Stanford Social Innovation Review

Disagreeing with James Bond

James Bond was known for preferring his martinis “shaken, not stirred.”

Stephanie Strom’s article in Monday’s Times on states’ pursuits of taxes on presumed tax-exempt organizations raises important questions about when things blur, rather than blend (or get shaken rather than stirred).

1. Here is the NYT article, “Tax Exemptions of Charities Raise New Challenges.” It looks into a few cases of nonprofit organizations where the fee structure raised eyebrows at state regulators’ offices. There are three key issues, according to the piece:

“One issue is the growing confusion over what constitutes a charity at a time when nonprofit groups look more like businesses, charging fees and selling products and services to raise money, and state and local governments are under financial pressure because of lower tax revenues. And there are others: Does a nonprofit hospital give enough charity care to earn a tax exemption? Is a wealthy university providing enough financial aid?”

The last two issues have been the objects of considerable scrutiny lately—as well as an op-ed in Sunday’s edition of the Times. The broad questions raised by the piece are at the very crux of my professional interests—what is public, what is private, and who decides?

2. The second force mentioned in the article, the budget pressures on state and local governments, is a time-honored source of pressure on nonprofit regulators and tax systems. I’ve written frequently about the relationships between public budget pressures and the regulatory infrastructure for nonprofits and foundations.

3. The issues raised in the article are critical. Viewed more broadly than the few instances examined in the Times, the questions are:

• What is a public good?
• Are public goods and those who provide them deserving of special exemption and recognition? When?
• Who should provide these goods?
• How should these providers be structured?
• How do we support and provide the right incentives for a sustainable mix of “public good” providers?

These issues are not unique to our times—debates and decisions about these very questions are why we have the tax structures and regulatory systems we have. However, they must be understood in today’s context, which includes the rise in corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, social ventures, and new governance structures for hybrid organizations—B Corporations and L3Cs, in particular.

Unrealistic expectations of sustainable revenue sources for nonprofits or discussions of funders’ exit strategies undervalue and push essential organizations (that are not paid for by market mechanisms) further toward the margins. Simultaneously, espying a devil in all earned revenue sources leaves critical service providers vulnerable to forces that are beyond their control and that work at fundamentally cross purposes (witness the relationships between falling support for food banks, while the need for their services increases).

The social enterprise movement, philanthropy, and social venture businesses share a wide array of interrelated beliefs:

1. Communities need a diversity of public goods providers
2. Businesses have many public responsibilities
3. Market forces can be harnessed for public good—though this requires deliberate structure and attention and should not be assumed
4. Public good providers need sustainable sources of funding
5. Governments alone cannot be the sole providers of public goods.

There are other premises, and more eloquent articulations of them. However, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone participating in these discussions make a (serious) claim that we don’t need independent civil society institutions, nor that social ventures can, will, or should provide all public goods. When the discussions devolve into an “either/or” approach, I tend to tune out. Civil society organizations, “pure” nonprofits, hybrid organizations, and socially responsible businesses are here to stay. The Times article makes clear that we need public discussions and enforcement actions that consider what mix of actors can best serve broad public goals, knowledge of who does what well, what is known and what is experimental, and the kind of regulatory structure that promotes the best service and protects the most vulnerable.

Disclosure: My company, Blueprint Research & Design, Inc. is a founding B Corporation. We are members of Social Venture Network.

Lucy Bernholz is the Founder and President of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic individuals and institutions achieve their missions. She is the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award-winning blog about the business of giving, and serves as executive producer of The Giving Channel on Fora.tv.

Posted by Katie Harrington

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How I Became a Social Entrepreneur

In the spring of 2001, I had just moved to California and took a temporary administrative job at the Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Center for Social Innovation. The two best things about that job were the people I worked with and the exposure to the amazing conferences and discussions that happened so frequently on campus. I remember first hearing the term “social entrepreneurship” in a lecture in Bishop Auditorium during my lunch break; I was instantly intrigued. I wanted to be a social entrepreneur!

But doing what, exactly? I had no idea. The motivation, values, and energy were all there, but the specific context was missing. This was a problem. You can’t be a social entrepreneur without, well, a specific idea to implement. I felt like someone who wanted to be an author but had no idea what the book should be about, or someone who dreamt of going to the Olympics but hadn’t chosen a sport.

So my task became choosing a context, and finding my one, specific mission. At least I wasn’t starting completely from scratch. I’d always known I wanted to do something to alleviate poverty, and to think globally about doing so. I tried to absorb everything about international development, poverty alleviation, and the like.

I began digging, searching, reading, reflecting, journaling—just trying to figure out what in the world I could do to make an impact on poverty. I kept files with titles like “dream jobs” and “social entrepreneurs” and “international development courses/programs.” I’d have at least three to four lunches or coffee dates a week with anyone who knew anything about poverty. I worked overtime, sometimes doing extra projects (or entire extra jobs) to see more, learn more, absorb more, more quickly. Even while at Stanford, I had a second job evenings and weekends, as a live-in “house mom” and manager of New Creation Ministries in East Palo Alto, a home for underprivileged teenage moms and their kids. It was a whirlwind, but boy, did I learn a lot!

A few years later, in the fall of 2003, I was no longer a temp, and was serving the GSB as a senior program manager in the Public Management Program. One evening, I stuck around after work to hear yet another speaker on campus. He was talking about something related to banking, which I knew nothing about, but apparently he worked with very poor entrepreneurs. It sounded like it could be up my alley, so I went.

The speaker that evening was Dr. Muhammad Yunus. Hearing his story changed my life. Something clicked. This sounded like a fit. This was my context. I wanted to figure out how to contribute to the work of microfinance.

In his November 2007 blog entry highlighting “Six Lessons of Kiva,” Guy Kawasaki references this time in my life:

“Bank on unproven people. What would the ideal background be of the founder of Kiva? Investment banker from Goldman Sachs? Vice president of the World Bank? Vice president of the Peace Corps? Vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation? Partner at McKinsey? How about temporary administrative assistant at the Stanford business school? Because that’s how Jessica started her quest. The spark that lit the fire was a speech by Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner.”

It’s true—I was, for all intents and purposes, “unproven.” But, that was OK, because I’d been quietly preparing. When Dr. Yunus came to campus, my ears and eyes and heart were open. I knew what else was out there in the social sector, and I knew that this was a beautiful fit for me. I was ready to take the next step.

Things happened quickly from that moment onward. I began to take very specific action, in a specific context (microfinance)—I didn’t just dream about it. A few months later, I quit my job at Stanford to join Village Enterprise Fund (VEF), a San Mateo-based nonprofit focusing on micro-enterprise development and training in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. I moved to East Africa to begin my VEF work, through which I met more than 100 entrepreneurs whose stories would inspire the creation of Kiva.

Kiva became my specific mission. From a handful of friends and family members lending $3,000 to seven entrepreneurs in Uganda, as of this blog entry, Kiva has facilitated nearly $40 million in loans from 330,000 lenders to 60,000 entrepreneurs worldwide.

A funny thing happened while we were building Kiva: I actually forgot about my initial obsession with the idea of being a social entrepreneur. Only retroactively have I been able to look back at the last few years and say, “Oh, yeah… I guess that happened!” My vision got specific. The tasks in front of me each day got specific. Those initial dreams about what I wanted to be, a social entrepreneur, led me to a specific mission for what I wanted to do, Kiva.

For anyone out there who finds themselves in a similar place—wanting to be a social entrepreneur, but not knowing where to focus or how to start—here are some ideas:

Learn: Read, research, write, etc. Go to lectures. Absorb whatever you can on the topics that interest you. Get an idea of what the issues are. Take a class or just make up your own little reading lists and assignments if you love structure.

Listen: Reach out to a real, specific, human being who could be your “customer” (someone whose problems you want to understand, and who you’d like to serve by addressing those problems). Listen very carefully. Learn as much as you can. Then, reach out to another person, then another, then another. (Read Paul Polak’s amazing book, Out of Poverty, for much more on this concept!)

Ask: As you start to amass questions and can’t find the answers yourself, reach out to people who might. Get their opinions, their insight, their advice.  Learn how their organizations work, what problems they face, what challenges and successes they’ve had. A special note: There are many ways to be entrepreneurial and create significant social change without starting your own organization. Sometimes you can be more effective at doing the specific thing you want to do in the world by joining an existing group or project, and revolutionizing from within.

Jump: At a certain point, you just need to start pursuing what resonates with you. Follow it as best you can, wherever it leads. It’s OK if you don’t know what the next five steps are. It’s enough to take one step in the direction of your interest. Sometimes you can only find the second step after you’ve taken the first one.

Keep Dreaming: Kiva represents my wildest dream of what I wanted to do in the world. And it’s happening! I couldn’t be more thankful for this. But something else is happening too: The faster Kiva goes, the more it grows, and the more I’m convinced that other great changes are possible in the world. I hope never to stop dreaming, preparing, and being ready to see what’s next.

