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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.

Flaws in the way credit risk is assessed have played a critical role in the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown. At the same time, SVT is seeing increasing calls for ratings of risk in the emerging social capital markets: not just ratings of credit or financial risk, but also ratings of the likelihood of a certain social or environmental outcome. For example, this topic has come up in conversations about how to address the problems of cost and access in health care, where a need is being defined for not only better ratings of patients’ “credit risk” in the sense of their ability to pay so that healthcare providers might price services more affordably to a given individual and thus have a greater likelihood of receiving payment (nonpayment being a billion dollar problem for both healthcare providers and patients), but also for ratings of patients’ “health risk,” in terms of how individuals manage aspects of their health over which they have influence. The latter is analogous to an individual’s credit score, except here the score would be related to how well one had managed one’s health factors.

Another illustration is in the impact investing space, where there is both a desire to be able to gauge both what novel risks to financial return may exist in investment opportunities that have a social or environmental spin to them, and a desire to gauge in a simple, low-cost way the degree to which a given investment opportunity counts as a “positive impact” investment.

The key question is, how should health risk, or impact, or impact “risk,” be assessed? And, if it were, how would we know this was a good measure? What if it was flawed- would individuals who’d gotten a low “health credit score” be able to appeal? If so, to whom? Would companies who fill out ratings surveys to gauge their sustainability be held accountable for the accuracy of their self-reported data? By whom?
I like swishing around in this murky territory…. But no matter how unclear the answers are, one thing is certain. the fact that these conversations are taking place and experimental solutions are being piloted means the social capital marketplace is maturing into a full-fledged market.

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.

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!

Peter Scholten of Amsterdam’s Scholten & Franssen, Jeremy Nicholls of new economics foundation in the UK, and Brett Galimidi and I from SVT just published a Guide to SROI Analysis that is a sort of workbook with updates that took place over 2004-2005 to the Social Return on Investment methodology. This book is a revision of the original paper Jeremy and I wrote that documented a framework that a group led by Jed Emerson and Sheila Bonini of Hewlett Foundation’s Blended Value Project brought together in 2003. This group included Peter, Jeremy, Jed, Sheila, me, and Stephanie Robertson (then of London Business School and the GSVC, now of SiMPACT Strategy Group in Canada), Robert Tolmach (then of Glasses for Humanity and now Important Gifts and Wellgood LLC in New York) and Betsy Biemann (then of the Rockefeller Foundation, now running the Maine Technology Institute.
The new book has several good current case studies and a step-by-step description of how to perform the quantitative and monetizable calculations of SROI.
We’re distributing it to faculty at business, environmental, social service and other management programs. We’re talking about incorporating it into curriculum and about updating it with the help of a university press.

We’re also looking forward to expanding on this book with a new one that includes advances in how to incorporate qualitative and narrative information, how to lower cost while improving quality, and how reports can be formatted for user-friendliness.