Social Velocity

Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.

Nonprofit Finance Fund

A Revolution in Nonprofit Finance: An Interview with Clara Miller

By 2 Comments

Last month we kicked off a new, monthly Social Velocity blog interview series where I interview leading thinkers and doers in the social innovation space. Our inaugural interview was with Kevin Jones co-founder of both Good Capital, one of the first venture capital funds that invests in social enterprises, and the Social Capital Markets Conference […]

Constraint or Opportunity?

By Leave a Comment

One of my favorite organizations and a critical player in the creation of a well-capitalized nonprofit sector, the Nonprofit Finance Fund, is seeking feedback.  NFF is a community-development fund that makes millions of dollars in loans to nonprofits and pushes for fundamental improvement in how money is given and used in the sector. Last March […]

Making Change the New Norm

By 2 Comments

It occurred to me in two conversations I had this morning that small change can create large change, but how exactly does that happen? My first conversation was a phone call with George Overholser, from the Nonprofit Finance Fund and a leading thinker around new kinds of capital for nonprofit organizations.  I was getting some […]

The Beginnings of a Social Capital Market

By 11 Comments

One of the key things necessary to fundamentally change our ability to solve social problems is the creation of a social capital market.  By social capital market I mean that financial tools and vehicles of a significant size, volume, variety and usefulness are made available to social entrepreneurs and ventures.  Nonprofits and social businesses are […]

Adding Equity to the Nonprofit Balance Sheet

By 6 Comments

Expanding on the argument for equity holders in the nonprofit sector, there has been a call for restructuring nonprofit accounting standards (FASB) to introduce equity capital.  The idea, proposed by Sean Stannard-Stockton, from Tactical Philanthropy, and George Overholser of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, is that we make a distinction in nonprofit accounting between revenue used […]

A Call for Equity Holders in the Nonprofit Sector

By 2 Comments

Clara Miller, CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, which is a leader in working to adequately capitalize the nonprofit sector, wrote a great post in the Chronicle of Philanthropy about how the sorely inadequate way the nonprofit sector is funded has got to change.  She argues that the current recession is the potential nail in […]