Jessica Jackley Flannery cofounded Kiva, the first peer-to-peer microlending Web site, and believes that microfinance, relationships, and stories are powerful tools for change. She holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Social Enterprise in Scotland: The World Forum

I’m here in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the first-ever Social Enterprise World Forum. There are over 400 attendees from 25 countries, all here to talk about how to use business to accomplish social outcomes. And Scotland is a logical place for such an event. “Social enterprise is a key part of the Scottish government’s social strategy,” says Ruth Parsons, Director of the Public Sector (Scottish government). Plus, the Social Enterprise Alliance is a cosponsor of the event, and we’re scheduled to host the third world forum in San Francisco in 2010.

One of the fun aspects of social enterprise conferences is to visit the social enterprises. Before the conference was formally opened, there were three different study tours available to attendees. I visited the One World Shop and learned about the history of the fair trade movement. The UK is probably the leading country in the world for consumption of fair trade products, mainly because fair trade has become a mainstream concept in supermarkets here.

We then walked through Edinburgh on a lovely, sunny afternoon to the Soap Company. This social enterprise sells hand-made soaps, creating production and retail jobs. It’s part of the Forth Sector, a regional social enterprise group with a handful of enterprises.

The opening ceremony had a mind-boggling location: Edinburgh Castle. I haven’t been to a social enterprise conference where the opening event included viewing the crown jewels of the country! We had drinks overlooking the city, and the kilts were out in force.

The introductory speeches highlighted the Scottish national government’s commitment to social enterprise, which is a noteworthy aspect of the sector here in Scotland and in the UK. The UK actually has a government minister for the Third Sector, who is focused on social enterprise (he’s due to speak on the second day of the conference).

I also learned about devolution here in Scotland, which means that the Scottish national government now has responsibility for issues that used to be controlled by the UK central government. This makes the social enterprise scene just a bit more complicated here!

Jim Fruchterman is an engineer turned social entrepreneur. He has worked as a rocket scientist, founded two of the foremost optical character recognition companies, and developed a successful line of reading machines for the blind. He now runs his own “deliberately nonprofit” technology company, Benetech. He also won the 2006 MacArthur Fellowship, the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2004 and 2006, and was named a Schwab Social Entrepreneur in 2003.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Fail Faster, Succeed Sooner

“Fail faster, succeed sooner” is a core axiom in the field of innovation design, attributed to David Kelley, founder of IDEO. It’s very popular with engineers, industrial and process designers, and creative folks. Most foundations and nonprofits don’t seem to have this ethic, though.

Before exploring some possible explanations for this, I want to highly recommend the cover story in the current issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Rediscovering Social Innovation” by James Phills Jr., Kriss Deiglmeier, and Dale T. Miller. The authors provide a clear definition of social innovation:

“A novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions, and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.”

Avoiding the cheerleading found in so many articles on the subject, they make some very important distinctions and clarifications, such as: innovation can be both a process and a result; the concepts of “social enterprise” and “social entrepreneurship” are too narrowly focused on organizations and intrepid individuals, respectively; social innovation is fed by transfer and sharing of knowledge across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors;  and a social innovation can be not only a product, process, or technology, but also “a principle, an idea, a piece of legislation, a social movement, an intervention, or some combination of them.” The article is a really, really good read.

Now, back to the risk of failure. I’ve always thought that the reason so many nonprofits and foundations were so risk-averse was that they couldn’t (or didn’t believe they could) absorb and recover from failure. This is kind of like the way very small farmers in developing nations were inherently conservative in trying new seeds and techniques. The gains from innovation may be high, even proven to be high—but if the price of failure for farmers and their families is starvation, the cost/benefit wouldn’t balance.

Why the “fail faster” ethic isn’t stronger at foundations is more of a mystery, however.  For foundations, the failure=extinction calculus doesn’t apply. Let’s hope examples like Jim Canales’ open discussion of some of the Irvine Foundation’s failures (as profiled by Sean Stannard-Stockton here) will encourage others to follow, and eventually lead more funders to try, revise, and adapt approaches more quickly and openly.

Ironically, a focus on innovation seems “oversubscribed” in philanthropy, as Dr. Robert Ross remarked when accepting the Distinguished Grantmaker Award on behalf of The California Endowment, rather than for himself, at last May’s Council on Foundations conference. He observed that in many fields, the question is not what to do, but how to do it to scale, and in his view that’s why it is increasingly important for foundations to engage in and support advocacy. The old notion that government or “society” would expand and support proven innovations doesn’t seem to hold, if it ever did; but too many foundations still seem to think that their role is to develop new solutions, and let others figure out how to get them widely adopted. (That last observation and its faults are mine, not Ross’.)  Ironically, though advocating for taking proven approaches to scale runs a high risk of failure, and while the rewards may be very high, this path still may be difficult for many foundations to choose because it can be hard to say exactly what piece of success the foundation “owns” (the outcomes frame). Plus the work may not seem innovative and thereby lack the “cool” factor that attracts praise from peers.

How could we help see this become the path more traveled by?

Peter Manzo is the director of strategic initiatives for the Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy organization, and a senior research fellow with the Center for Civil Society in the UCLA School of Public Affairs. Previously, he was the executive director and general counsel of the Center for Nonprofit Management. 

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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BoP 101: Essential Reading for Those Interested in the Base of the Pyramid

The leaves are changing and the mornings are becoming a little more brisk; it is clearly back-to-school season. In the spirit of this shift, I offer up the following list of books, articles, and cases that comprise what we here at NextBillion.net consider the essential pieces of base-of-the-pyramid reading.

I often get questions from students and readers about where to start. There is so much out there, and although NextBillion has done a great job of posting reviews of works as they are published, this post is designed to give a high-level overview of the literature over time. Therefore, the following showcases some of the most pivotal pieces that have influenced and continue to expand the base of the pyramid idea.

Genesis of an Idea

In 1999, CK Prahalad, Professor at the University of Michigan Business School, and Stuart Hart, then Professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, wrote the article that first introduced the world to the term BoP. It was titled “Strategies for the Bottom of the Pyramid: Creating Sustainable Development.” This article attempted to raise awareness of the world economic pyramid and the vastly untapped market of four billion people living on less than $1,500 PPP per capita income. Organizations that were already involved in serving BoP markets, Hindustan Lever Limited, for instance, were highlighted as examples of MNC BoP strategy.

Although the early BoP theory was presented primarily as a business strategy for MNCs, it also addressed the potential for poverty alleviation, since the paper stated, “Foreign aid and charitable giving have not alleviated the problems for the world’s poor.” The paper called on MNCs to “recognize that the bottom of the pyramid poses a fundamentally new question: How do we marry low cost, good quality, sustainability, and profitability at the same time?”

Despite the fact that this seminal piece broke ground for the BoP movement, the idea did not really gain speed until it was picked up in 2002 by the Harvard Business Review. Al Hammond of WRI coauthored the HBR article with Prahalad, and it was titled “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably.”

A Shifting Tide

So why was there a three-year lull between the original piece and the HBR article? Well, between 1999 and 2002 there were several books, articles, and discussions that may have shifted the business community’s openness to the BoP strategy. In the development space, scholars such as Amartya Sen and Hernando de Soto published outright challenges of what was then accepted as the traditional models of aid and development, and reframed the question of what was holding impoverished individuals back from reaching their full potential. They called on business to be part of the solution.

In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals were first established, as world leaders realized the reality of continued suffering despite years of international development spending. Fed up with government, the public began to call for the corporation to take on more of a role in sustainable development through what was termed Corporate Social Responsibility. The United Nations Global Compact, a voluntary initiative to promote socially and environmentally responsible business, was launched by the United Nations in 2000 as world leaders started to engage companies in deeper dialogue regarding their business practices.

Despite all of this pressure, companies were struggling to find the business case for most of their CSR activities, which were then framed as PR or risk-management strategies rather than strategies for top-line growth. The BoP theory, therefore, debuted on the world stage in 2002 as a potential strategy for business to alleviate global problems and tap into additional areas of growth—outside of the slowing top-of-the-pyramid markets.

The HBR article received a lot of attention, and both Prahalad and Hart decided to publish books on their somewhat divergent views of BoP theory. The books that followed this article were Prahalad’s 2005 “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” and Hart’s 2005 “Capitalism at the Crossroads;” both are must-reads for anyone wanting to learn more about the foundation of BoP. The “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” introduces the reader to many stories of early BoP actors, such as CEMEX and E+Co, which are still referenced today as prototypical examples of successful BoP cases. In “Capitalism at the Crossroads,” Hart addresses both poverty alleviation and the environment, as he asserts that “environmental and social concerns can be alleviated while spreading prosperity to those at the bottom of the pyramid.” Like Prahalad, Hart also draws on the real-world cases of organizations such as Grameen Bank to highlight his theories of linking profit to sustainability.

