actually. They realize that in order for their businesses to succeed, the neighborhoods surrounding them have to be strengthened and rebuilt. It is never good for business to be surrounded by depressed and dangerous neighborhoods. Parents won’t want to bring their children to those schools; doctors and nurses won’t want to work for those hospitals. If people aren’t employed, they can’t pay for the services these institutions offer. So, even beyond the moral or humanitarian reasons, there are sound business reasons for these institutions to be at the table.

Nell: What are your long-term financing plans for the Evergreen Cooperative? Will you ever be able to fully exit and allow these businesses to stand on their own?

Ted: There is essentially no equity investments in the Evergreen cooperatives – almost all of the financing is debt financing that will be repaid over time. The goal is to have each company become profitable, repay its debt, and become a sustainable and successful business. That said, we also are intent on tying the businesses together into a coherent network with a shared mission and shared values. In 2011, we will establish the Evergreen Cooperative Corporation which will be a kind of holding company that will coordinate the entire network. ECC’s board will be comprised of a range of stakeholders – representatives of the individual coops, the anchor institution partners, local philanthropy and so on. In building this structure, we have been inspired by the example of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque region of Spain. There, over a 50 year period, a group of 120 cooperatives employing more than 100,000 people, with annual revenues of $20 billions has been built. While each company has great autonomy, they are all networked together, which provides business resilience and ensures that the cooperative vision and mission are shared by all,

Nell: Aside from the fascinating model and financing, yours is also an interesting study in managing diverse stakeholders. There are many stakeholders in this project (city of Cleveland, businesses, employee-owners, funders, etc). How do you keep them all aligned on both the long-term vision and the day-to-day tasks?

Ted: Certainly, Evergreen embraces a broad and diverse group of stakeholders. At one end of the spectrum, you have world-class, multi-billion dollar institutions that are the economic engine of our region. At the other, you have men and women who have grown up in some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods to be found anywhere in America. Any many other types of institutional actors in between. Keeping all of this aligned and moving forward together is one of the essentials to our success to date.

We have established many mechanisms to nurture and sustain this alignment. Each quarter, for example, the Cleveland Foundation’s president, Ronn Richard, convenes a meeting of the leaders of the city’s major anchor institutions, foundations, city agencies, etc. – the most recent gathering had about 30 people around the table. They update each other on ongoing plans related to community development, job creation, transportation issues, and so on.

There is also a leadership team of people working on Evergreen at the staff level – the managers of the cooperatives, program staff at the Cleveland Foundation, consultants working on different elements of the project.

Continuing education and constant information flow are essential to keep the network and system of relationships whole and aligned. One element that has been quite important is an annual study trip to Mondragon (sponsored by the Cleveland Foundation). To date, about 35 civic leaders from Cleveland have participated in these trips, which have been important learning experiences about how cooperative development strategies can move to significant scale. I imagine that the City of Cleveland has a greater percentage of its leaders that have visited Mondragon than any comparable city in America.

Finally, it has to be said that the role played by the Cleveland Foundation as an honest broker and convener, in addition to its role as a funder, has been essential. The Foundation has been able to bring people to the table, and to keep them on board over a period now going on six years.

Nell: What is still holding the project back? Where are the hurdles in this project going forward and what are you doing to overcome them?

Ted: While we have had some success to date, we very definitely are facing big hurdles and significant challenges. Three stand out:

First: we have more business opportunities related to our anchor partners than we have solid management talent to bring new Evergreen companies into existence. We are now aggressively looking for seasoned managers who want to play key roles in this initiative – and who buy into the broader cooperative ownership and community stabilization vision. This is not typical for most business people, to say the least. But if any of your readers out there are interested in this, they should contact us!

Second: it will be critical to our long term success to build a strong culture of cooperative ownership within Evergreen companies. Being a worker-owner is a very different proposition from showing up at work for 8 hours a day and then clocking out. In Evergreen, each person is an owner – and with that comes enormous responsibility and accountability. Building that culture, and empowering our worker-owners to become leaders, both within their companies and within the communities, is essential.

Third: while we have had some success at accessing and placing capital, we are going to need to expand our capital pool considerably. In 2011 we will be launching our new Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund and will be seeking a broad range of investments – from foundation grant and program related investments to mission related investments, private equity (that is willing to take a below market rate of return), and government loans and grants. We are thinking of something on the order of raising $50 – $100 million in the coming period to capitalize the next generations of Evergreen companies. This is going to be a challenge in these difficult financial times, to say the least. But we believe we can do it.

