Blog

In a time when economies are failing and funding is tight, it’s hard to imagine that any investor would put funds into an organization that can promise little more than an attempt to meet a set of guiding principles. But they do. Repeatedly.

Imagine you went into a restaurant and rather than a menu, you were handed only a culinary Code of Conduct.

For your contribution of $10, we declare our intention to*:

1) Hire employees from the area surrounding the restaurant
2) Buy ingredients from a reputable supplier
3) Cook them into something we hope you will enjoy Read more...

Master’s degrees in business administration (MBAs) are expensive. Only a small percentage of people worldwide can afford them, and many graduates are saddled with debt that makes straying from the conventional corporate path difficult once they earn the degree. As corporations begin to take real steps toward sustainability, more opportunities exist for those who want to combine business careers with social justice and a net neutral impact on the planet’s ecosystem, but it is still outside of corporate life where the heart of social entrepreneurship beats. Read more...

New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) and Bertelsmann Stiftung will be hosting a conference in London this May, to discuss the subject of nonprofit analysis. It is an event for anyone who is interested in assessing charities and other nonprofits, and looking at their effectiveness.

The conference aims to create excitement and energy around the analysis of nonprofits as a discipline. We hope that it will give rise to a network of individuals from all over the world who will become the core of a new association. Read more...

The UC Berkeley Center for Executive Education and the UC Berkeley Center for Responsible Business will host a Corporate Responsiblity Leadership Program May 14-15, 2009. The program will provide two days of interactive instruction designed to strengthen senior executives’ efforts to integrate corporate responsibility into their business strategy. Read more...

Arul Velan and Dinesh Thirupuvanam, founders of San Francisco start-up Viv, have a bright idea – give businesses a simple way to go green while driving sales and profits. Viv is founded on two principles: 1) Small changes add up and 2) Give consumers the power to do good without going too far out of their way, and they will. Read more...

I am in Bangkok this week spending time at one of Southeast Asia’s premier MBA programs, Thammasat University, to participate in the judging event of the Global Social Venture Competition South East Asia Semifinals, and a question that hovers much of the time in the back of my mind has come to the fore. Social capitalists and entrepreneurs may in some cases be born, but where do you go if you want to learn the science of social investing or impact management? Read more...

SVT Group is one of about 180 B Corporations across the country. If you aren’t familiar with the B Corporation movement, it is an exciting development you’ll want to learn about. Read on for an overview of how B Corporations are paving the way to allow companies to embrace and enhance social and environmental (as opposed to strictly shareholder financial) value. Susan Hollingshead of B Lab graciously contributed the following. Read more...

The world’s leaders have convened the world’s top economists and financial engineers to come up with a solution to the global economic crisis. Unfortunately the tools economists and financiers use are, in a nutshell, designed to create an economy that generates short-term financial value. Yet in our derivative-and debt-laden world, short-term financial value creation has increasingly been divorced from the underlying basis and drivers of financial value. So, truly solving the current crisis is very unlikely to happen unless we add some new tools and adjust some of the old ones. Read more...

Each day I become more aware of how critical our water problems are becoming – the availability of water has profound implications for our health, productivity, and economic development, all of which will flounder in the absence of clean drinking water. Currently, 20% of the world’s population lives without enough water. Last week’s Clean Tech Forum was a chance for clean tech companies addressing this and other problems to “to fund and be funded” as 3p’s Jen Boynton pointed out. Read more...

With all this talk of the emerging social capital markets, doing well by doing good, impact investing, and triple bottom line considerations, I’ve recently been taking a harder look at my modest portfolio. More specifically, I’ve been looking at how my liquid cash is invested. (Long term investments in IRA, 401k, stocks, bonds, etc are a whole other story that I won’t address here.) Let me preface this all with - I am no expert, just looking for good places to put my money, and wanting to both share what I’ve found and open up the discussion to the community. Read more...