BoP Criticism

In August of 2006, University of Michigan professor Aneel Karnani posted a critique to the BoP theory on NextBillion.net. In many peoples’ eyes, the fact that the BoP perspective attracted criticism was a good indicator that enough people were taking it seriously. In Karnani’s article, titled “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: A Mirage,” he claimed that Prahalad’s estimates of the BoP market size were wildly optimistic, and he suggested that what impoverished people really needed was employment, not additional products. The basis of this article was the traditional poverty alleviation strategy of raising the real income of the poor, and it deserves a close read, alongside both Al Hammond’s and CK Prahalad’s responses. This debate is ongoing, and Karnani’s point of view has been adopted by a few other critics of BoP theory.

BoP Theory Subtopics: Driving Innovation, BoP as a Complementary Approach to International Development, Market Research

When one wants to move beyond these few seminal works that have mainly defined this space, it may be beneficial to take a deeper dive into one of the multiple BoP subtopics that have emerged over the years. As the field has expanded, so have the number of independent researchers that are carving their own niche areas.

One area that has been developed further by BoP originator Stu Hart, who is now at Cornell University and the William Davidson Institute, is the opportunity for business innovation through engaging with and building businesses with the poor. One of Hart’s early articles, titled “The Great Leap: Driving Innovation from the BoP,” was co-authored by Harvard innovation guru Clay Christensen. The piece discusses how emerging markets are ideal places to develop and incubate disruptive innovations. In the quest for furthering the BoP perspective on business innovation in the field, Stu Hart and his team have now produced the second version of the “BoP Protocol.” Drawn from best practices and field experience from the team, this document has laid the foundation for MNCs to engage in co-creating social businesses with BoP communities. It is an essential read for business managers who want to embark on a BoP project or people with a general interest in the startup phase of BoP businesses.

Ted London, who is at the University of Michigan, has carved his BoP niche in the role of the BoP strategy as a complementary approach to international development. London, who has on-the-ground experience with development projects, co-authored one of the early BoP papers with Stu Hart, entitled “Reinventing Strategies for Emerging Markets.”  He has now gone on to consider the BoP strategy first and foremost as a means for poverty alleviation. He believes that we need to measure the social, economic, and relational aspects of communities that engage in BoP projects in order to understand the full impact.

One of his most recent works, which addresses this niche area is the “Base-of-the-pyramid Perspective on Poverty Alleviation.” According to London, this paper is driven by “the development sector coming under increasing pressure to explore new approaches to reducing poverty … [and] a growing number of private sector and socially-oriented organizations viewing the poor’s unmet needs as untapped market opportunities.”

As London claims, it is true that many from within the international development community have also been calling for more accountability and more market-based approaches to development.  One of the most outspoken critics of aid-as-usual is William Easterly, and his 2006 book “The White Man’s Burden” may be of interest to those who see the BoP perspective as playing a role in this space. 

In terms of market research and quantification, WRI has created what is known as the most comprehensive document for defining and understanding the BoP market: “The Next 4 Billion Report,” published in 2007. This hard data-driven publication estimates both the size and composition of the BoP market. It should be read by anyone who is looking to better understand the particularities of the majority of the world’s consumers.

An Idea Turning to Practice: Finance at the BoP and Design for Social Impact

As the BoP idea has turned into practice in the field, noteworthy articles have begun to surface that address issues such as adequate financing, design at the base of the pyramid, and new models for distribution.

One of the most interesting and noteworthy trends in the base of the pyramid space is the growth of different kinds of “social investment” capital. MIT’s Innovations journal outlined this topic in Patient Capital, an article authored by Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, which is one of the pioneering organizations in this field. The article, titled “Meeting Urgent Needs with Patient Capital,” talks about the changing world of philanthropy (another driving force for more market-based approaches) and Acumen’s unique approach to investing in BoP businesses.  It also gives a good overview of some of Acumen’s main investments. Novagratz says that, “capital invested in businesses seeking to deliver basic goods and services to the marginalized majority will require long-term commitments, a lot of management assistance, and sustained relationship building.” This article is very useful for understanding the new approach to investment in SMEs that serve the BoP.

As adequate capital has begun to enter this field, there has been an increased push for innovative organizations and moreover innovative products and services that address the needs and aspirations of those living at the base of the pyramid. In 2007, the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City hosted an exhibition titled “Design for the Other 90%, which highlighted design-driven innovations in areas as varied and vital as water, healthcare, energy and housing. The book that summarizes the exhibition is definitely worth your time if you are interested in seeing how design can, for example, change the way men and women transport water and thus attain dramatic improvements in their quality of life.

“Design for the Other 90%” is the brainchild of Paul Polak, a prominent figure in the space of entrepreneurial approaches to the challenges of poverty who has revolutionized small scale agriculture through the design of affordable drip irrigation equipment at International Development Enterprises (IDE). His book Out of Poverty describes the path of building his organization and provides valuable insights from the field, emphasizing the importance of listening to and becoming aware of the specific context and conditions surrounding those at the base of the pyramid. 

Additional Resources

There are of course numerous other books, articles, and cases that highlight the growing adoption of the BoP approach. If you know of any additional pieces, feel free to comment on this post. Here are some in addition to those highlighted above.

Thanks to Francisco Noguera for his contribution to this post. Also, please note that this should not be understood as an exhaustive compilation of everything that has been written about the BoP. Please feel free to comment below if you want to add something to this list.

Grace Augustine is a research associate with the William Davidson Institute, an educational institute focused on researching and supporting organizations in emerging markets. She writes for the NextBillion blog and has an interest in economic development and clean technology for the world’s poorest citizens.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Reviewing the Past, Predicting the Future

Ah, December. The anticipation of snow, unless you’re already several feet under. The warmth of a fire, unless you live in the south.  The excitement of winter holidays, unless you’re a grouch. Don’t forget the thrill of reviewing the year gone by and the accuracy of previous prognostications, while also prepping for the foolhardiness of sticking your neck out yet again and claiming trends, key changes, and buzzwords for the year to come. Ah, December.

Last year at this time on this very site I made several rather rash predictions. Briefly, they were:

1. One of the many philanthropic prizes launched in 2007 will succeed in motivating the solution it seeks;
2. At least one-third, and maybe as many as one-half of the world’s top 10 largest gifts in 2008 will be made by non-Americans to non-American institutions;
3. The lines between political giving, embedded giving, and giving will continue to blur;
4. Half of the glossy magazines dedicated to giving, launched in 2006 or 2007, will fold in 2008; and
5. Nothing significant will happen to the regulatory structure that shapes philanthropy in 2008.

My full accounting of these predictions can be found here in this article, “Alliance Magazine You can find additional discussion of it here and here  .

In brief, I was right on numbers three and four, wrong on number one, and we don’t have the data yet to assess number two. Number five was so poorly worded (my fault) that I can claim to be correct simply by being selective about which regulatory frames I meant. Apologies—I’ll do better next time. In that same post I also identified six trends or events that would matter to philanthropy in 2008. They were:

1. The economy
2. Health care finance will start down the same slope as subprime mortgages
3. Metrics
4. Markets
5. Bill Gates will go full-time
6. Race and age will matter

It is pretty clear in December 2008 that the economy and health care finance have profoundly shaped the direction of philanthropy in the last year—to say nothing of their effect on the U.S. presidential election. Discussions of metrics and markets were plentiful and some progress has been made—from the Acumen Fund’s Portfolio Data Management System and mainstream media’s attention to metrics to conferences on Social Capital Markets and the buzz around philanthrocapitalism. Bill Gates as philanthropist has garnered attention from his speech on creative capitalism to his retirement in June to his launch of a new company to the rapt attention paid to the Foundation’s investment policies and grants budgets. And, finally, the sector is beginning to pay real attention to racial diversity of leadership, grantmaking, encore careers, and next generation leadership issues—plenty more to be done, but I’d argue these issues have moved out of the wings and into the center of the room.

So what about 2009? Here are some thoughts. I’ll be back with more:

1. I’m going to recycle prediction number two from 2008—big giving is going to come from off America’s shores in 2009—we’ll see at least 30 percent of the year’s biggest gifts coming from/going to non-Americans. And we’ll have data to show this.
2. The number of nonprofit organizations in America will shrink through mergers and organizations going out of business. Paul Light has pegged this decline at 100,000 organizations or just fewer than 10 percent of the whole. Others I know are predicting shrinkage in numbers of up to 25 percent.
3. On the other hand, social enterprises will increase. President-elect Obama is promising investment in them and has already established a working group on social innovation. Necessity is the mother of social innovation. One problem—we don’t have any accurate or longitudinal counts (or even definitions) of social enterprises—so I can’t be wrong on this, because we don’t have data. (What an opportunity….)
4. Related to number three, but not synonymous: new corporate structures, such as B Corporations and L3Cs will significantly expand in 2009. B Corps will double in number and market reach.
5. Overall giving in the U.S.A. from all sources (foundations, individuals and corporations) will drop in real dollars in 2009 compared to 2008. (There I go again, sticking my neck out.)
6. The market of online giving marketplaces will mature – we’ll see this in shrinkage and consolidation (there are more than 120 of these now, they’ll be fewer than 100 this time next year) and the solidification of market leaders.
7. Social action by young people and elders will keep us hopeful.

