Over the last few months, I have had the privilege of working with a group of talented people who have transformed the Social Finance Chain from a humble micro-loan program, into the national Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund, which provides debt and equity solutions to young social entrepreneurs who want to change the world. It has ambitious capital raising targets for the next year, and what amazes me is that the team has raised 20% towards its goal of $87,500 in only two months.

The Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund (YSI-CF) began with the idea that youth are brimming with innovative ideas on how to tackle the complex challenges that confront our society.

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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing investment adviser and portfolio manager R. Paul Herman, pioneer of the HIP (Human Impact + Profit) methodology and author of The HIP Investor: Make Bigger Profits by Building a Better World. Paul invented HIP in 2004 to connect investors seeking positive human, social and environmental impacts and seeking financial returns with investments designed to deliver those intended results. Paul shared his insights and thoughts on constructing an impact investing portfolio as well as his most practical solution for investors to start thinking about this process.

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Recently on SocialFinance.ca, Timothy Nash offered a tip for those considering shifting their money to help build a more sustainable economy. At the top of his list? “Join a credit union,” he said. We’re not going to argue with that kind of advice. Indeed, the recent economic crisis has caused a lot of people in Canada and around the world to give credit unions a second, or even a first look.

As Nash alludes to in his article, what’s attractive for those concerned about sustainability is that credit unions are co-operatives, mission-driven to improve the quality of life of their members and their local communities. That’s kinda nice to hear isn’t it? But the really good news is that credit unions are continuously improving their social, environmental and economic performance.

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SocialFinance.ca produces a weekly round up featuring social finance related news, insights, job openings, and events. We source the content for these round ups from Twitter, an RSS reader, and directly from our community of social finance practitioners. Below is our round up for the week of March 19, 2012.

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Capitalism - or reforming it, at least - has been a hot topic lately. In this short 2 minute video, Mitchell Kapor, founder of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, speaks at the 2011 Social Innovation Summit on how impact investing may save capitalism from itself.

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