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Copied wholesale from the Cal press release on NewsBlaze LLC:

The 9th annual Global Social Venture Competition at the University of California’s Haas School of Business. Ten business school teams from the United States, Indonesia, Taiwan and France will present their plans for businesses with both a financial and a social or environmental bottom line.

The finalists’ business ideas range from microbial fuel cells and safe syringes to socially responsible outsourcing to Africa. Plan summaries are online at:
http://socialvc.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=237. The business plan presentations are open to the public.

The 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship will cap off the competition.
It will feature keynote addresses and panels as well as the announcement of and presentation by the competition’s Social Impact Assessment Prize winner, chosen from one of this year’s finalist teams.

- Global Social Venture Competition

WHEN: 8:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., Friday, April 18

WHERE: Wells Fargo Room, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. A map is online at: http://www.berkeley.edu/map.

- 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship (registration required)

WHEN:
9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday April 19

WHERE:
UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. A map and directions are online at: http://www.ahl-missionbay.com/directions.cfm.

WHO:
Pamela Hartigan, founding partner of Volans Ventures and founding managing director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and Jason Green, general partner of Emergence Capital Partners, among others.

BACKGROUND:
The competition was founded by five Berkeley MBA students at the Haas School of Business in 1999 and has since then grown into an international partnership between the Haas School, Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business and Yale School of Management.

Thammasat University in Thailand, ESSEC Business School in France, the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a consortium of business schools in South Korea called Social Venture Competition Korea provided additional support by soliciting MBA teams from their respective international regions.

The Global Social Venture Competition is the largest and oldest student-led business plan competition providing mentorship, exposure and financial awards to emerging social ventures from around the world.

For more information, go to http://www.gsvc.org or http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/2008GSVCSymposium.htm.

Susan Sanderman of Denver just forwarded this fascinating World Clock that shows the current status of major global health, environmental and social statistics, updated in real time.  It’s like an impact dashboard for the Planet!
This kind of ‘impact context’ should be a touchstone for any impact analysis– if focused down to the region where a company or organization does its work,  it makes a great starting point for what the “addressable market” is in terms of any of these social or environmental issues.  Working to prevent biodiversity loss?  Malaria?  Drowning?  Use your impact analysis to say not just, we’re preventing X instances, but also, “Here’s how much our solution will slow it from the current rate of loss.”  That makes it MUCH more meaningful.
World Clock’s makers compiled it from highly credible sources of statistical datasets, but they have not verified any of it and it may be spotty in parts, so it would be worth verifying if you use it.

Flaws in the way credit risk is assessed have played a critical role in the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown. At the same time, SVT is seeing increasing calls for ratings of risk in the emerging social capital markets: not just ratings of credit or financial risk, but also ratings of the likelihood of a certain social or environmental outcome. For example, this topic has come up in conversations about how to address the problems of cost and access in health care, where a need is being defined for not only better ratings of patients’ “credit risk” in the sense of their ability to pay so that healthcare providers might price services more affordably to a given individual and thus have a greater likelihood of receiving payment (nonpayment being a billion dollar problem for both healthcare providers and patients), but also for ratings of patients’ “health risk,” in terms of how individuals manage aspects of their health over which they have influence. The latter is analogous to an individual’s credit score, except here the score would be related to how well one had managed one’s health factors.

Another illustration is in the impact investing space, where there is both a desire to be able to gauge both what novel risks to financial return may exist in investment opportunities that have a social or environmental spin to them, and a desire to gauge in a simple, low-cost way the degree to which a given investment opportunity counts as a “positive impact” investment.

The key question is, how should health risk, or impact, or impact “risk,” be assessed? And, if it were, how would we know this was a good measure? What if it was flawed- would individuals who’d gotten a low “health credit score” be able to appeal? If so, to whom? Would companies who fill out ratings surveys to gauge their sustainability be held accountable for the accuracy of their self-reported data? By whom?
I like swishing around in this murky territory…. But no matter how unclear the answers are, one thing is certain. the fact that these conversations are taking place and experimental solutions are being piloted means the social capital marketplace is maturing into a full-fledged market.

Our friend Paul Herman sent this fabulous Squidoo list of 71 (and counting) Carbon Calculators, which Natural Logic’s Dave Jaber and Mike Wallace of Wallace Partners stocked.  You can rate your favorite!  Great place to start figuring out your contribution to global warming and how to minimize and offset it.

Human rights abuse issues are complex, nonlinear and ever-changing problems; the problem definition derives from solution strategy; the key stakeholder groups have radically different world views and frames of the problem, and often the problem can only be “solved” by group effort. All of these characteristics describe what sociologist Horst Rittel (1973) called “wicked problems.” You know what some are: terrorism, poverty, peace in the Middle East… along with many of the human rights issues two great human rights organizations, Ella Baker Center (EBC) and WITNESS, work to change.

We were hired to work with these two partners to develop an analysis of the social returns attributable specifically to System Failure– a wicked problem challenge. So we used a wicked problem solution strategy to define an approach. We had to capture the different stakeholders observations about what change had taken place and what caused it. The key impact question was, “What impacts are because of the specific event, organization, or specific aspect of the campaign?”