What do you think? What do you predict? What will you stick your neck out about?

Lucy Bernholz is the Founder and President of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic individuals and institutions achieve their missions. She is the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award winning blog about the business of giving and serves as Executive Producer of The Giving Channel on Fora.tv.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Generations Converge at the Intersection of Money and Meaning

The social capital markets are convening at the intersection of money and meaning. Sometimes that intersection acts like an asset class, and sometimes it shows up more as a movement driven by a passionate desire to get more out of the professional part of life than the exchange that traditional business offers.

The most vital element in the social capital markets is the capital that shows up on two legs, rather than on a balance sheet as a new investment. That influx of new people is what’s starting to tip the balance as this movement heads toward the mainstream. The flow has not let up since the Wall Street meltdown. The people who were committed to social enterprise, to financially sustainable, mission-focused business as the way to make a difference in the world, are no less committed. In fact, the problems they are tackling, from alternatives to predatory payday checking businesses that pray on cash-strapped poor people, to solutions like roof-top gardens that green the inner city, are growing.

The number of new people wanting to join them, eager to get involved, is growing as well; the downturn has created an important inflection point where people are willing to examine and even start walking away from existing beliefs that kept them enmeshed in the old-style, greed-is-good market system.

As I encounter this new influx of people when I speak at an event, or when they come to the events we put on, I’ve started to use a generational filter to put them into context. That’s because how they enter, what they expect, and what they have to learn or how they have to compromise seems to differ according to whether they are a millennial (roughly 30 and under), a Gen X’er (30s and early 40s), or a boomer (mid-40s to late 50s).

The millennials are, in large part, not buying into the system. They seem to be naturally entrepreneurial, wanting to create their own initiatives, while they live five to an apartment.

The Gen X’ers who have heard the call are often stuck; they’ve got kids, mortgages, or at least nice apartments and have gotten used to regular paychecks. But when they can manage to make the switch, they have a decade of practical and professional experience on the millennials. Their professional skills are sometimes the exact right fit for the problem of a particular social enterprise at a particular point in its growth.

If you find the right ones for the right companies, they can often manage to deliver the perfect injection of professional skill for a short consulting gig that doesn’t make them leave behind the day job that’s paying the rent. And, since most social enterprises, at whatever stage of funding, are often cash-strapped or working within tight budgets, the Gen X’ers are a core group that is providing the movement cum asset class an essential nudge forward.

Working with them often requires a long engagement by the funder or advisor or board member who’s trying to round up the right ecosystem of talent to push a particular social enterprise toward its full social and economic potential. They often need some level of career counseling as they learn to put together the new, meaningful part of their professional life with the other part that’s paying the bills.

My own group, baby boomers, is often the most difficult to work with. The problem is, boomers have often been successful and kind of suddenly wake up and realize that the meaningful part of their life has been segregated from the professional part. They have a legacy problem: “Oh no, this can’t be all that I’ve done. How did I get to this place? I need some more meaning in my professional life right now.” There’s a real opportunity for someone to develop some kind of career change curriculum or practice for both Gen Xers and boomers.

It often takes boomers a couple of years to realize their skills are not directly transferable, that the nonprofit-infused social capital market is a different culture with different rules and norms, and that their habits of command and fast action run into barriers they don’t see coming. That’s about how long it took me; it may not take others as long.

I tell boomers it’s like being transferred to Japan; there are customs that you don’t recognize, that you can’t change, and that you have to pay attention to; walls you will run into that you didn’t see coming. When I encounter recent cash-outs or early retirees, I try to send them off on a quest. Start going to the events in the space, become a mentor to a raw student startup in a social venture competition or a particular nonprofit and learn the different kinds of funding and execution challenges facing businesses with an embedded social mission.

The overlaps of the three generations are pretty interesting as well; boomers and millennials are natural allies; they are both impatient and unwilling to do it the old way. They can work together on projects well, but longer-term engagements can be more difficult. Boomers are used to long-term commitments while millennials reassess the link between their engagement and meaning more often; but I’m seeing a lot of potential as they learn to figure out the roles of experience and enthusiasm.

The desire to take the next step into social capital markets may be just as strong for all three generations. For the short term, however, it seems to me the Gen Xers, the ones who are in some ways stuck, are able to provide a social enterprise the most bang for their scarce bucks. They don’t have the habits of power to unlearn that the boomers do. And unlike the millennials, who continually question their engagement, Gen Xers are used to taking on a particular task and working until it gets done. They have 10 years of honing their professional skills, and are thrilled when their particular talents can be the answer to a mission-focused business at an inflection point.

This is just a tentative hypothesis, based on gathering a lot of observations. I don’t consider them rules or a methodology. And that is the real problem; I wish somebody would make their own version of this concept into a methodology and maybe a career counseling and curriculum business. The biggest gap I see is a way to scale the intake, evaluation, and assessment and matchmaking processes as these three generations work their way through the intersection of money and meaning and try to find a way to make a difference helping or starting a social enterprise.

Kevin Jones is a cofounding principal of Good Capital, an investment firm that accelerates the flow of capital to enterprises that use market forces to create large-scale social change. Jones is a successful serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and cofounder of Social Capital Markets, the groundbreaking conference on social venture investing.

Posted by Katie Harrington

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From Blue to Green

I just finished reading an advance copy of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, Jacqueline Novogratz’s book on social enterprise due out in March—and it’s terrific, an unusually candid and highly personal memoir about the deep and often painful complexities of trying to make lasting change in the world.

Novogratz, the CEO and founder of The Acumen Fund, which invests money in companies run by and for the developing world, is also generous with her storytelling: Early in the book, she shares the memory of first landing in Africa some 22 years ago, at the Abidjan airport on a sweaty Ivory Coast morning. She had just left Wall Street, had cut her hair (“to the point of resembling Margaret Mead,” she told Cause Global) and gave away most everything she’d owned, arriving with “all the essentials, from poetry to new clothes to, of course, a guitar. I was 25 and I was going to save the world—and I thought I would just start with the African continent.” Yet within days of arriving, she was told—and in no uncertain terms by a group of West African women—that “‘Africans didn’t want saving, thank you very much’—and least of all, not by me.” Recalls Novogratz: “I was too young, unmarried, had no children, didn’t really know Africa and my French was pitiful. It was an incredibly painful time of my life and yet it gave me enough humility to start listening.”

And learning: To this day, Novogratz—cited last fall by Portfolio magazine as one of the “73-Biggest Brains in Business”—has let her experiences as a pioneer in the still-evolving field of social enterprise continuously shape and check her unique blend of idealism and flat-out pragmatism; her Acumen Fund, founded in 2001, remains passionately focused on “changing the way the world sees the poor” by alleviating poverty in ways that make the poor the customers of—and workers at—self-sustaining businesses seeded by donors but run locally, over time, without hand-outs. From her experiences running a bakery in Rwanda in 1986 with 20 unwed mothers to starting the first microfinance institution in Kenya, Novogratz has seen first-hand “the power of markets to end poverty, the discipline that running a business provides, and the pride that results from ownership”—in other words, an end to charity. She has also seen what doesn’t work, and retells the story of revisiting Rwanda a few months after the 1994 genocide there.

Of all the inspiring stories in her memoir—[the blue sweater in the title comes from Novogratz’ experience of seeing her favorite childhood sweater, which her family had given 11 years earlier to Goodwill, being worn by a child she met on a hilly street in Kigali—her name, written on the collar, still intact]—one of my favorites is her hard-won lesson in the importance of listening, closely, to those in need. “...I could have listened better,” she says about the women she met in and around the markets of Kigali while helping them to create a “blue bakery” to sell samosas and doughnuts as a local enterprise, even painting the walls blue until one of the women dared to speak the truth to their enthusiastic benefactor. [“Our color,” one of them finally told Novogratz, “really is green.”] “...Listening is not just having the patience to wait,” Novogratz writes, “but is also about learning how to better ask the questions.” Her efforts eventually transformed the bakery, which had been run as a charity when she got there, into an enterprise that earned $2 a day for each of the women. “When you’ve lived on charity and been dependent your whole life long, it’s really hard to say what you mean,” Novogratz says. “The poor often think no one really wants to hear the truth.”