Tags: anti-poverty approaches, Cleveland Foundation, Evergreen Cooperatives, inner city poverty, Innovative financing for social change, social business, Social Capital Markets conference, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship, Ted Howard, The Democracy Collaborative

Call for 2011 Unreasonable Institute Applicants

The World’s Most Unreasonable Trailer from Unreasonable Institute on Vimeo.

The Unreasonable Institute, a breeding ground for high impact social entrepreneurs, is looking for their next class of fellows. The Unreasonable Institute inaugural class brought 22 social entrepreneurs with an idea for a social enterprise to reach at least 1 million people together for 10 weeks last summer. They are a pretty impressive group of people.

The second Unreasonable Institute will bring 25 social entrepreneurs together for 8 weeks in the summer of 2011 in Boulder, Colorado. During that time, they will live under the same roof alongside experts and thought leaders to bring their ideas to fruition. They’ll work and live with 60 world-class mentors, pitch their ventures to investors in up to five U.S. cities, and prepare to launch financially self-sustaining, globally scalable ventures that can serve the needs of at least one million people.

To find out if you have what it takes to be an Unreasonable fellow, check out their eligibility requirements, and the selection process. You can also learn more about what fellows get and the costs.

Applications are due November 20th. Good luck!

Tags: Social Enterprise, social entrepreneur competitions, Social Entrepreneurship, The Unreasonable Institute

Unlocking Philanthropic Capital: An Interview with Sean Stannard-Stockton

In this month’s Social Velocity blog interview, we are talking with Sean Stannard-Stockton, one of my favorite people in the social innovation world.

Sean is a visionary leading the charge to transform philanthropy. He is CEO of Tactical Philanthropy Advisors, a philanthropy advisory firm. He is also the author of the very popular Tactical Philanthropy blog and writes a monthly column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy. He is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council on Philanthropy & Social Investing and his insights on philanthropy have been referenced in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Financial Times.

You can read our past interviews with Clara Miller, Kevin Jones, Lucy Bernholz, Paul Tarini, George Overholser.

Nell: At the first Social Capital Markets Conference (SoCap) in 2008 one of the keynoters said “we’re not here to talk about nonprofits.” We’ve come a long way from there to this year’s devoted track around philanthropic capital and the nonprofit space at SoCap. Where do you think the initial hesitance to connect philanthropic and impact investing came from? And how do we continue to integrate the two worlds?

Sean: I think that one of the segments of people who are attracted to impact investing are people who think philanthropy doesn’t work. While I view philanthropic and for-profit social capital to be part of a single continuum of capital, many people seem to feel that they are fundamentally different. Like most new ideas, early adopters often think it is a silver bullet that will “change everything”. Some early adopters of impact investing or other forms of for-profit social capital wrongly believe that impact investing will replace philanthropy. I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding. Continuing to integrate the two worlds will require helping the various points on the capital spectrum better understand each other. At the end of the day, capital shouldn’t be viewed through an ideological lens, but should simply be deployed based on what sort of capital fits the situation.

Nell: The SoCap session on nonprofit rating systems like Charity Navigator and GiveWell demonstrated that there is still quite a divide between GIIRS (the impact investing rating system) and nonprofit rating systems. What is your sense of this? Do you think there is potential to somehow combine GIIRS (or something else) and nonprofit rating systems so that there is one comparable impact measurement system?

Sean: I would guess that any truly effective impact measurement system should be functional across both for-profit and nonprofit activity. A good impact assessment system wouldn’t care about the tax status of the entity producing results, it would just care about the results and the cost of obtaining them. That being said, I think evaluating a nonprofit organization is really quite different from evaluating a for-profit organization. So even if we have a unified impact assessment framework some day, I would guess that organizational assessment will utilize different systems and approaches for nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Nell: How would you like to see the conversation about connecting philanthropy and impact investing evolve at SoCap11? What are your hopes for next year’s conference?

Sean: I’d like to work to profile more examples of ways that for-profit and philanthropic capital worked together to produce social impact. Our session on Evergreen Lodge at this year’s conference looked precisely at this question, but I’d like to see more examples. I’d also like to see examples of ways philanthropic entities have used for-profit investments or subsidiaries well or for-profits have effectively used philanthropic activities to drive profit and social results. However, one of the most important goals is simply getting the different players into the same room and getting them to come to understand each other better. While Kevin Jones and I had a good time talking about the Social Capital Markets as a meeting ground for the Barbarians and Byzantine, in reality none of us are barbarians.

Nell: Beyond SoCap where do you think the important conversations about unlocking philanthropic and government capital for social impact are happening?

Sean: This is an interesting question. SoCap is special because it is one of the only (the only?) conference that is specifically about capital for social impact without regard for sector. But versions of this conversation are happening around Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, The Social Innovation Fund, online and in a different sort of way at the PopTech conference.

