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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.

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!

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.
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The New York Times today (May 21) covers a report on a study commissioned by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Education that “tries to put a dollar value on the state’s natural resources, from the Jersey Shore to the Kittatinny Mountains, to places like, well, Weehawken.” The article reports that values ranged from about $1,470 per acre in the Pine Barrens to $42,000 for the “environmentally essential sand dunes” at Beaches like Sandy Hook and Sea Girt.

The Times has also reported, most recently in April, on a similar study by UC Davis experts that assigned a monetary value to New York City’s trees (see “Maybe Only God Can Make a Tree,” April 18 by David K. Randall), specifically accounting for values including the carbon they sequester and the real estate price improvements they confer.

Both stories indicate to us that policymakers are finding social return on investment analysis to be an increasingly useful tool to raise awareness about all the benefits of natural assets when budget decisions are being made.