But perhaps the biggest lesson, both from the book and the life it profiles, is that investing in businesses run by and for the people they’re intended to serve can actually work, grow, and create change across a neighborhood or a region or a country. For those looking for the “ROI” of social enterprise, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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SkollFest

The annual Skoll World Forum in Oxford —called the “Davos for social entrepreneurs”—is always about celebrating up-and-coming and established entrepreneurs who don’t simply want to get rich but also want to forge innovative solutions to the world’s social problems. But this year’s event, sold-out despite the dismal global economy, was as much about achieving some legitimacy, at last, for the fledgling new field. At the time of the first Skoll Forum six years ago, social entrepreneurship was seen “as an interesting but ephemeral fad” by those in mainstream business, academia, government, and the media, said Skoll Centre Director Pamela Hartigan. But not anymore: these same people, Hartigan said, are now finding that social entrepreneurship has been “a harbinger of future organizations, systems, and practices.”

The forum—which was held in what Skoll’s Oxford Centre Chairman Stephan Chambers called “the most chilling economic environment we’ve ever experienced”—was hosted by Oxford University and Jeff Skoll’s social enterprise foundation last week. [Skoll, who was the first employee and first president of eBay, also is the founder of the independent movie company, Participant Productions.]

Some 785 delegates from 65 countries attended the event, the biggest-ever Skoll forum, including Kailash Satyarthi, chairman of the Global March Against Child Labor; Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and currently the founder and president of Peace Worlds Group, and Soraya Salti, senior vice president of INJAZ al-Arab, a youth education and empowerment project in Jordan. A wide range of panels Thursday and Friday included talks entitled The Uses and Abuses of Power in Social Innovation, Capital Markets in Crisis, Powerful Women: Shifting the Status Quo, Technology and Shifting Power in a Hyper-Connected World, and Tomorrow’s News: Models for an Everyone-is-Media World.

Cause Global covered parts of the conference, which we at SSIR will be cross-posting this week. Among some of the first-day’s highlights:

• Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, urged conferees to be “the kinds of leaders who reject the traditional choices between two or more unsatisfactory alternatives and instead create new courses of action in the world.” Martin, during an opening ceremony at the historic Sheldonian Theatre, referred to President Obama’s inaugural speech, in which Obama asserted: “For our common defense, we reject as false a choice between our safety and our ideals.” Rotman said that time and again, highly successful leaders reject unsatisfactory options and create new alternatives. “They understand the power of the paradox,” Martin said.  “The critical take-away for social entrepreneurs, specifically, is that you must reject the notion that existing business models equal reality. The status-quo business model versus civil society is not a choice but rather the root of a new model, a new set of solutions for our times.”
• Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland and now president of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalisation Initiative, underscored the importance of government to help bring order to the current “chaotic” climate of change that is being felt around the world. She said: “One of the shifts taking place in this severe economic crisis is a recognition that government matters and that it’s very important to the 21st century. We had been in a neo-liberal phase when there was a reduction of government and the private sector was supposed to be so efficient and we didn’t need regulation. I am hoping we are now seeing a new era of more appropriate government, governments that are more responsive and also more welcoming to younger people with their tools of the information society. We need for people to become more participative in their communities and societies and their movements. We need more people holding those in power to account. How are social entrepreneurs holding existing institutions to account? We need more of that. It’s important to do that and that’s what social entrepreneurs and young people with their tools can do very well.”
• Ken Brecher, the executive director of the Sundance Institute and an anthropologist by training, delivered an eloquent speech that underscored the importance of passion and persistence in the pursuit of the common good. He received a hearty round of applause when he compared the traits of social entrepreneurs to those traits which characterized and qualified the fearless crews recruited by the early 20th century explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton.  [Brecher quoted an advertisement that Shackleton placed in The London Times in 1907: “Wanted: Men for hazardous journey, low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness, safe return doubtful, honor and recognition in the event of success.”] Brecher also spoke about the perserverance and resilience that characterized the life of the late Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, who received an honorary degree from Oxford in 1965, when she was 76 years old, during a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre [the spot where Skoll conferees were assembled Wednesday night]. Brecher urged social entrepreneurs to heed Akhmatova’s example of creativity and passion against brutal odds to bring new levels of sanity to the world. “You can use your skills to bring order from chaos and in doing so fulfill the highest human function, not as visionary but with a strong sense of reality. (Akhmatova’s life was) a reproach to those who feel that a single individual can never stand up to the march of history.”

We’ll be running more highlights through the week. For more on social entrepreneurs and the state of social innovation, see this recent article in The Economist.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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SkollFest Wraps

A week ago today, the Skoll World Forum at Oxford University concluded, with its leaders and many of its delegates declaring that the failures of the global economy have given legitimacy, at last, to the new field of social entrepreneurship. The growing ranks of business innovators who also want to solve the world’s social problems, they said, now seem the best hope for institutional innovation in the 21st century. “Our trusted institutions have turned out to be stunningly untrustworthy, ” said Colin Mayer, the dean of the Said Business School, the site of the conference. “While governments around the world believe they are in control and that the old order will soon re-emerge, you can be sure they are not and it won’t. Now, more than ever, there is a need and opportunity for institutional innovations.”

Social entrepreneurship used to be seen as “an interesting but ephemeral fad,” said Skoll Centre Director Pamela Hartigan—but not anymore. Those in mainstream business, academia, government, and the media “are now finding that [this movement] has been, indeed, a harbinger of future organizations, systems, and practices.” Jeffrey Skoll, in concluding remarks, urged delegates to step up their leadership efforts in the coming year. He quoted the American economist Paul Romer as saying, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Among closing-session highlights:

• Lord David Puttnam, a movie producer [best-known for the Oscar-winning Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, and The Killing Fields] and president of UNICEF UK, called on conferees to act urgently to overhaul education. Quoting the British author, H.G. Wells, that “the future is a race between education and catastrophe,” Puttnam said it is time for every citizen to “get absolutely honest” about the serious challenges facing humanity and to demand “exactly the same degree of honesty from those who seek to lead us and make decisions on our behalf.” He quoted from the 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, to sum up the failures of today’s wealth-society: “They smashed up things and ... then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness and let other people clean up the mess that they made.” Puttnam, however, was most passionate about the need for education innnovation, and showed the first seven minutes of a soon-to-be released documentary that he hopes will do for educational reform what Al Gore’s film, Inconvenient Truth did for climate change activism. Here’s a short portion of the script: “What we have now is a [school] system shaped by historical forces but now almost totally bankrupt of ideas for education in the 21st century—and they’re betraying most of our children. Public systems of education, paid for by taxation, were invented to meet the needs of the Industrial Economy emerging in the 18th and 19th centuries, when we needed a work force that could do certain sorts of things…The high schools of today were centrally designed in the 19th century…and in the old days, we’d say one-size-fits-all—we’d put 30 kids in a classroom and teach them the same material, which they’d all be expected get in the same way…But just five years from now, much less in 25 years time, we won’t know what the world will be like. How adaptable are today’s kids going to be? The very best we can do is to prepare young people for a rapidly changing social, technological, economic environment, in which they’re going to have to be the most flexible, collaborative, creative generation that has ever been. Education is the most fundamental challenge facing human beings; it will be key to solving all the other problems we’ve got.”
• Soraya Salti, a new Skoll fellow and the senior vice president of MENA, INJAZ al-Arab, an education nonprofit based in Jordan, said the region has strayed far from “the Golden Age of Islam”—a time when “people of different religions and cultures were coming together to move humanity forward.” Today, she said, schools across the Arab world have failed their students, fueling unprecedented rates of youth unemployment—30 percent in Saudi Arabia, 37 percent in Syria, 40 percent in Algeria, and 30 percent in Jordan. The irony? A lack of qualified human capital is cited by CEOs in the region as the No. 1 obstacle for growth. “Those who would control and politically mobilize the youth of the Arab world will be the ones who will win in the end,” Salti said, paraphrasing a 2008 report by the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Is it going to be government or is it going to be the [radical] Islamists?” Salti, in this video clip of her talk at the conference, described her recent work to assemble a team of 27 would-be social entrepreneurs from a girls’ school in Jamallah to compete for a regional prize for entrepreneurship. It was an example of what her group, INJAZ, is doing to reach more than 100,000 Arab youth in six countries across the Middle East.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Social Innovation in the White House

In the midst of a thoughtful discussion at the Wagner Center of the competing demands on philanthropies for funding of overtaxed social services and of social-change advocacy, big news: the White House is about to announce creation of the long-proposed Office of Social Innovation to bring together government responses and resources to the concerns of the philanthropic and charitable sectors.

Bureaucratic-style confirmation: the office appears on the list at whitehouse.gov.  Speculation about possible leadership has begun.

Kelly Kleiman, who blogs as The Nonprofiteer, is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose reportage and essays about the arts, philanthropy and women’s issues have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and other dailies; in magazines including In These Times and Chicago Philanthropy; and on websites including Aislesay.com and Artscope.net.

Posted by Kelsey Walker

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Social Entrepreneurship vs. Activism; SOCAP09 vs. Momentum09

A couple weeks ago was the SOCAP09 conference attracting social entrepreneurs from all over the world.  Last week was the MOMENTUM conference attracting the leading activists from all over the world. Interestingly there was only minor overlap in the attendees. Is there a divide between these two camps?  The civil society is already fragmented enough. If there is a growing divide between the social entrepreneurship and activist camps then surely the greater good would call for us to bridge the gap.
 
