This past Wednesday, a Dragon became Canada’s newest impact investor.

Arlene Dickinson, a leading Canadian investor and entrepreneur, CEO and owner of Venture Communications, and one of the “Dragons” on CBC’s Dragons' Den invested $450,000 in La Siembra, an Ottawa-based worker co-operative that owns Camino, a Canadian brand of fair trade, organic food products including chocolate and coffee.

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Over the last few months, I have had the privilege of working with a group of talented people who have transformed the Social Finance Chain from a humble micro-loan program, into the national Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund, which provides debt and equity solutions to young social entrepreneurs who want to change the world. It has ambitious capital raising targets for the next year, and what amazes me is that the team has raised 20% towards its goal of $87,500 in only two months.

The Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund (YSI-CF) began with the idea that youth are brimming with innovative ideas on how to tackle the complex challenges that confront our society.

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Recently on SocialFinance.ca, Timothy Nash offered a tip for those considering shifting their money to help build a more sustainable economy. At the top of his list? “Join a credit union,” he said. We’re not going to argue with that kind of advice. Indeed, the recent economic crisis has caused a lot of people in Canada and around the world to give credit unions a second, or even a first look.

As Nash alludes to in his article, what’s attractive for those concerned about sustainability is that credit unions are co-operatives, mission-driven to improve the quality of life of their members and their local communities. That’s kinda nice to hear isn’t it? But the really good news is that credit unions are continuously improving their social, environmental and economic performance.

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Over the past year, attention given to the international microfinance industry has continued to be fixated upon scandals – such as the suicides among borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, India – which led to the ‘great Indian microfinance crisis.’ Despite significant industry efforts, as of August 2011 the situation in Andhra Pradesh had only improved slightly.

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In The Ascent of Money, historian Niall Ferguson paints the picture of capitalism as an evolutionary beast. From the creation of stock-issuing corporations to the opaque engineering of collateralized debt obligations and other derivatives, capitalism is a story of constant innovation. More to the point, that innovation is what – in his telling – accounts for periods of dramatic economic expansion and growth. It is as if economies reach a sort of equilibrium state, and that progress requires some modification of an internal element of the system – meaning, in Ferguson’s story, the leveraging of vast new capital flows – in the underlying mechanics of the process.

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