Some of you might remember my blog post from when I joined the slate green challenge and found out about my atrocious carbon emissions rating. In one year, I (shamefully) used an estimated 59,999 pounds of carbon dioxide which is equivalent to 5.89 passenger car emissions. Since then, I have been living in Arusha trying to reuse all bottles, waste less, walk lots of places instead of taking a vehicle (except at night), and be more aware of my energy use. I am sure the frequent involuntary power outages help to diminish my pollution rate. On a street where most people do not have electricity for their mud and stick built houses, I feel lucky I have electricity at all.

Going to England last week for the Acumen Fellows mid-year meeting and the Skoll Forum really darkened my good efforts toward better energy use. The airline flight alone was equal to 2235 pounds of carbon dioxide. This one trip was almost the equivalent to one person’s carbon emissions for an entire year if he/she lives in India. Looking at the nearly 600 names on the delegate list of the conference I was attending, I thought about the irony, “Wow, the airplanes delivering us all to Oxford surely are making a dent on the environment. Even after Al Gore spoke about climate change at the same conference last year, we all still justify the flights to get to the UK to talk about changing the world.” Do we have to bang our heads against the wall to finally understand what consequences we are facing? In this video below, even the Blue Man Group thinks so (click arrow below to hear their message on the environment).

I will continue to update you on my carbon emissions challenge, and if you want to find out more about what you can do, click here.

After the Skoll Forum concluded, a private session was held for those engaged in financing social ventures.  In a room of about sixty people, the Skoll Centre’s Alex Nicholls opened the discussions which ranged from talk of a new capitalism to talk of whether evidence of new instruments designed to support social ventures are demonstrative of a new “social capital market” or simply a blossoming section of the mainstream capital markets.  This session aimed at informing the research of the Skoll Centre on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford.  Here is what was on the agenda and my notes to share with you:

1) Update on www.xigi.net

Unleashed at last year’s forum, www.xigi.net is a website containing relational mapping, deal posting, a blog, biographies of key people in the space, etc.  Tim Freundlich and Kevin Jones showed just how exciting it can be to use technology to map this space through user-generated content.  You can put yourself on the map by visiting xigi.net or just go there to understand the networks of actors in the field of financing social change.  

 
2) Recently Published Paper:  “Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained” by Keely Stevenson (yours truly), Jim Fruchterman , Jed Emerson, Tim Freundlich and Loren Berlin

Unleashed at this meeting, was a new paper that I contributed to which identified the critical gaps in risk taking capital for social enterprises.  

You can read our paper by clicking here.

 
The creation of this paper was sparked at last year’s Skoll Forum (which focused on finance) when Jim Fruchterman stood up and forced everyone to remember that there is a significant gap in finance available for growth of social ventures- an issue which had been skirted around in the panel discussion with little perspective from the practitioner.  At this year’s Finance4Change meeting, our paper led Jan Piercy of Shorebank to state that more of this type of writing needs to be done- more research which is useful to the practitioner.  I admit that even this paper is somewhat in between theory and practice so there is much more to be done on the ends of both of those extremes.

3) Recently Published Paper:  ‘Mapping the Boundaries of Social Finance:  A Review of the Current Landscape’ by Cathy Pharoah and Alex Nicholls

 
This research attempts to provide a holistic account of the “state of play” in the emerging field of social finance, defined as the flow of resources that bridge the gap between grant funding and earned income for organizations that primarily create social or environmental value.  Mapping a moving target is a challenging venture, so I thought that this paper did a good job of especially showcasing many of the UK innovations in social finance. 

