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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.

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.

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!

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.

Acknowledging the rising popularity around environmental and social issues, corporate responsibility campaigns have become very popular in recent years. Companies want to remind consumers what good they have done to promote their environmentally friendly products or to attract and hire new employees. A few of the corporate sustainability, socially-responsible marketing and “social strategy” firms expecting to grow by between 50-75% in the next few months include: Ethos JWT, BluSkye, Brown Flynn, and one of the field’s pioneers, our neighbor across the bay in Berkeley, Natural Logic.(See The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2007: “Agency Finds Social Responsibility Niche. Ethos Helps Companies Gain Marketing Benefit from Do-Good Efforts”). SVT and HIP Investor are collaborating with Brown Flynn to provide strategic insight on impact measurement and systems.  We’ll be expanding our list of collaborations this fall.
Read the story (requires subscription)
 
 

A dispute over a European emissions-trading proposal has caught U.S. airlines and airplane makers by surprise, spurring them to launch a public relations blitz highlighting their green bona fides, even if most of their work has been aimed at boosting their bottom lines. (See The Washington Post, July 28, 2007: “U.S. Airlines Under Pressure To Fly Greener; Carriers Already Trying to Save Fuel as Europe Proposes Plan”). Nancy N. Young, the new vice president of environmental affairs at the Air Transport Association, U.S. carriers’ main trade group said “We know that it’s coming here. . .Aviation has lost the public square in this debate. We need to do a better job of letting people know that our environmental interests are directly aligned with our business interests.”

It is evident that people inside and outside of the U.S. airline industry are looking at what is going in other parts of the  world, Europe in particular, to address environmental concerns, specifically global warming, and show that environmental interests are real interests that need to be addressed in every sector.

Read the story (requires subscription)

The New York Times (July 6, 2007: “In London’s Financial World, Carbon Trading Is the New Big Thing”) reported that within three years carbon dioxide trading has become very popular in London’s financial world. It noted that managing emissions has become one of the fastest-growing specialties in financial services, and companies are scrambling to find workers – their goal is a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion and that could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. More carbon was traded in London than in any other city – this is largely the result of a decision by European governments to start limiting the amounts that industries emit. Numerous investment banks are increasing the numbers of staff on their emission trading teams to keep up with this expanding market. Prospects for the industry are good, especially if the United States joins the Europeans in establishing a trading system.

Since carbon dioxide trading has become very popular in the London financial market and as a result companies are looking to expand their emission trading teams, we should continue to monitor this trend as it will likely spread to markets outside of London and become a big industry. It is evident that the financial world is finding environmental issues to be useful and important when evaluating businesses.

Read the story (requires subscription)

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