Over 1,200 attendees from all sectors of social enterprise in the U.S. converged on the Social Enterprise Conference at Harvard University in early March. The conference focused at the nexus of social innovation and entrepreneurship. As Caleb Shreve, executive director of the Global Fairness Initiative, said, “Social mission brings heart; entrepreneurship brings growth and impact.”
Several insights from participants emerged at the conference:
Transformative Capital
Eleven grants were made in the first year of Obama’s Social Innovation Fund (SIF) to intermediary philanthropic investors like Venture Philanthropy Partners, who received $4 million for a two-year commitment to invest in the non-profit initiative, youthCONNECT. A total of $50 million a year is to be granted by SIF. Intermediaries and non-profit social enterprise recipients are each expected to match government funding dollar-for-dollar.
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 April 4, 2011.
“Build it n’ Flip it” is one of the key themes that emerged from the 
“Deep and intertwined in our humanity, is a need to support and feel involvement in the kinds of projects and companies which we care about. Until the recent crowdfunding phenomena emerged, our more centralized and intermediated capital formation and funding mechanisms scarcely recognized the social power of crowds which form affinities around any kind of mission. Crowdfunding is a natural systemic response to fill this gap, and an expression of our collective human will. It is perhaps, one of the most powerful developments in our modern-day socio-economics, and promises both to transform the capital formation landscape and to offer an avenue for a creative and intellectual re-birth.” 
As someone who is relatively new to the world of microfinance, the past six months working with the exec team of Wokai Toronto has been eye opening. We often hear about the explosive growth and modernization that China is currently undergoing, but what gets left out is that over 100 million Chinese in rural areas live below the international poverty standard of less than a dollar a day.
