This is a video of Toby Eccles, founder of Social Finance (UK), explaining the Social Impact Bond (SIB) pilot undertaken in U.K. in spring 2010. The first such program in the world, it is a six-year pilot aimed at reducing reoffending rates of prisoners after they have been released. SIBs are an innovative method of financing social outcomes through collaboration between government, private investors, and social service agencies.

Last week, the first preliminary evaluation report from this SIB was released by the Ministry of Justice, United Kingdom. Based on interviews of those involved in developing and implementing the SIB, it aims to identify early lessons in SIB implementation.

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The Revisioning Value 2011 conference (REVV) held in Portland, OR on March 7 and 8 provided yet another excellent opportunity for those interested in social entrepreneurship and social finance to come together. This is the second annual REVV conference; both have been hosted by Springboard Innovations, a non-profit in Portland developing a social entrepreneurial ecosystem in order to catalyze local social innovation. This year, the conference both continued and broadened last year’s focus on social finance.

Amy Pearl, director of Springboard, laid out three themes, or what she referred to as “three I’s,” for REVV 2011:

1. Integration from social innovation to enterprises that increase both social and economic wealth;
2. Intersection of cross disciplines such as entrepreneurship, finance, design thinking, and engineering for solving problems; and
3. Developing local and national ecosystems to nurture and promote innovators that pursue the previous two I’s.

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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 21, 2011.

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Are you interested in learning about social banking and social finance? Look no further than the Institute for Social Banking (ISB). The ISB is opening up registration for its upcoming Summer School session entitled, “Money rules the world – who rules the money?” The session will take place from July 3 to 8, 2011 in Canterbury, U.K. There are 110 spots available.

The application and submission criteria can be found on the ISB website. The deadline for applications is April 15, 2011.

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Countless moments in history have shown the irrefutable power of taking a stand for meaning. Today, the events in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and the wider Middle East are a poignant reminder that systems failing to support our common well being can be challenged to do better.

From May 30th to June 1st, Amsterdam will host SOCAP/Europe, the largest interdisciplinary gathering of individuals and institutions at the intersection of money and meaning in Europe. SOCAP/Europe will challenge one of the most prominent economic systems in history. Whether directly invested or indirectly affected, capitalism’s influence is global; consequently, it unites us all in a great opportunity to insist that our capital markets work better to reflect our shared meaning – to enrich our health, environment, education, economic opportunity and local communities in a sustainable way.

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