Sure enough during a Tuesday evening cocktail networking at the Tides Momentum Conference, I oversaw Ellen Friedman (ED of Tides and the host of this conference) at a table with Kevin Jones and Rosa Lee Harden (the co-founders of the SOCAP conference last week among other important endeavors).  It was as if both gang leaders were huddling up in a dark alley to decide the fate of civil society, or so I melodramatically imagined.  I was intrigued and so I interviewed them the next day. 

Friedman mentioned that they did discuss this divide and are keen on beginning a dialogue to start bridging the gap.  In fact, Friedman suggested that one important outcome from the conference might be this very dialogue. She intends to “keep the conversations going.”  I met with Kevin and Rose Lee separately and they confirmed their interest in strengthening the dialogue and start to build bridges. So keep an eye out and start pressuring from your end.  All those with the passion to drive social progress need to find a way to stay united. 

I also asked their opinion on the difference between activism and social entrepreneurship. There was consensus that entrepreneurship is about creating something new while activism is about taking action of any kind so you can indeed be both an activist and a social entrepreneur. Friedman gave Kevin Bales and Willie Smits as examples.  Both changemakers spoke eloquently in the Momentum conference about their work. Bales’ mission is to end slavery over the next 25 years while Smits’ is to curb global warming, save local fauna & flora while simultaneously developing local jobs in Borneo, Indonesia.  Both individuals are creating something new and innovative but are required to influence government and others in positions of power as part of their important work.  As Friedman eloquently put it, “often you need to build a movement and a market.”

Most social entrepreneurs, like me, don’t identify with activism, but, like corporate managers have understood for a long time, we mustn’t overlook the fact that influencing those critical non-market actors in positions of power is often a critical part of our work as well.  One can influence non-market actors in two ways: with votes or with dollars.  Most social entrepreneurs don’t have the deep pockets of the corporate world, so they will have to follow the path blazed by the activists: build political leverage with votes.  On the other hand, activists should also start to recognize that their work will only be enhanced by learning from a new wave of changemakers who want to go beyond the traditional activism born out of the 60s to incorporate principles of the market and best practices of management and private industry to achieve the same goals.  The millennials, particularly in the US, don’t identify as activists but will usually need to incorporate their best practices for the purposes of movement formation and advocacy.

Do you think the activist community and the social entrepreneur community are divided?  Should that divide enough of a concern to be seriously addressed now?

Lloyd Nimetz founded the online giving market HelpArgentina.org. While pursuing his MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Nimetz has focused on for-profit business models that address social challenges. This summer he will launch a payments platform for India’s bottom billion.

Posted by Jason Chua

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Three Social Entrepreneurs Sell Shares in Selves to Scale

Three young social entrepreneurs—setting a radical precedent in the social innovation sector—have just announced they will offer up a portion of their future income in exchange for immediate resources to scale their social enterprises.

The trio has created a Web site and a name for their request—the Thrust Fund. www.thrustfund.com. They announced their bold move Tuesday on the Social Edge Web site in a post entitled, “Invest in Me, Take My Equity.”

The three entrepreneurs are: Saul Garlick, 26, founder of ThinkImpact, a startup nonprofit that connects American students to rural villages in Africa to alleviate poverty; Kjerstin Erickson, 26, the founder of FORGE, and Jon Gosier, 28, the founder of AppAfrica, a social venture investing in African software entrepreneurs to create jobs and build their own companies.

“(We) are announcing that we are ready to do something we had never heard of one month ago,” the post reads. “We are going to offer equity in our life’s earnings for an unrestricted infusion of cash today.” Gosier and Garlick are each offering 100 shares in themselves, priced at $3,000 USD per share, to raise $300,000 each in exchange for 3% of each man’s future earnings; Erickson is “selling” 200 shares in herself at $3,000 per share for a total capital investment of $600,000, in exchange for 6% of all of her future earnings. Interested investors are invited to fill out and sign a contract that further stipulates the terms of the unusual offer.

The idea of 1-to-1 investing isn’t new in the nonprofit sector. But it’s just starting to take off in the social enterprise space. Last fall, one social investor had decided to give a young entrepreneur he believed in some investment capital in exchange for a percentage of her future earnings. That move, detailed by investor/entrepreneur/tech consultant Rafe Furst late last year in his personal blog, has spawned considerable discussion across the sector in recent weeks, but Tuesday’s Thrust Fund announcement was the first time that any social entrepreneurs have stepped forward to offer themselves as candidates under the concept.

The idea isn’t complicated. Instead of investing in start-up companies, angel funders could invest in individuals they believe in and then take a percentage of their life’s income over time as the ROI.

“If we loved perpetual hand-to-mouth fundraising for our social enterprises, we’d never make this announcement,” the trio wrote in their post. “If the market were up to speed on the scalable potential of social entrepreneurship with engaged funders like the more advanced VC community that the exclusively for-profit sector looks to for scale, this discussion would be lame. But it’s not and we are raising money hand-to-mouth when we know for sure that a modest infusion of capital would scale our social enterprises.”

What do you think? Is the sector likely to see a flood of such investment offers, or is this idea still too new and untested to take seriously? Let us hear your thoughts.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

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Haiti Relief Underscores Deeper Needs

While Americans quickly dug deep to support relief efforts in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, the outpouring of generosity also serves as a troubling reminder of our ongoing failure to better address social and global needs that are urgent, persistent and deeply rooted.

Just as they did after 9/11, Katrina and the Asian tsunamis, individuals, companies and foundations after the Haiti quake have done what Americans do best in times of crisis: They got involved and gave.

What we often seem to forget, however, is that we face a perpetual crisis, one the recession simply has deepened.

At home and abroad, millions are hungry, homeless, in poor health, impoverished, illiterate, and subjected to violence and intolerance.

The giving sector exists in large part to address the problems vulnerable populations face.

But among the nearly one million charities in the U.S., many struggle with limited resources and big operating challenges.

Individuals, foundations and companies in the U.S. give over $300 billion a year to support charities, and often give more after horrific events like the quake in Haiti.

But the charitable marketplace has changed dramatically in recent years in the wake of financial and ethical scandals and the collapse of the economy.

Many foundations and corporations have narrowed the focus of their giving, and are demanding more business-like operations from charities seeking support.

Those funders want nonprofits to be more strategic, set measurable goals, create clear metrics to gauge their impact and effectiveness, and make their staffs and boards more diverse and inclusive.

These all are important goals: To address critical needs, nonprofits must be able to sustain themselves financially and engage the thinking and know-how of the full spectrum of people and institutions with a stake in making our communities better places to live and work.

But in placing greater demands on charities and ratcheting up expectations for how they perform, many funders seem to be in denial about the investment charities need to meet those demands and expectations.

Most charities are small, community-based groups with limited resources.
Their employees are overworked and underpaid and often lack the skills or know-how they need to keep their shops financially afloat.

Their boards often are not willing to raise money or set a vision and direction for the organization, and typically are not even aware those are key responsibilities of their board role.

The recession has increased demand for services from charities and reduced the dollars available to them in what has become a fiercely competitive charitable marketplace.

And foundations and corporations typically will not support charitable operations, preferring to fund special projects and address particular needs in sync with their mission or business goals.

So while they expect charities to be more enterprising, efficient, effective and strategic, funders are not willing to make the significant investment charities need to improve the way they do business.

After the Haiti earthquake, savvy charities used social-media strategies like text-messaging to raise a lot of money quickly.

Aiding that effort was massive coverage by mass media that used the power of images and technology to communicate both the intimacy and the massive scale of devastation in a nation long ground down by poverty.

Yet while they are quick to provide wall-to-wall coverage of horrific disasters in their immediate wake, the media fail to tell the ongoing story of the relentless toll poverty takes throughout America and the world.

And while nonprofits serve on the front lines in the fight against poverty, their limited resources make it tough for them to more effectively tell their story to the mass audience mass media can reach.

Nonprofits need all the help they can get, including greater understanding and flexibility among foundations and corporations that control charitable resources nonprofits can use to do a better job running their organizations, serving people in need, and telling their stories to engage more people in their cause.

Todd Cohen, a veteran news reporter and editor, is editor and publisher of Philanthropy Journal, an online newspaper that is a program of the Institute for Nonprofits at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. Cohen has taught nonprofit reporting and media relations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University, and regularly speaks on the topics of nonprofit media relations and trends in the charitable world..

