One of the highlights of the Social Enterprise Conference at Harvard in early March was the keynote speech from William Foote, Founder and CEO of Root Capital, a nonprofit social investment fund focused on rural communities in the developing world. His organization has provided $256 million in credit to 320 small and growing businesses in 30 countries since it was founded in 1999.

At heart is Root Capital’s belief that leadership for alleviating poverty already resides in local communities, what Foote calls “leadership in the bush”.  The role of the impact investor is to bring critical resources and networks to bear on viable opportunities, and in so doing, to overcome systemic constraints to rural development and small business.

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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 April 11, 2011.

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Over the last two years, I was writing and editing the book, Social Banks and the Future of Sustainable Finance. The idea for the book came during my time as a member on the board of the Institute for Social Banking (ISB) in Germany, which offers a master’s degree in Social Banking. But while ISB has a master’s program, basic literature about social banks and sustainable finance was non-existent at the time and so students had no textbook to follow. Systematic analyses and research on social banking, sustainable finance and impact investment was still rare. However, with interest growing in this relatively new field, some literature on social banking is emerging and it seems that social finance is on its way to becoming a more established sector.

A sign of progress in social banking came with the founding of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values in 2008. The worldwide association of social banks includes microfinance organizations and has a Canadian member, the Vancouver-based Vancity. Having moved to Canada a year ago, it’s been exciting to watch how fast global networks are forming.

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Corporate spending on Research & Development is an informative signal for the direction of the overall economy. R&D strategies and budgets are often laid out in a long-term horizon, so they give a good indication of a company’s heading. When companies in a sector start competing to be the ‘greenest’ company, it spurs rapid innovation. This can lead to advertising campaigns touting environmental benefits that increase consumer awareness, such as Audi’s Superbowl ad.

Since no global research has been conducted on the extent of private corporate “green” R&D, the Green Transition Scoreboard® (GTS) research team is, to our knowledge, the first to compile these figures. Our final total of $163,813,743,000 in investments and commitments to R&D since 2007 is by no means exhaustive, as R&D for green innovation is not always segregated and reported on its own by companies (although more than 1400 companies have produced GRI-compliant sustainability reports). Additionally, limited time for research challenged our team to look for big numbers first, counting commitments above $100 million. There are likely thousands more companies globally who are investing in green R&D that have not been included in this figure. Many do not report such R&D investments for competitive reasons. If you have access to press releases or audited statements for companies we have not listed, please email us.

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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.   

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