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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Meeting someone in-person after only speaking to them in the wee hours of the morning over Skype is sometimes a surreal experience. When that person is wearing someone else's name tag, and when you're tremendously jet lagged, things can get quite confusing. Nevertheless, these were the circumstances in which I ran into Leander Bindewald, a consultant to Hub Brussels. A year ago, Leander and I had grappled with how to track the social value of co-working spaces.  

Conceptually this is fairly simple, but in practice has a set of rather complex problems. Anyways, Leander showed me a really cool tool that I just have to share. He's built a Drupal based site that tracks the informal transactions that are so vital to co-working spaces. The data coming out of this kind of site is exactly what's needed for capturing the social value and social networks created through places like the Centre for Social Innovation and the Hub. Needless to say, my jetlagged confusion quickly turned into extreme interest. To a measurement person, tools for metrics are like a shot of caffeine. Or maybe that's just me.

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In the Three Bridges to Capital session, Bill Davis from Gate Impact, Tim Freundlich from ImpactAssets and Stephanie Nieman from Global Impact Investment Rating System (GIIRS) discussed various developments in their fields. Between the three panelists, it was clear how much the conversation on impact investing has moved forward--in fact, technically all the infrastructure one would need to finance socially motivated businesses on a large scale was present in the room.

Gate Impact provides a platform for investors to connect with social entrepreneurs, pulling from GIIRS ratings and introductions between investors and social entrepreneurs. GIIRS is a rating system for impact investors to gauge the social value created by a specific standard, determined by a set of standards based on the Impact Reporting and Investment Standard (IRIS). ImpactAssets, with its ImpactAssets50 will be the first index of private debt and equity for impact investment fund managers (Fifty experienced fund managers' performances will be tracked, hence the name).Theoretically, between the ImpactAssets, Gate Impact, and GIIRS, all the needs of large investors can be met. It will be interesting to see how this sort of triumvirate plays out in practice.

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Holistic Impact: Investing in Agroecology was not originally on my list of sessions to attend, but, I realized that although I eat, breathe, and sleep metrics, the readers of SocialFinance.ca may not be as enthused about hearing about social measurements in five successive blogposts. With the interests of this readership in mind, I headed over to hear what Marilou van Golstein Brouwers of Triodos, John Fullerton of Capital Institute, Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust, and John Liu filmmaker of Hope in a Changing Climate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turned out to be the session I learnt the most in. 

The panel was a lively one, with the panelists often debating with each other on the best way to create a shift in consumption patterns. Often, the dialogue seemed to model the analogy of three blind people in a room feeling an elephant.  Liu was adamant that there needed to be a shift in consumer consciousness, which he argued started with the consumer becoming aware of externalities. Holden, who advocates on the government level noted that sustainable systems would not be incentivized until policy enforced these areas--to him this was of paramount concern.

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In my previous post on SocialFinance.ca, I framed SoCap Europe as a litmus test for the differences between the European and North American impact investing market. In the opening panel, Moving Minds, Moving Money Panel, the contrasts between the two markets were clear. There was a lot of talk about the "specific european approach", where government had a very large role to play in the public sector. This is not necessary a good thing, said Max Martin from Impact Economy. He argued that the divide between public and private sectors in Western Europe drives out deal flow. Similar to the Canadian space, the panelists also noted a skepticism within the social sector towards financially profitable enterprises.

This is an interesting debate, and a schizophrenia that is indigenous to this space: Do we exclude corporations to stop these entities from "buying out" social entrepreneurship, or allow them the opportunity for reform. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the SoCap panel was mostly of the latter view (and I'd have to be in agreement for the most part). Penelope Douglas, the discussion's moderator went as far as to say that corporate involvement could be the best possible outcome. Certainly food for thought. Gauging the reaction in the room, I wondered if this is a realization that sits better with North Americans. I was reminded of an ad  that JWT Canada's President and CEO presented at the recent Ontario Social Innovation Summit, which is a great example of how for-profit organizations can play an instrumental and altruistic role in creating social value. If you haven't seen the ad yet, check it out here.

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I attended the Social Capital Markets Conference 2010 (SoCap10) last year in San Francisco as a scholarship recipient. For SOCAP/Europe, SocialFinance.ca had a press ticket for one of its writers, and I leapt for it (literally--when the e-mail from SocialFinance.ca came into my inbox, I put the the most click-happy eBay shopper to shame). The excitement is justified: Social Capital Markets is the convergence of so many doers, people taking on projects that are changing the way finance serves society. SoCap10 was eye-opening to be amongst practitioners, where the conversation revolves around real, tangible, and urgent issues in the space, and I’m looking forward to seeing how SoCap translates into the European space.

Aside from the usual excitement associated with SoCap, I think this edition of the conference has particular meaning--As SoCap crosses the ocean, we are witnessing a flowering of social innovation, and a maturation as pioneers become incumbents and claim space within social innovation. Social Capital Markets has certainly claimed the space as a convener of practitioners on social finance.

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Below are some reflections I wrote up following my attendance at Social Capital Markets 2010 in San Francisco last October.

As a scholarship recipient at SoCap10, this was my first time at the conference. The conference was overwhelming, both because of its sheer size (approximately 1,200 attendees) and the breadth of expertise represented by conference attendees. What stood out to me was that SoCap is so much more than a conference. It represents a community. And communities are capable of creating movements, which is exactly what the social finance and impact investing communities need in order to take off. 

As a social entrepreneur launching a business on social metrics, I thought I would naturally gravitate to the Metrics track, yet I found myself moving between tracks, and often finding other people doing the same. If SoCap is an event that checks the pulse of North American social innovation, then I can surmise that this is a group of people where cross-pollination of ideas are drive innovation.

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On Wednesday morning, I attended Canada Day @ Social Capital Markets 2010, convened and organized by SocialFinance.ca. The event included "lightening talks" consisting of 4 minute presentations followed by 2 minutes of questions and answers. The lightening talks were led by leaders from the non-profit, for-profit and social enterprise space. The sessions led to some great discussions, which I’ve summarised below.

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In 2007, I spontaneously left for a week in New York City to meet my cousin, who was flying into NYC from the UK. A miscommunication left me arriving into the city about five hours early with no access to our housing. With nothing better to do, I wandered around Greenwich until I came upon one of those charming, slightly over priced New York bookstores with patrons leafing through political non-fiction.

Out of boredom, I picked up Power and Idealists by Paul Berman, a book about the 1968 student revolutionaries in Europe. The first few pages captivated me. I spent much of that week reading Berman’s book, finding spots on the parks and sidewalks of New York.

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This weekend is YSEC’s Re:Vision Conference and, in a separate event, we’re launching our pilot YSEC Fund event with the YSEC Pitch Competition. I wanted to say a few words about the Fund, the Pitch Competition, and the amazing young social entrepreneurs that are making this happen.

The Pitch Competition was an idea that started at the YSEC office at around 5AM, when a late strategic working session led to Assaf and I scribbling away on a piece of paper. We realized that we could offer a low-cost loan (for us and for them) to social entrepreneurs. The structure allowed us to connect young social entrepreneurs to each other, provide small loans, and also have the amount of funding increase incrementally each time the loan was given out. We were particularly excited about the fact that every loan recipient has a hand in choosing out another project that they think is worth funding: a mechanism in which “lessons learned” from previous loans can be passed on from former loan recipients to future ones.

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