4) Draft Paper Discussion: ‘Venture Philanthropy Beyond a Cheque; How Do Venture Philanthropists Add Value?’ by Rob John

 
I had the honor of working with Rob on a business plan for an Oxford Venture Philanthropy Fund a few years ago.  At this Finance4 Change meeting, he presented an excellent draft paper that focused on the non-financial services provided to social purpose organizations in addition to finance.  A venture philanthropist (VP) will differ from a traditional philanthropist in that he/she is much more engaged in supporting the strategic and operational aspects of an organization to which he/she provides finance (a board seat, strategy consulting, etc.)  He revealed interesting findings from a survey conducted of 34 venture philanthropists (in Europe, US and Australia) and 20 social entrepreneurs who receive VP support.  While in draft format, several findings intrigued me:  European VP funders using debt/equity instruments were in central;/eastern Europe, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, France, Ireland and the UK.  VPs feel the most important services to offer social entrepreneurs are strategy/business planning, revenue generation and financial management.  Social entrepreneurs feel that the most important services to receive are strategy consulting, access to networks and coaching.  I found Rob’s work to be appropriately focused on how to identify and measure quality of the supply of services and best understand the demand of services offered by VPs.  Since these services distinguish VP over traditional philanthropy, Rob’s continued research is quite important to validating (or not) their worth to the field.

5)  Draft Paper Discussion:  ‘From Fragmentation to Functionality:  Critical Concepts and Writings on Social Capital Market Structure, Operation, and Innovation’ by Jed Emerson and Joshua Spitzer.

This paper was also presented in draft format and ultimately “aspires to encourage more funds to flow through investment that themselves aim to generate social and/or environmental value in partnership with some level of financial performance… Those flows should be performance based and investments should adopt structures serving the needs of investors and investees.”  The paper’s secondary goals are to help focus the “future research and praxis on efforts that build on the significant existing work…and promote an elevated discussion of the social capital markets.”  The paper itself was not discussed in our meeting, but having read it since, I found it quite comprehensive.  Instead, Jed and Joshua focused the meeting on the need to stop reinventing the wheel with new research that has been already covered and move forward with a common foundation that is useful…thus the title, from Fragmentation to Functionality.   

6)  Presentation by Maximilian Martin of UBS Philanthropy Services

Maximilian provided an interesting overview on evolution, investor motivation and frameworks of financial innovation in social investment.  Beginning first with the point that last year the market was observed to be in its infancy, with fiduciary duty constraints on mission-related investing (MRI= market rate investments with a social benefit) and pockets of knowledge fragmented (neither CSO or a bank alone can develop social investment solutions).  He then said that the framework is evolving for conditions of social investment (transparency regarding investment preferences is increasing, new legal frameworks have come into play with the distinction of non-profit and for-profit transcended.  He concluded with how “niches for financial innovations remain untaken” and how setting up pilots could result in the later adaptation to the retail segment.  UBS is leading the way for other commercial banks in the quality of its philanthropy services and commitment to contributing its learning to the field.  In addition to Maximilian’s power point presentation, a longer paper was circulated covering the drivers for philanthropic support for social entrepreneurs and exploring how financial service intermediaries (such as UBS) can add value in the process.

I found the papers distributed at the Finance4Change meeting to be the most valuable information I received at the Skoll Forum.  Given John Elkington’s comments on an earlier panel that SustainAbility’s recent survey of social entrepreneurs showed that access to capital was rated as their highest concern, it is an urgent matter for anyone who cares about social change.  I do feel that we are at an exciting point in history when social change could occur in much larger waves if we attract more appropriate capital to social ventures, build their capacity to use it effectively and codify our approaches and measure the success along the way.  This meeting was a room full of people focused on doing just that. 

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Since the launch of Social Edge several years ago, this community has debated over definitions of the term social entrepreneurship.  Most recently, I have heard it debated at the Skoll Forum, and I began to ask myself, “does definition really matter if people are doing good work?”  While the practice of social entrepreneurship has been around for a while, the discussions of how to define this field are nascent and often include wide ranging activities.  The visionary and founder of Ashoka Innovators for the Public (the leading network of social entrepreneurs), Bill Drayton, announced last week at the Skoll Forum that he considers a new article written by Sally Osberg and Roger Martin to be one of the best pieces ever written. Sally and Roger argue that as the field attracts more talent and money, it is time for a more rigorous definition of who a social entrepreneur is and what he or she actually does.  Their main concern is that by not defining it tightly, “serious thinkers will overlook social entrepreneurship, and that the indiscriminate use of the term may undermine its significance and potential importance to those seeking to understand how societies change and progress.”