Nell: At the last general session of SoCap Woody Tasch of the Slow Money movement said he doesn’t think mission-related investing will ever be adopted by the majority of foundations. What are your thoughts on that?

Sean: Social Responsible Investing, the practice of screening out stocks of tobacco companies, defense contractors and the like from investment portfolios, is not practiced by a majority of investors. Yet, SRI is very mainstream and has significantly altered the behavior of publicly traded companies. Today, SRI mutual funds are one of the fastest growing areas in money management. So I don’t think that the majority of funders have to adopt mission related investing for the concept to be deemed a success. It should be noted that SRI took a good 20 years or so to go mainstream. So it could be some time before mission related investing is considering mainstream.

Nell: And more broadly, what do you think it will take to change how philanthropists (both foundations and individual donors) use money to support social impact? How do we make more donors builders instead of just buyers?

Sean: Today, I think that very few people in the social sector really understand what “philanthropic equity” is and how capital differs from revenue. Nonprofit accounting does not acknowledge that capital even exists in the sector. Nonprofits can only book cash coming into their business as revenue or a loan. There’s no official way to account for equity-like capital. So I think that there needs to be a pretty major education effort to get the whole sector very clear on how fundamentally different it is for a funder/donor to “invest” philanthropic equity in a nonprofit vs paying a nonprofit revenue to execute programs. Personally, I don’t think much progress will be made until nonprofit accounting changes. Until that happens, it doesn’t matter much what we call “growth capital”, it is all just revenue to the nonprofit.

Tags: builders vs. buyers, Charity Navigator, Chronicle of Philanthropy, GIIRS, GiveWell, Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, impact investing, Mission-Related Investing, nonprofit accounting, nonprofit growth capital, philanthropic capital, philanthropic equity, Sean Stannard-Stockton, SoCap, Social Innovation Fund, social responsible investing, Tactical Philanthropy, Woody Tasch

SoCap Day 1: Building the Market

Now that I got that off my chest, I want to tell you about all of the great things happening at the Social Capital Markets Conference (SoCap). Day 1 provided a great update on all the work that has happened since we met at Fort Mason a year ago. Unlike so many other conferences that just regurgitate old information and bring the same people together to discuss how great they are, SoCap is very much a working conference. The sense of urgency is palpable. The attendees are the very people who are creating this new social capital market, and they don’t have time to sit around and theorize. So SoCap holds many exciting announcements about new initiatives, new infrastructure, new tools to strengthen and grow this burgeoning marketplace for money to create social impact.

Day 1 began with a passionate, inspiring speech by Jacqueline Novogratz of Acumen Fund. She discussed their and others’ work to create new measurement tools for impact, like Pulse and REDF’s new tool (officially announced later in the day). So much of SoCap is about measurement, which is very exciting. How do we know social change is happening? What does it mean to say we created a job?

She also talked about the need for exit strategies and patient capital. Two critical elements to making impact and scale happen and be sustainable. But most importantly, Jacqueline provided the balance of passion, commitment, and inspiration that is so important to remember as we work to create what often is a dry, data-driven space. She encouraged us to remember that we are “building our own organizations while we are building a sector,” and “each of us can work to change a small sequence of events that together changes the world.”

Next up, Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva–the online micro-lending platform, described how Kiva has democratized and distributed risk-tolerant, patient capital, which again is such an enormous need to those working to create complicated, long-term social change. And he argued that online philanthropy is quickly becoming a huge economic force. This idea of democratizing capital through lots of people giving small amounts through new technologies is very exciting.

And finally, to drive home that point, Kushal Chakrabarti from Vittana, a Kiva-like platform for education loans to students in third-world countries, demonstrated that this idea of person-to-person small lending holds tremendous promise for transforming how capital flows to social change efforts.

In the “High Engagement Impact Investing” session I attended later in the day, there were great examples of new ways of engaging impact investors, but the highlight for me was Don Shaffer of RSF Social Finance (a true pioneer in the social capital market space) discussing “RSF Prime,” their community-based pricing for loans. Periodically they bring investors and borrowers together with staff to set the interest rate for borrowers. It’s a radical idea that is really working for them. Deval Sanghavi from Dasra described a similar community-based approach that they and others like Village Capital take where the entrepreneurs within their portfolio decide who gets funding. These community-based approaches to funding are fascinating and as Don said, they are truly “transforming the way the world works with money.”

