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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.

Thank you to the almost 40 people who joined us at Salesforce.com’s headquarters for the discussion on poverty alleviation and voluntary markets with Sierra Gorda, the Ecosystem Marketplace, Salesforce and SVT.

It was a lively and insightful discussion, but one that we hope is just the beginning of the dialogue. We invite you to use this space to exchange ideas about the next generation of carbon offsets and ecosystem services, to communicate directly with SVT or to think creatively about any of the panelists and their work.

Please note: You’ll have to register (free) to comment on this blog. Follow this link and click register. Give us a username and your email and we’ll send you a password right away.

Thanks again for your participation!

~The SVT Team

Putting a price on poverty and the planet: The new voluntary market for poverty alleviation and environmental services

Two emerging trends in the social capital marketplace are Social and Environmental Return on Investment (SROI) Analysis and the markets for Environmental Services, which build on carbon credit markets. Do these trends create tremendous opportunity, or hamstring progress?

The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve is the world’s leading laboratory for both trends, and has been grappling with the driving question: how can we compensate the residents of watersheds, forests and jungles for the ecosystem services that they provide and protect? Sierra Gorda has transacted one of the first trades of carbon offsets plus ecosystem services at $15/ton: a premium of $5/ton over carbon alone. Their ambition is to add a super premium product of carbon + ecosystem services + verified poverty alleviation.

Join us for a lively discussion about how the emerging market for this value might harness market forces to improve life.

Requested fee: $10 in advance or $15 at the door

Panelists:

Martha “Pati” Ruiz Corzo, Director of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve
Ricardo Bayon, Director, Editor-in-Chief of the Ecosystem Marketplace
Samjhana Upadhyay of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public’s Global Fellowship
Sara Olsen, Founding Partner, SVT Group
Corporate executive to be confirmed

Location: The Landmark Building, Salesforce.com headquarters
1 Market Street, San Francisco, CA
This event is open to the public, but space is limited. If you are interested in attending, please contact us at info(at)svtgroup(dot)net or call us

SVT is excited to have teamed up with R. Paul Herman’s newest venture, HIP Investor, in our first expansion into public equity impact analysis. We co-developed a framework that investigates the link between Human Impact and Profitability, and in collaboration with Fast Company have now applied it to 21 Fortune 500 companies. The company analyses are this month’s issue.
We also worked with FC’s web team to enable you to take a quiz to rate your own company’s HIPness. Check out the “Sensible Investing” article and company assessments.
The thesis behind this which I think Paul (the brains behind the HIP acronym) puts extremely well at his HIP Investor site, is that:
1. Human impact drives profit, a new source of value and innovation

2. Impact can – and should – be measured, such as Health, Wealth, Earth and Equality

3. Only those leaders, investors and organizations that pursue this approach will outperform and prove truly sustainable.

You can see the HIP Scorecard (HIP: Human Impact + Profit) and the companies we reviewed, and add your ratings too. Please pass the link on!
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Check out the new April issue of FastCompany magazine for a spread we did with HIP Investor. SVT and HIP interviewed 20+ public companies to gain insight into the interrelationship between their ‘human impact and profitability’ (HIP). We will post a link to the web component here once it goes live on the FastCompany site.

Metrical analysis is often characterized by a drive to find a common measurement or set of measurements by which organizations can be compared. The assumption is that the metric(s) acting as a proxy can effectively normalize the different results being measured, and thus provide insight into the value of the work, regardless of what the work is. Unfortunately it is not so simple. This speaks to a confusion between data and value—the former being empirical, the latter subjective. While this discrepancy has been recognized within the SROI methodology, it is important to delve deeper in the interest of clarification for emerging SROI practitioners.

For some the word ‘valuation’ carries with it a sense of profit, equity or financial returns. From this perspective, a critique of SROI might be that reducing social efforts to financial is simply feeding the fire that cases social problem to begin with—a desensitized number that gives little insight into the behind-the-scenes complexity. The value measured here, however, is contextual. The goal is not this desensitized representation using agreed upon terminology, but quite the opposite. SROI provides an opportunity to define value within a given situation, based on the unique qualities of a project.

Social return on investment allows valuation parameters to be defined for each project. Value is determined by the stakeholders and measured accordingly. That is not to say stakeholders only measure what is considered positive or successful, but what is directly relevant to their goals and project-specific characteristics. As such, value becomes a means of description for ground-level work rather than a means of creating a single metric for comparison across disparate projects.

Welcome to SVT Group’s official blog! We will communicate regularly here on a variety of topics. This blog is designed to allow SVT Group and its affiliates to express ideas, innovations, concerns, events or just about anything that comes to our minds. We invite you to check back often and comment on postings. If you have something you would like to post, please email us at blog(at)svtgroup(dot)net. On behalf of SVT Group, welcome to our interactive world.