In my first post we looked at some of the challenges involved in developing a social finance portfolio, managing its risks and measuring its returns. Both of these posts are based on the white paper titled “Enabling Social Innovation through Development Impact Investing”, co-authored with Frances Westley and Olaf Weber.

Developing an investment portfolio is a challenge. It involves taking a diverse set of investment opportunities, comparing them to each other, and estimating the potential returns and risks involved in each. Once you’ve done all this, you then have to decide which you will put your money into, which can be an additional challenge if the entrepreneurs requesting investment need a minimum amount to get their projects of the ground.

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“There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we don’t know we don’t know” – Donald Rumsfeld

Opening with a quote from the former US Secretary of Defense probably seems like an odd start for a blog post about social finance, but I like its framing of a key problem in social finance: how can you best manage what you don’t understand?

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Join 1200 people from over 70 countries in Montreal, October 17^th -20^th who are activating the social and solidarity economy across Canada and globally. fiess2011,  is the International Forum on the Social and Solidarity Economy, that brings together those who collaborate with different levels of government to effect public policy for the benefit of the social economy.  

For Canadians, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of the world at our door.  You will want to be at fiess2011 if you are part of the non-profit, cooperative, social business or social entrepreneurship sectors, or if you are working towards changing the landscape of public policy towards social well-being and economic growth.  fies2011  takes networking to a new level with dedicated spaces and delegate meet-ups.    

This is Canada's premier event to connect with the people who are changing how we collectively address complex social and envrionmental issues of our time. Check out the program, workshops and field trips planned throughout the week.

I am looking forward to hearing from this impressive list of international and national guest presenters:

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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 September 5, 2011.

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In the lead-up towards SoCap 2011, I’ve spent some time thinking about what I want to gain from this year's conference. As an attendee to prior SoCap conferences, I have had the privilege to reflect on the key issues and opportunities that have surfaced each year (see my posts here, here, and here).

It is no surprise that there is a groundswell of interest in the topics of impact investing and social finance. The first conference boasted an impressive number of attendees, despite (or perhaps, as a result of) it taking place in the midst of the worst financial crisis in a generation. It also witnessed the launch of an influential report by the Monitor Institute that proposed a vision for the growth of the impact investment industry.

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