They distinguish social entrepreneurship from social activism and from social service provision.  A social entrepreneur is one who “targets an unfortunate but stable equilibrium that causes the neglect, marginalization, or suffering of a segment of humanity who brings to bear on this situation his or her inspiration, direct action, creativity, courage and fortitude and who aims for and ultimately affects the establishment of a new stable equilibrium that secures permanent benefit for the targeted group and society at large.”  Social activists also look to create and sustain a new equilibrium in society, but they are often indirect in their nature of action (Martin Luther King Jr, Gandhi, Vaclav Havel) and therefore not considered social entrepreneurs.  Social service providers are just the opposite; they are maintaining and improving an extant system and their nature of action is direct (someone who sees the problem of AIDS orphans in Africa, so begins one school to address it).  I found the article a very well written piece that clarified my own thinking.  To read the article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, click here. 

One of the most sincere stories shared at the Forum was by Skoll Award winner Roshaneh Zafar who told us of a young woman who had been empowered through microfinance.  Later in the session, we heard how recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, Professor Muhammad Yunus,  inspired Roshaneh to start the Kashf Foundation (meaning miracle in Arabic).  When people told Roshaneh that microfinance would not work in Pakistan, Professor Yunus told her, “You Must Believe in Yourself.”  Now, more than 100,000 families have since been taken out of poverty through microfinance opportunities offered at Kashf.  She not only believed in herself, she believed in all the women in Pakistan who were worthy of being empowered by what she was about to build.

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What do you imagine for the world in the near future?  Do you fall in the camp of Cambridge University scientist Martin Reese who believes that civilization has only a 50% chance of surviving another century?  Or do you believe that some amazing people out there help us move from cynicism to hope?  Jeff Skoll stated that terms like “social entrepreneur” cannot begin to describe what hope looks like.  Realized hope is the Promise of social entrepreneurship and that is what we celebrated at the Forum- so tangible you could feel it….or even hear it as the crowd stood up and clapped to the rhythm of Salman Ahmad’s music.   

We were then reminded of the possibilities as these newspaper headlines flashed on a screen in front of us:

• New AIDS cases fall to zero in Africa.
• Child soldiers exchange all guns for books in Africa.
• US imports last barrel of oil:  Carbon output reaches all-time low.
• Last of Nuclear weapons destroyed.
• Israel & Palestine celebrate 10 years of peace.
• Last of nuclear weapons destroyed.
• Snow returns to Kilimanjaro.

The final clip showed John Gardner’s words: “We have before us some breathtaking opportunities disguised as insolvable problems.”

This indeed was the message echoed on the closing day from Larry Brilliant who leads Google.org (the charitable arm or Google.com).  Larry laid out for us a case for pessimism and a case for optimism.

First, the case for pessimism:  85,000 riots in China last year, increasing number of disasters (natural, human, etc), Darfur at its origin a resource war, more growing sick and hungry, religious tension leading to major conflict.  And all this combined with the fact the people around the world can witness it on the Internet, their cell phones, the newspapers.  Some will get angry, some will withdraw, some will latch onto materialism….all ultimately spiraling downwards.

So Larry asks us (just as John Gardner has in the past), as social entrepreneurs, will we be despondent or energized by these challenges?

The case for optimism: He then flashed a picture of Nobel Laureates on the screen and said “human beings have always risen to the occasion.”  Eradication of guinea worm, the fact that new wealth is investing in social development instead of passing it to their family in the next generation, and just a few weeks ago, activists from the business community (yes, the “business” community) stopped a coal fired electrical plant that would have contributed to destroying the earth.  The most powerful of his cases for optimism was the story of the eradication of small pox, which he witnessed himself when he worked for the World Health Organization (WHO).  Small pox is one of the worst diseases in history having killed nearly half a billion people (more than any other infectious disease or all wars put together).  To eradicate it, the largest UN army in history was required.  In Larry’s first job out of medical school, he had 150,000 WHO people working for him and they made over one billion house calls in India searching for small pox.   Just when they thought they had gotten all the cases, a small outbreak in a city with migrant workers spread it all over again- millions suffering.  An important lesson for us all:  the last inch matters- stay strong until the end.  But his point was the end did come.  A disease that no one thought could be controlled is no longer a threat to us.  A bond between doctors and health workers from 30 different countries was created and together against a common enemy, not each other, they won.

