Lately, Iʼve been working to map and review the impact investment options for groups like Community Foundations of Canada and the Walter & Duncan Gordon Foundation.
Although Iʼve found dozens of amazing investment vehicles that achieve a strong financial return in addition to creating a lasting social and/or environmental impact, greenwashing is one area that sticks out as a problem.
Since my last update, we have completed the first draft of Financing for Your Future: The Open Guide to Social Finance. When the guide goes live in March, it will give readers the opportunity to:
The initial contents of the guide are already online and open for your comments as we go through a review process -- check out the Google Site for a sneak peek!
Perhaps chemistry has some lessons to teach us about how to catalyze the connections between the demand for, and supply of, social finance.
A chemical reaction occurs where specific amount(s) of reactant(s) combine to create (expected or unexpected) products. This reaction is a function of what the core substances are, as well as the process of combining the elements. Equations can provide us with a logical framework for predicting these outcomes, and we validate what happens in practice through continuous experimentation in a controlled environment.
So, what are the core elements of a “social finance reaction”?
Hello All. In the spirit of the season, I thought I’d share my list of social enterprise resolutions for the coming year.
Focus on the Customer, Not the Funder
Like most nonprofit-based social enterprises, we have a history of receiving funding from government agencies and foundations to develop and deliver products and services for the customers we serve (i.e. people and organizations that provide technical and financial assistance to entrepreneurs). It’s surprisingly easy how we can secure funding for a proposal that is built upon a plausible argument, but which is nonetheless unsupported by actual evidence of demand and/or need on the part of our customers. Sometimes, we get lucky and hit upon something that our customers want; many times, we end up with a product that may look great and that our customers “should” want, but don’t, and it sits on the shelf, unused, and we move on to the next funding proposal.
This blog post is the fifth in a series related to the Canadian Task Force on Social Finance. In this series, Task Force members explore ideas and research that will help to catalyze a robust social finance marketplace in Canada.
Social entrepreneurship represents the elusive middle ground in our society - that combination between for-profit and non-profit commitment that has been kept at arm’s length until now.
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Your Guide helps social entrepreneurs learn how to attract financing for their social ventures.
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Your Guide to Social Finance
SocialFinance.ca hosts an online guide that helps social entrepreneurs learn how to attract financing for their social ventures.
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