Creating more strategic, financially savvy, and confident nonprofit leaders and organizations.
In today’s Social Velocity interview, I’m talking with Ted Levinson. Ted is the Director of Lending at RSF Social Finance, a San Francisco-based financial services non-profit dedicated to transforming the way the world works with money. Levinson manages RSF’s flagship $75 million Social Investment Fund which provides debt capital to US and Canadian social enterprises. […]
Note: I was asked by UnSectored, a community platform for rethinking social change, to write a post as part of their month-long conversation leading up to the William James Foundation’s Annual Gathering about how we sustain social enterprise. Below is that post. It originally appeared on the UnSectored blog where you can see the other […]
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 […]
As I have written before, despite being the 3rd largest venture capital city in the country, Austin is slow to climb on the emerging social capital market bandwagon. Tremendous wealth and entrepreneurial expertise exist here, but there isn’t a lot of energy around creating a continuum of capital for social entrepreneurs. Perhaps that is about […]
Lucy Bernholz, head of Blueprint Research and Design, a philanthropy consulting firm, and thought-leader on trends in philanthropy is preparing a monograph on what 2010 will hold for the social sector. As a true adopter of social media, she is asking others to contribute, in essence crowd-sourcing answers, this year to her annual “what will […]
Two weeks from today the 2nd annual Social Capital Markets Conference kicks off in San Francisco. I’m pretty excited about it because I think one of the biggest things standing in the way of social innovation is a social capital market–the financial tools and vehicles necessary to adequately capitalize social innovation. The speaker’s list for […]
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, […]
Continuing the various discussions about the beginning signs and formations of a social capital market, I’d like to add PRIs (Program Related Investments) to the conversation. In all of the concern about decreasing philanthropic giving because of the economy there has been little talk about these financial vehicles as a real opportunity for foundations, and […]
There’s an interesting article by Michael Grunwald in Time Magazine about how Obama is using behavioral science to create the tremendous change he has promised and that America needs. Perhaps this approach can be useful to social entrepreneurs as well. Grunwald illustrates that throughout the presidential campaign Obama used behavioral science to change voter and […]
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 […]