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Bay Area Social Entrepreneurs Talk Funding

Bay Area nonprofit leaders sounded pretty optimistic and focused on growth at a breakfast gathering I attended last week, entitled “Conversations with Social Entrepreneurs: 2010 and Beyond,” sponsored by Commongood Careers and Building Movement Project. At the beginning of the three-hour gathering at a downtown hotel, James Weinberg, founder and CEO of Commongood Careers, had the group of about 50 give a two-word description of how they were feeling. Attendees, who were mostly from education and youth development nonprofits, shouted out adjectives along the lines of “cautiously optimistic,” “growing,” “opportunities ahead,” and “pumped!”  The spirit in the room was energetic.

Kudos to Commongood Careers and Building Movement Project for bringing social entrepreneurs together for a chance to network; with job demands it’s always tough to take the time to get together.  These two organizations are holding four such breakfast events. The other three have already taken place in New York City, Boston, and Washington, DC. The purpose of the events is to discuss nonprofits’ collective opportunities and challenges as well as the role “human capital management strategies” will play in their organizations this year.

Attendees are answering a brief survey on their organizations’ budgets, plans, and 2010 challenges. Survey results will be available on the Commongood Careers website in late February. Early results were handed out at our gathering – and comparisons between the Bay Area and the other three cities were intriguing.  (I don’t know how statistically valid the data is but the results were fun to look at nevertheless.)

Across the country, respondents said that a “significantly increased focus to secure gifts from high net worth individuals” was their number one funding goal in 2010, but the response was much higher from Bay Area nonprofits than from nonprofits in the other three cities.  Also according to these preliminary results, in order of priority, after high net worth individuals, Bay Area nonprofits were going to look for corporate partners second, and foundation grants, third.  In the rest of the country, all of these funding sources had about the same priority.

The San Francisco gathering included a panel discussion, and several panelists echoed what the survey data showed. BUILD in particular has been successful in changing its mix of funding to have more of an emphasis on individual donors. The social entrepreneurs on the panel were Suzanne McKechnie Klahr (BUILD), Louise Davis (Peer Health Exchange), and Jill Vialet (Playworks). These three panelists kept up the enthusiasm in the room by sharing their recent impressive successes and their growth plans for 2010.

The fourth panelist was Anne Marie Burgoyne (Draper Richards Foundation), who shared her insights from working with so many Draper Richards grantees (full disclosure: Draper Richards is one of the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s funders). Anne Marie commented that it didn’t surprise her that Bay Area nonprofits had a higher focus on pursuing individual donors given the wealth in the region. She also noted that she has seen that foundations are pulling back and choosing to fund what’s safe. As for corporate funding, Anne Marie said she is observing more partnerships and fewer dollars. She ended by encouraged nonprofits to pass by the “shiny pennies” on the road and stay focused on mission and their organizations’ strengths.

Overall, James noted several surprises he had from the survey: that most nonprofits expected their budget and program levels would expand this year and that government was fairly low on the list as a source of funding.

How about your organization?  Do you plan to grow your budget and programs this year? What funding balance are you aiming for (looking at individual donors, corporate funding, foundation grants, and government support) and has that balance shifted this year? Is the Bay Area a funding anomaly?

Ms. Ridley joined the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2006 as publishing director. Previously she was group president at CMP Media, where she ran a division of technology publications, events, and websites. Ridley is also founder and board chair of Friends of Timboni Feeder School, a nonprofit that supports a K-5 school in Kenya. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Connecticut and a Masters in International Management from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Posted by Samantha Penabad

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In a Changing Ecosystem, Whither Nonprofits?

I’m concerned about nonprofits. Are they aware of the threats they face?

Are they prepared to demonstrate their value in the face of changes in corporate and tax law, and, as importantly, changes in the cultural zeitgeist about social capital markets and social enterprise?

For almost a century, 501c3 nonprofits have held a privileged place in our communities and in our tax code. They are provided tax exempt status, and supporters can deduct their contributions to these organizations from their income taxes. In so doing, the US tax code privileges these organizations - from major hospitals and universities to small neighborhood groups - as providers of social goods and contributors to civil society.

Those privileges are being challenged from numerous directions. Let me list just a few:

• New corporate forms that recognize social businesses (these are modifications to the corporate codes at state levels - L3Cs, B Corporations, proposed H corporation);
• Tax credits for social businesses;
• Foundations’ increasing interest in “sector agnostic” approaches to solving social problems;
• Regulatory concern about good governance, payout rates, and endowment growth over charitable purpose;
• Social investment exchanges that are expanding the revenue and capital streams to financial/social hybrids (not necessarily to nonprofits);
• Growth of models for social goods/civil society that emphasize operating foundations or social enterprises more than a nonprofit framework (everywhere but USA).

Each of the innovations above has advantages and disadvantages and none may be explicitly targeted at putting nonprofits out of business. Most of the hybrid forms are promoted as expansions of the social sector.  The fervent interest in social investment exchanges and mission related investing or impact investing are also seen as new revenue sources to good. Note, however, that these are effectively ways of expanding the pools of social good providers and social good financing, effectively increasing the pool around nonprofits, not working to strengthen, support or expand financing to them.

What we are experiencing is a confluence of forces, each of which may have merit independently, but which collectively challenge our current framework (policies, mental models. and financing systems) for where civil society and social goods come from.

Who provides them, who finances them, and how are they distributed?

Michael Edwards’ new book, Small Change, which challenges the currently en vogue market model, comes closest to raising these questions.  And conferences on regulation, discussions of technological innovations, and celebrations of innovations and changing ecosystems contribute to the broad awareness of options.

But who is working on these big questions in pragmatic ways? Who is looking at what nonprofits do best, what social enterprises and social businesses contribute, and what roles government can and must play? Who is looking out for the whole? Or even looking at the intersections, not all of which are complementary or positive, of these many pieces?

Currently, most of the innovation in the sector is around the edges of our existing corporate and tax frameworks - we are developing “workarounds” to the 501c3 or commercial corporate model to encourage social entrepreneurs and new investors or donors.

The preponderance of these workarounds should have been our first clue - it is time to reconsider the entirety of the systems and policies for the production, financing and distribution of social goods and civil society in the Twenty First century.

Lucy Bernholz is the founder and president of Blueprint Research & Design, Inc, a strategy consulting firm that helps philanthropic individuals and institutions achieve their missions. She is the publisher of Philanthropy2173, an award winning blog about the business of giving and serves as executive producer of The Giving Channel on Fora.tv.

Posted by Samantha Penabad

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Patient Optimists

I’m not an “impatient optimist” like Bill and Melinda Gates. When it comes to making the world a better place, I think impatient optimists are quite possibly a part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Led by some terrific organizations, the nonprofit and social entrepreneurship sector is generating solid evidence on the effectiveness of programs aimed at alleviating poverty, combating homelessness, preserving natural resources, and the like. The Obama administration has embraced this emphasis on rigorous evidence—and caused many in the sector to raise the specter of “epistemological nihilism” or paralysis due to demands for proof that is too hard and expensive to generate.

The real problem, and the real fear, among nonprofits and social entrepreneurs is not the difficulty and expense of finding evidence, however—it’s that the changes realized are often small ones. Indeed, sociologist Peter Rossi has gone so far as to coin the Stainless Steel Law of Evaluation: “The better designed the impact assessment of a social program, the more likely is the resulting estimate of net impact to be zero.”

There’s good reason for this, and it’s not a flaw of evaluation. It’s that human beings, political systems, economic systems and the social problems they create are complex. Despite this basic fact, the nonprofit sector and, increasingly, social entrepreneurs have told us for years that small donations or investments can “change lives” or make other huge impacts. It’s obvious why they do this—to raise money. But it also sets ridiculously high expectations among the general public. That’s why evidence that microfinance has had a small but positive impact in poor rural communities has been portrayed by some as a “failure.” To quote Esther Duflo,  a co-founder of Jameel Poverty Action Lab and recent winner of a MacArthur “genius” grant: “[Microfinance is] useful, but it’s not like the miracle drug to end poverty.” The only reason we would expect it to be a miracle drug is that we were told it was.

Who’s telling us that? You guessed it—the impatient optimists. They’re doing it for understandable reasons. The needs are great; big solutions seem like the right way to fix big problems; and it seems cruel not to try to fix such pressing problems quickly. So if a program shows some promise, it’s quickly promoted as a “solution.” Only later do we learn that early results aren’t replicable, the program doesn’t work at scale, or the benefits are far more modest than initially advertised. The impatient optimists run the risk of producing inspired donors in the short term and cynics in the long term.

What’s the solution? Patient optimism—a view that combines the belief that change is possible with the belief that any significant transformation takes a great deal of time and effort. It recognizes that programs that produce small or marginal benefits even for a small portion of aid recipients are good programs. It funds continued experimentation to find ways to achieve a little bit more with each dollar. It doesn’t believe in silver bullets but is willing to place small bets on risky innovations with potentially high returns.