To determine this three types of information are needed from stakeholders.

1. Information about Magnitude
How big was the change?
How difficult was it to effect?

2. Information about Linkage
How did the film play a role?
How much did the film have to do with causing the change?

3. Information about Confidence
How sure are we that our rating of the linkage between the film and the change is accurate?
Our approach to SROI Analysis for Wicked Problems is summarized in this pdf (scroll down to the section called “also available from SVT”). Have you grappled with measurement of change in a wicked problem situation? How did you do it?

Michael Edesess, Boardmember of International Development Enterprises (IDE), reports that “The Economist magazine has a highly favorable review this week of my friend and colleague Paul Polak’s book ‘Out of Poverty.’…The book describes the methods that Paul and International Development Enterprises (IDE), the organization he founded, use to help the poorest people in the developing world earn more income.” I’m delighted to see it’s for sale on Amazon, rather than only found on a foundation’s site!
IDE received a $13M grant about a year ago from the Gates Foundation to scale its work, which has allowed Paul, now 74, the time to write. It’s excellent to see a person with so much to teach have the time and opportunity to write up and disseminate his knowledge! I wish so many other social entrepreneurs with great wisdom had the time and resources to document their work. If I were a philanthropist I’d invest in such a library of books– this amazing moment in the transformation of the capital markets should not be lost to history.

For example I’d love to see Martin Fisher of Kickstart, which has been pursuing similar goals with excellence, do a book with Paul where they share and perhaps debate what the both have learned over decades about the nuances and issues of delivering sustainable tools to solve poverty; or Pati Ruiz Corzo of Sierra Gorda and Albina Ruiz of Ciudad Saludable document and debate the differences between their approaches to engaging community members in economically and culturally sustainable protection and restoration of ecosystems. I’m talking about the nitty gritty- how does this stuff really work and what are the hard-won entrepreneurial lessons for people working in the trenches.
Fortunately John Elkington (SustainAbility) and Pamela Hartigan (Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship) have also just written The Power of Unreasonable People capturing some of these lessons learned, but although I have only yet read the book jacket I suspect they’ve gone light on the nitty gritty of their own trench stories, which I think would be fascinating and useful to know– but perhaps I better read it and find out!

Aflatoun: Child Savings International is laying the groundwork to roll out its SROI-based impact assessment framework, which it is calling “AQIS” (Aflatoun’s Quality assurance and Impact Assessment System), and held the first meeting of its Impact Advisory Committee a couple weeks ago.

The meeting was hosted by Greg Dees at Duke, chaired by John Elkington, and included committee members with tremendous experience and skill, including our SROI Guide co-author, Peter Scholten.
The attached outcomes report from the meeting summarizes the discussion and agreed next steps as Aflatoun prepares to roll out a system for measuring its impact as it scales its model to a targeted 100 countries. An excerpt of the key takeaways:

• At the heart of the discussion was the balance between “doing it” and “studying it”, and between scale and quality. The committee has given concrete input to find this balance
• The committee suggested to combine several approaches, including SROI, qualitative research and randomized evaluation, aiming to create a symbiotic strategy
• This combined strategy aims to answer both at organizational and external demands
• The committee has discussed strategic organizational partnerships for a sustainable process of AQIS. Members agree that it is a process of constant learning.

Aflatoun works with schools and other partners to teach the world’s poorest children the discipline of saving, and to build their sense of themselves as capable and responsible citizens of their communities.  Stay tuned for more as they begin rolling this out!

This week I’ve had three tantalizing conversations with totally unrelated people about their ingenious ideas for how to bring quality healthcare, renewable energy, and units of social impact to market at a price and via a delivery mechanism huge percentages of the world population can afford.

In two cases, these were people who have themselves made a few or more million dollars by innovating new products in their chosen fields (medicine, finance), and now they’re shifting their focus to entrepreneurial good-doing in both unrelated fields (renewable energy) and related (creating new exchanges, but this time it’s units of social value being traded for money). In the third the fellow’s motivation is partly that he wants to make a lot of money– but he wants to do it by transforming the inaccessible way healthcare is delivered in the US and in many other parts of the world. In every case these conversations were with men in their early 40s. As they get further along I will describe what they’re doing.
There are a lot of things about the relatively unfettered capitalism in the US and the resulting income gap that concern me, but I also see peoples’ desire to do something meaningful and genuinely innovative flourishing as a result of the wealth they might make or have already made in this system.

My goal is to make information about the negative and positive externalities of all products and companies tangible, so that the natural inclination of people to do good for both themselves and others can be catalyzed through the free market, rather than suppressed as it has been in the past in all too many cases. It’s deeply encouraging that these entrepreneurs are probably in the company now of thousands if not tens of thousands of other super smart, capable people, who have discovered that the capital market can be an engine for good, and they’re making it happen.

Blue Egg is a new website started by industry veterans to help regular people act sustainably while minimizing lifestyle sacrifices. Sustainable living is no longer for the hardcore! Blueegg.com co-founder and veteran journalist Cheryl Dahle recently caught up with SVT Founding Partner Sara Olsen to discuss ‘triple bottom line reporting’—financial performance in parallel with environmental and social impacts. Follow this link to read the story.