In The News
Support for Social Enterprise in the UK (via @SEmagreporter): Lots of exciting news last week around the Social Enterprise Summit. The big news was the £100m slice of the £1bn Future Jobs Fund to help social enterprises create 15,000 jobs. This looks to be part of a broader package of support for social enterprise - including a loan guarantee scheme for CDFIs. At the same time, as part of a three-year program on Measuring Social Value to standardize the approach to SROI and encourage its wider use, the SROI Guide 2009 was launched - check out the SROI-UK Network for more information.
Brokering Investment for Social Enterprise: More from the UK, where The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and the Office of the Third Sector (OTS) have jointly funded a £90,000 year-long program that will pay a success fee to brokers whose investment advice results in funding for social enterprises. On a related note, Liam Black writes an excellent post on Reinvesting Finance for Social Entreprises, where he highlights the lack of good finance options for social enterprises as the biggest barrier to growth, argues that we need to get much better at articulating and verifying what social impact is, and the need to find ways to scale through joint ventures and partnerships.
NCIF Develops Tool to Measure Impact of CDFIs on Low-Income Communities: In order to measure and communicate the impact of financial institutions that serve low- and moderate-income communities, a report analyzing their impact was recently issued by the National Community Investment Fund (NCIF), a non-profit, private equity trust that invests in banks, thrifts and credit unions that generate both financial and social returns. The report, entitled “The Impact of Community Development Banks: 2007 and Beyond,” utilizes three primary tools developed by NCIF to measure the impact of CDFIs and CDBIs on underserved, low-income communities.
Community Banking Stays Strong: In related news, community banking in the US appears to be stable despite the continued volatility in the rest of the banking sector. The article notes that “despite investing in what the big banks would consider high-risk borrowers, CDFIs have continued to do well because their focus remains on relationship lending. Sure many, if not most, of their borrowers wouldn’t qualify for loans from larger institutions. But the bankers at small credit unions, for example, know the people and not just the paperwork. Their conservative approach to a relatively risky population continues to be one of the pillars of socially responsible investing.”
IRIS: Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (HT: Lucy Bernholz): The Rockefeller Foundation, Acumen Fund and B Lab have initiated the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS) effort to create a common framework for defining, tracking and reporting the performance of impact capital. Take a look at the Framework, Index of Indicators, and FAQs.
Social Entrepreneurship as a business model (via @josephdee): Lisa Torjman from SiG@MaRS has pulled together an excellent presentation around social enterpreneurship, including an introduction to the Canadian context and the role of SiG and MaRS.
Social Entrepreneurs API announced (HT: Lucy Bernholz): The Skoll Foundation, PopTech, ideablob, Civic Ventures and SocialActions have announced the Social Entrepreneurs API - essentially an open database of social entrepreneurs. More details at the source, and read Sean Stannard-Stockon’s thoughts here.
Social Innovation in a Post-Crisis World (via @narain): A must-read - this Special Edition of the Innovations journal for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2009 features excellent articles by Klaus Schwab, J. Gregory Dees, Roshaneh Zafar, and many others. From the introduction: “This special edition includes five lead essays from thought leaders and outstanding social entrepreneurs commenting on the challenges of the moment; five narratives authored by innovators describing successful approaches to shaping “post-crisis” or otherwise desperate environments; and a “perspective on policy” essay describing the imperative of resilience as it applies to companies and governments.”
