svtgroup.net

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.

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!

Aflatoun: Child Savings International is laying the groundwork to roll out its SROI-based impact assessment framework, which it is calling “AQIS” (Aflatoun’s Quality assurance and Impact Assessment System), and held the first meeting of its Impact Advisory Committee a couple weeks ago.

The meeting was hosted by Greg Dees at Duke, chaired by John Elkington, and included committee members with tremendous experience and skill, including our SROI Guide co-author, Peter Scholten.
The attached outcomes report from the meeting summarizes the discussion and agreed next steps as Aflatoun prepares to roll out a system for measuring its impact as it scales its model to a targeted 100 countries. An excerpt of the key takeaways:

• At the heart of the discussion was the balance between “doing it” and “studying it”, and between scale and quality. The committee has given concrete input to find this balance
• The committee suggested to combine several approaches, including SROI, qualitative research and randomized evaluation, aiming to create a symbiotic strategy
• This combined strategy aims to answer both at organizational and external demands
• The committee has discussed strategic organizational partnerships for a sustainable process of AQIS. Members agree that it is a process of constant learning.

Aflatoun works with schools and other partners to teach the world’s poorest children the discipline of saving, and to build their sense of themselves as capable and responsible citizens of their communities.  Stay tuned for more as they begin rolling this out!

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

David Satterthwaite, editor-in-chief of the Microcapital Monitor writes in the October 3rd 2006 edition of the MicroCapital Monitor: “We may look back on September 2006 as the catalyst month for microfinance. With the United Nations in session each year at this time and the Clinton Global Initiative staking claim to the three days that end the gathering of international leaders in New York City, energy and momentum are driving structural progress in almost all regions around the world per our top stories this month.
“We here at the MicroCapital Monitor saw more news volume this past month than in any month since our founding more than a year ago. But there’s more to what’s going on than sheer volume. The depth and integration of microfinance activities–together with mainstream organizations’ service capabilities–is really beginning to fill in the gap that has separated the poor from seeing sophisticated products and services at accessible prices. A true beginning is upon us.

“Indeed it’s early in this trend, but new, solid links between institutions of capital strength and those of local market know-how mean a more complete product-service continuum than we have seen to date.”

I just got back from the first national summit of the Initiative for Global Development, which was formed after 9/11 “to make the elimination of global poverty a [US] national priority.” The initiative showed truly phenomenal convening power (in order of appearance: Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, John Shalikashvili, George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer, Jim Wolfensohn, Mary Robinson, Ted Turner, Carly Fiorina and Jeffrey Sachs to name only a few) and while I came wondering whether the very high powered business and government people who were convened there would be aware of or would recognize the value of the social entrepreneurial and investing innovation going on out there in the xigi community, given its inherent unconventionality and their inherent conventionality, I left feeling tentatively optimistic. While many there probably do not see this as an emerging capital market yet, many of them definitely have their sleeves rolled up in pieces of it, and through IGD there is an opportunity for the larger group to begin to see the more systemic picture and the roles they can play in relation to it and each other. But, I also left still feeling concerned that there’s a lot of room for unintended negative consequences, since this group has a lot of horsepower, but the execution still lacks any systemic way of either assessing what good and bad is actually getting accomplished, or systematically incorporating the voices of the people the whole initiative intends to help.
What was affirmed from every speaker, not least of whom was Bush himself (at some length no less, and with evident passion), was the notion that it is both a business imperative, a national security priority and a moral necessity to “get on with it.”I thought Wolfensohn and Turner said it best. Wolfensohn painted the situation in big, eloquent brushstrokes which I won’t do justice to now but which went something like: in the next 40 years we’re moving from a world of 6 billion to 9 billion people, and one where Brazil, China and India replace the European countries among the G8, and the growth in the middle class is going to be in the 100s of millions if not billions but almost all of that will be in non-western regions. There’s both an opportunity for continued business growth of our economy here if these peoples’ wealth increases, and an opportunity to avoid the backlash now that they can see on the internet and cable what they have and don’t have relative to us. Not only this, but America has lost moral standing in the world– people don’t dislike us, but they think Americans are selfish. There is an opportunity, Wolfensohn said, to redefine what this country stands for– to restore the nation’s soul. We can think about what is good for business, and what’s good for our kids… and if we do nothing, our kids will have to deal with the consequences of that.
Or, as Turner put it: “let’s stop doing dumb things, and start doing smart things.”
Like I learned a long time ago from Shorebank’s founders (who weren’t at this meeting but who should be next time), the old-fashioned way of doing business used to be that you couldn’t do business in a place where people couldn’t afford to buy your products, or where your products harmed them, so you had to invest in creating the conditions for people that enabled them to do business with you. That kind of business seemed to get lost when the market grew to be international, but now that the world is shrinking again– fast– this gathering tried to remind us that the old-fashioned ethic is true once again.

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.