25 years of pioneering and advancing Impact Management
Impact Pioneers
2001-2005
SVT launches as one of the world’s first firms devoted to measuring and managing social and environmental value among private sector enterprises.
Its first clients – Shorebank and Rockefeller Foundation’s ProVenEx – use SVT’s frameworks to assess impact in investment portfolios.
SVT coauthors the first standardized SROI Guidelines in California Management Review, laying the groundwork for the discipline of impact accounting.
Emerging Standards
2006-2011
SVT leads early SROI analyses for Schwab Foundation fellows at the World Economic Forum in Davos and coauthors the first book on SROI.
SVT becomes an inaugural certified B Corp.
Clients to date include CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the US; a savings and loan working to transform banking from cannibalistic to beneficial to customers, and nonprofits– all voluntarily accounting for their impact.
Sara Olsen helps seed the SROI Network (later Social Value International) and co-chairs its methodology committee that defines its global guidance.
Growing Capacity
2012–2016
SVT designs impact-measurement systems for Fair Trade USA and the Global Fund for Women to embed impact measurement into their global standards and processes.
Sara Olsen testifies with other B Corp executives in Sacramento on the introduction of Benefit Corporation legislation, and creates graduate courses in impact management at two graduate business schools.
SVT helps AEA and Social Value US conceive Impact Convergence, the first conference uniting professional impact analysts, and co-authors SSIR’s “The Next Frontier in Impact Measurement Isn’t Measurement at All.”
Toward the Mainstream
2017-2019
While serving for-profit and nonprofit clients self-motivated to understand and manage their impact, SVT continues to raise awareness and build capacity.
With several founding board members, Sara and David Pritchard successfully establish Social Value US as a national network of Social Value International.
SVT Publishes an industry landscape, The Pulse of Impact Management, contributes to The Impact Assets Handbook for Investors, and moderates an Impact Management Project “huddle” on impact monetization as part of its work to harmonize impact management and disclosure standards. SVT convenes a Roundtable on the Future of Impact Management at the Haas School of Business, helping define how investors track and report their impact.
System Change, AI, and Future Outlook
2020-2026
Amid the pandemic, impact management education goes online. SVT explores establishing a clearinghouse for high quality impact management education, and ways to overcome resistance to impact management and disclosure regulation from business as usual.
SVT developed and open-sourced the Happiness Return Framework for venture capital with Happiness Capital. To address the unspoken resistance that often hinders successful solutions, we co-founded RIDER (Rural Innovation Driving Equitable Resilience) with 5 sites working to cut rural child poverty, demonstrating a replicable model of community co-creation for system-level impact. The New York Fed recognizes RIDER as one of its design teams for an economy that works for all.
Also partnered with Sanai AI and Red Sea Futures to apply artificial intelligence to community-led systems change in low-resource communities domestically and abroad.