What’s an example? Deworming. Hundreds of millions of children suffer from a variety of parasitic worms and treating them is both low cost (usually less than $2 per child) and has a large impact on school attendance. However, we know that in the same locales where worms are a problem, the children don’t learn much when in school because of failures of the education system. Does that mean that we shouldn’t fund deworming? Absolutely not. But we should do so with the full understanding that we’re not likely to see large gains in educational achievement as a consequence any time soon. That doesn’t mean we need to try to fix everything at once—which doesn’t work either—but that we should make what small improvements we can, where we can. Deworming will improve lives in many ways other than test scores and will allow the people who benefit to take more action to help themselves.

Impatient optimists are like investors in subprime mortgages in 2007. They can be so blinded by the upside that they fail to do their due diligence. In the end, their impatience and pursuit of outsize returns fuels waste and disappointment. Patient optimists, by contrast, have lowered their expectations of any particular program or intervention, but not their belief in a better world over the long term. If we’re going to succeed in making the world a better place, we need to convince more people to lower their expectations, too. Then we can get about the work of trying, failing, learning, improving—and truly making the world a better place.

Tim Ogden is Executive Partner at Sona Partners, a thought leadership communications firm. He has edited 4 books on the intersection of business strategy and technology published by Harvard Business School Press and co-authored or ghostwritten several articles for Harvard Business Review. He is frequently quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Financial Times.

Posted by Samantha Penabad

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Mobile: Increasingly on Call

On February 20, Harvard Business School (HBS) hosted its eleventh annual “Africa Business Conference,” a collection of high-profile discussions, many of which focused on the centrality of telecommunications, mobile banking, and new media in African development.  On February 27, Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) held its “Policy Making in a Digital World” conference featuring luminaries such as Jonathan Zittrain, co-Founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, panelists from the U.S. Department of State, and innovators from new platforms such as Ushahidi that enable crowd-sourced crisis mapping via SMS, and were instrumental to saving lives in Haiti.

Topics ranged from private equity in Africa to crisis response, but the commonality across both events for managers and innovators focused on international development was that new technology –open-source but coordinated and non-redundant, crowd-sourced platforms– is central to progress.  That high mobile penetration makes it the platform of choice is no novel news.  However, such conferences shed light on the empirics of how firms are innovating today, and raise important issues such as the fact that poor coverage and mobile promotions from competing networks impel many in Africa to own more than one phone, eroding the presumed mobile penetration associated with a number like 4 billion cell phones.

As I highlight in a Yale Journal of International Affairs article entitled, “Bringing Africa Online: Leveraging Technology to Empower Entrepreneurs,”, there are a number of challenges today.  The HBS conference focused on one such issue in that current transaction platforms insufficiently enable informed African consumers to access global retail outlets, and preclude entrepreneurs from providing goods on the world stage.  Online payment platforms limit access to many in emerging markets, and this impacts both consumers who want access to global providers, and retailers who cannot accept payments, and cannot fully leverage international promotion online. 

Peter Ojo, CEO of Virtual Terminal Network (VTN), described how his service empowers Nigerian consumers by enabling GSM mobile transactions from all 36 states.  Nigerian businesses can utilize VTN to accept mobile payments from consumers, and over 3,000 Nigerian businesses have adopted this platform.  Whereas PayPal and Google Checkout are cumbersome and ineffective on the continent due to legal and payment restrictions, VTN streamlines transaction costs for Nigerian businesses while concurrently offering access to domestic consumers.  Cost savings can inspire profit re-investment, leading to growth and employment.

As mobile is still the device of choice in Africa, mobile banking and mobile payment facilitation is a natural extension to what VTN offers in Nigeria.  While lacking the patina of fellow HBS panelists, young Benjamin Lyon, Executive Director of Frontline SMS, discussed his innovative company that facilitates institutional mobile transaction capabilities.  Frontline SMS is focused on helping provide back-end infrastructure that enables microfinance institutions to manage the logistics of frequent and voluminous inflow of mobile payments. 

At Columbia University SIPA, Ushahidi Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships, Patrick Meier, spoke on the groundbreaking humanitarian management applications for crowd-sourced mobile response.  Ushahidi, which means “witness” or “testimony” in Swahili, is a Kenyan organization supported by the Omidyar Network that focuses on crowd-sourced crisis mapping.  Following the earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi –a network of volunteers who had undergone brief training– scoured a diverse array of media, from YouTube, UN reports, local radio in Creole and French, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr to collect instant on-the-ground information from Haiti, map, tag, and geo-code it with GPS coordinates for immediate search and rescue application.  Whereas official mobilization took days, technology mobilization took hours, and within a week Ushahidi had been featured on CNN, referenced by Secretary of State Clinton, and thanked from the decks of a US Aircraft Carrier, by Marine commanders, and aid volunteers.

Meier stressed coordinated open-source development, wherein creation can happen without proprietary impediment, but wherein duplication is minimized, improving the consolidation of actionable information.  He stressed real-time, visual presentation of information, and audience-attuned presentation.  In the case of crisis response, GPS coordinates drive how teams are dispatched and lives saved.

On October 1-3, 2010 the International Conference on Crisis Mapping, focused on “Haiti, Chile and Beyond” will take place in Boston, Massachusetts, and will seek to expand on platforms that crowd-source local information via SMS, and relay actionable “tagged” information in real-time, GPS geo-coded maps.  A demand-driven, volunteer network of organizations, the conference will be a call for input.

Whether in expanding financial services access to the un-banked in Africa, improving access to payments platforms to enable consumers and entrepreneurs seeking global online markets, or responding to crisis, mobile is on call.  Many-to-many platforms that are developed open-source, and made available to all with the caveats of coordination, can continue to build upon crowd-source local knowledge.  Repackaged in intuitive, actionable ways, its rapid response availability and ease of use will ultimately necessitate its adoption for pragmatists and humanists, a statement that was evident at Harvard and Columbia, and now echoed at Stanford. 

Scott E. Hartley (Stanford, ’05) is a former Google.org Business Development Consultant and dual-degree MIA/MBA graduate student at Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs and Columbia Business School.  He writes on Internet & Democracy for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Posted by Samantha Penabad

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Social entrepreneurship - too much emphasis on the business side?

[note: this is a reposting of an entry that was inadvertenty deleted]

There’s undoubtedly a lot of energy around the idea of social entrepreneurship, but I do wonder if the discussion is too much skewed towards the business and organizational side of things rather than on what we really want to achieve. So I was interested to receive an email from Paola Grenier, who’s doing a PhD on social entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics, who’s thinking of writing an article ‘challenging the dominance of business schools in the development of research and and education into social entrepreneurship’.

Posted by Caroline Hartnell

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Field Notes: Social Venture Network Conference

Social Venture Network has figured out how to hold a great conference: Bring together 250 people passionate about creating social change through business; plan long full days of stimulating presentations interspersed with yoga, men’s and women’s circles, and live music; and locate the conference in the beautiful desert foothills overlooking Tucson. Going to SVN for the first time, I felt right away that it was no ordinary “business” conference.

The attendees were entrepreneurs with an intense personal and professional commitment to building a just and sustainable world through business. (Think Aveda, New Leaf Paper, Calvert, Eileen Fisher.) This year’s conference theme was Economic Justice, so many presentations focused on addressing the growing gap between rich and poor through a variety of business approaches such as employee ownership, limiting CEO wages to a multiple of the lowest employee’s wage, and committing to a living wage. The triple bottom line–people, planet, and profits–came up repeatedly in sessions.

One of the most inspirational talks was by Julius Walls Jr. from Greyston Bakery, in Yonkers, N.Y., who told an extraordinary story of building a profitable company based on hiring “chronically unemployable” workers. Greyston practices an unusual policy of “open hiring”—hiring the first person to apply for a job opening—rather than interviewing and then selecting the most qualified candidate. This approach, coupled with Greyston’s commitment to treating employees with “clarity of communication, consistency, and compassion” has worked very well. Walls said that open hiring sends an important message to staff from the very beginning that the company has confidence that every employee can be successful if he or she wants to be.

As I sat outside by the pool in the perfect warm evening weather, enjoying the evening guitar strumming and group singing, it was hard not to compare this event with one I’ll be attending in New York City in two weeks, the Business for Social Responsibility Conference. (It’s hard to imagine singing Motown tunes in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt).

BSR was one of several groups that evolved out of SVN. (SVN was founded in 1987, BSR in 1992). Now, BSR is seen as an organization comprising mostly larger companies incorporating socially responsible behaviors as part of their overall business strategy. SVN’s mission is to “inspire a community of business and social leaders to build a just economy and sustainable planet;” while BSR “seeks to create a just and sustainable world by working with companies to promote more responsible business practices, innovation and collaboration.”

I don’t understand why there weren’t more representatives from larger companies at SVN, and I look forward to gaining a better understanding of the differences between the two organizations when I attend the upcoming BSR conference. Although the culture of the events will be different—I know I won’t spend evenings gazing up at a star-studded western sky—I am hoping to find the same passion and commitment to social change through business in NYC that I found in Tucson.

_______

Regina Starr Ridley is the publishing director of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Posted by Regina Ridley

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