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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.

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!

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.

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.

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Right now I’m working on the social return on investment analysis of WITNESS’s campaign to reform the California Juvenile Justice System. The Schwab Foundation has put up funds to support small-scale Social Return on Investment Analyses (see the Framework paper, not yet loaded) for five enterprises and a workshop on SROI in January at their annual Summit preceding the World Economic Forum. How do you systematically capture and track the value created by a human rights video campaign?

I just put in their 22-minute 2001 video, Books Not Bars, the first of two they’ve helped produce and disseminate to catalyze movement. I expected to be impressed with the quality of the video, and probably to feel anger about the injustice they’re trying to expose, maybe some guilt or shame. The surprise was that about 15 minutes into it I started crying.

I’m wondering if this is related to sleep deprivation? I was out late and drank a lot…. or maybe hormones? It’s Sunday so I’m here in the office alone and free to overtly feel. I’m already feeling wired and anxious, ok, I admit it, intimidated– I really want Gillian and the others to think my analysis is worthwhile, and time is short and I’m doing it mostly by myself.

…maybe some of the faces remind me of the kids I taught and worked with in Chicago, or the 15-year old, sweet, black father whose purple crayon portrait I drew and gave to him in the all-volunteer education program at the juvenile detention center in Greenville, Misssissippi in 1994. It’s bringing back the raw feelings for those 2 years in the Delta and the years afterwards doing social work in Chicago: the overwhelming disillusionment about my country and about people in general when I realized how whole generations of people were systematically shut out and everybody could see it and they just went about their lives, that protracted grief and outrage combined with an extreme case of the twentysomething fear/angst that comes with the passage from college into real life when you’re ejected into a vaccuum without any context at all for the first time in your life.

It was because of that experience that I became a social entrepreneur. And it was because you can’t get enough d–n money to fund the work even when you’re doing the most truly necessary work there is that I became obsessed with how you measure non-financial value in a way the capital markets can use. So here I am, diving into this analysis in hopes it is somewhat additive to the smart metrics Gillian and her team have already, and in hopes I can help paint a convincing picture for her and the other Schwabbies that if enough social entrepreneurs use the same process for assessing and reporting their social value, the capital markets will move differently.

The stats are a thin extraction from the video that I can put into words: the US is the world’s largest jailer… 1/4 of the world’s prisoners are in America… 1 in 10 black men here are in jail… a black kid is 48X more likely than a white kid to do time when arrested on a drug-related charge… 3 in 5 kids will become reinvolved in the system after their release. Spending on prisons up 800 percent in the past 20 years- a pretty frigging great IRR for somebody and a pretty crap one for a whole bunch of others. How does that compare to other US industries?

Now on to the job at hand: an experimental, systematic valuation of the role WITNESS’s video has actually played in this human rights campaign. Empirical evidence of impact item #1: 15 minutes to tears.