The last general session of the day was packed with exciting new infrastructure announcements. B Lab’s Jay Coen Gilbert announced several exciting things:

• Their work to create a legal “benefit corporation” status in Maryland and Vermont. The benefit corporation is a legal corporate structure that marries the financial motive of the for-profit corporation with the social benefit of the non-profit corporation. Within one day of being a legal business structure, Maryland already had 11 benefit corporations.
• The work to develop the necessary infrastructure of a new impact investing asset class with things like IRIS, (the FASB of the social capital market space) and the GIIRS rating system that compares social impact results (the S&P or Moody’s of the impact investing world).

The standards and systems that B Lab and others are creating provide the necessary infrastructure to encourage investors to become impact investors.

Finally the Calvert Foundation and Ron Cordes announced the Global Impact 50 Index who’s goal is to drive $2 billion of capital into impact investing over the next 5 years by working with the gatekeepers to impact investing, the financial advisor community. The theory is that if financial advisors understand impact investing and have the products and infrastructure necessary, they will encourage their high-net worth clients to make impact investments, thereby unlocking this capital market.

It is so great to see so much progress, albeit in the impact investing part of the market only, in just one year. You really get the sense, at the edge of the San Francisco Bay, that something is happening, systems are changing, the social capital market is slowly becoming a reality. And it is due to this sharp, passionate, committed group of people who aren’t content to philosophize. They are out there building, brick by brick, this new capital market that will make social change a reality.

Tags: Acumen Fund, B Lab, benefit corporation, Calvert Foundation, Dasra, Deval Sanghavi, Don Shaffer, GIIRS, Global Impact 50 Index, impact investing, IRIS, Jacqueline Novogratz, Jay Coen Gilbert, Kiva, Kushal Chakrabarti, Matt Flannery, Pulse, REDF, RSF Social Finance, SoCap, Social Capital Markets conference, Village Capital, Vittana

Here Comes SoCap

So it’s my favorite time of year again, well at least in the world of social innovation. The Social Capital Markets Conference in San Francisco starts Monday. There are a lot of social innovation conferences, in fact you can read a great rundown on many of this Fall’s best. But SoCap is by far my favorite. It is the one place where the disparate array of people who are interested in how to get more money flowing to social impact come together for 3 days. There are nonprofit, for-profit and hybrid social entrepreneurs; philanthropists; social investors; government bureaucrats and anyone in between. It seems this conference more than any other is a microcosm of the convergence that is happening in the world of social innovation between the public, private and government sectors.

I’ll be honest, the first two years of the conference were a little heavy on the for-profit social entrepreneurship side, leaving somewhat behind government and nonprofit. There were sessions and speakers from those worlds, to be sure, but the emphasis of the conference in the beginning was how to get money flowing more readily to double bottom-line businesses (for-profit businesses that are making money AND creating a social impact).

This year’s conference promises to open wide the doors of the social capital market. For starters, SoCap organizers have developed 6 “tracks” that each focus on a particular area of the social capital market. The track that interests me the most, of course, is the one focusing on nonprofit/philanthropy. Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy has put together a nice track with cutting-edge topics in the world of making money work better in the nonprofit sector:

• Decriminalizing Fundraising
• Scaling Social Impact
• Individual Donors Practicing Unconstrained Philanthropy
• The Lessons of Behavioral Finance
• When to Invest and When to Give
• Nonprofit Analysis: Beyond Metrics

In addition there are several other tracks that hold great appeal: Impact Investing, New Money, Metrics and System Thinking and so on. And then there are some fabulous speakers including Jacqueline Novogratz from Acumen Fund, Matt Flannery from Kiva, speakers from the Gates Foundation and Root Capital and many others. Add to that the side sessions, pitch events and more, and my head starts to spin. Three days is just not enough.

I’ll be blogging from the conference as I did last year (you can read my blogs from SoCap09 here, here and here).

What I love so much about SoCap is that it really challenges this burgeoning community/movement/space to do more, to ask harder questions, to push the momentum forward. You come out of a session with many more questions than you had going in. But also, so much more energy to break out of the normal way of thinking and envision a different path forward. Because at its essence, SoCap is about creating something completely new. It’s about creating a space where money and social impact meet and create a synergy that can, we hope, change the world. The old rules and constraints don’t apply. This conference and all the people attending it, in person or via social media networks, are writing the new rule book. And that’s exciting, challenging, exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time.

If you are attending SoCap too, let me know. See you there!

Tags: Acumen Fund, Convergence, Gates Foundation, Jacqueline Novogratz, Kiva, Matt Flannery, philanthropic equity, Root Capital, Sean Stannard-Stockton, SoCap10, Social Capital Markets conference, Social Entrepreneurship, social innovation, social investors, Tactical Philanthropy