“Build it n’ Flip it” is one of the key themes that emerged from the Structure Lab process I experienced in Boston in February. The purpose of the Lab process is to help social enterprises proactively protect their mission and values by teaching them how to think about the optimal legal structures that can be used to further their mission. Knowing how to think about this is very empowering process, which will filter through to the strategies that social entrepreneurs employ in many contexts, including finance.
Build It
Criterion Ventures, a U.S. based organization that identifies, examines and solves social problems by launching social ventures, held the workshop that I participated in. I did so because I agree with their perspective on the role of legal structure vis-à-vis strategy. Their innovative process to discussing legal structure is, appropriately, one where the social entrepreneur identifies their core mission in the form of their values, relationship, and assets, and then builds their venture “from the Mission Up.” Ultimately, the basis behind the perspective that legal structure is linked to strategy is simple: legal structures manage relationships.
“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.
This past Saturday some of the brightest and most creative minds in Toronto’s social entrepreneurship community came together for Young Social Entrepreneurs of Canada’s second annual re:Vision conference at Metro Hall.
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 28, 2011.