As Larry flashed on the screen in front of us a picture Rehema Banu, a young child who was the last case of small pox in the world, it was clear that we have done it in the past, and we can do it again if we do not give up.  I must say, the case for optimism certainly won me over.

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John Elkington announced a recent report titled “Growing Opportunity” which is the first of several annual publications to be produced in partnership with SustainAbility and the Skoll Foundation.  The report attempts to assess the current state of social entrepreneurship — the possibilities presented by new mindsets, the challenges entrepreneurs face in scaling their organizations and the opportunities for greater collaboration with corporations and others.

The main conclusions were these:

• Social entrepreneurship is on a roll.
• The potential for breakthrough solutions is considerable and growing.
• The field is growing, but still relatively small.
• Money remains the main headache.
• Financial self-sufficiency is seen as a real prospect within five years.
• There is a real appetite to partner with business.
• Beware of blind spots.
• For real system change, we must focus on government and public policy.

To read the full report, you can click on SustainAbility’s Entrepreneurial Solutions homepage.

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On opening night of the Skoll Forum, the walls of Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theater echoed with the delightful music of Salman Ahmad, who is a Pakistani musician, UN Goodwill Ambassador HIV/AIDS, and the founder of Junoon, South Asia’s most popular rock band.  He began with a song about Baba Bulicia (not sure of spelling- sorry) from 17th century Pakistan who was a student at an Islamic school.  The story goes that one day he asked his teacher what was the point of washing hands and feet if his heart was not clean?  The teacher replied saying one does not get to ask such questions here, but instead must follow rituals like everyone else around him.  So, he left the school, grew his hair long and picked up an instrument to sing a song that starts, “I’m not pure. I am not vile. Who am I?”

 

The concept of purity is something that came up several times in conversation over the few days of the Forum.  It came up once in conversation about a tough relationship between an investor and an entrepreneur, once in discussion of the role of government policy and politics to facilitate change and another time in a personal discussion with a friend who has scaled back some of his dreams for becoming a highly visible leader of social movements and is coming to terms with his choices to affect change in other ways that are perhaps not his day job.

 

Almost nothing is pure in this world.  It is important for us to set realistic expectations so we don’t give up on ourselves, our organizations or the world.  Amazing things happen regardless of purities.  We are all something in between what Baba Bulicia was exploring in his song- its ok.

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Four years ago sparked a tradition for me of being actively engaged in this exciting gathering of the Skoll World Forum- I have spoke on panels, helped plan speaker lists, blogged, hosted social finance dinners, prepped keynotes, stuffed binders, marketed like crazy and after-partied with the best of them.  It has always been a wonderful place to feel like you are a part of a very special community working toward something greater than yourself.  I am consistently inspired with all that I learn and all the amazing new people I meet. 

 

Here are the topics I heard the most buzz about this year:

1. There is a strong need to develop next generation leadership in the sector.  Attracting and developing talent is going to be a critical challenge moving forward.
2. Tension exists between highlighting the role of the individual (hero social entrepreneur) vs. the team.
3. Scale is on everyone’s mind, but no one is sure of the road to get there.
4. More social entrepreneurs are recognizing the role of government and the corporate sector participation to achieve large scale social change rather than seeing them as the problem.
5. There is a transition to seeking more mainstream investment capital to grow social ventures, yet the ramifications for reporting, governance and growth are not yet widely understood.

 

Yet this year, the thing I valued most was not in fact introductions to new ideas from panels or award ceremonies, but it was the chance to spend quality time reconnecting with old friends who inspire me…the kind of friends who remind you of who you are even when you can’t remember anymore.  We skipped some sessions and made time to drill down deeper into each other’s personal lives, professional struggles and triumphs as changemakers.  Honestly, I was more inspired by the life decisions and work of these few individuals than most of the social entrepreneurs in the conference. 

 

I also had the chance before the Forum to spend a few days with the Acumen Fund Fellows, who had flown in from India, Pakistan, Washington DC (on the way to China), Kenya and Tanzania.  As a team, we are trying to develop a framework for sharing the common lessons from the enterprises we work with across Acumen Fund’s portfolios.  This is no easy task given how busy we are in the field, so the opportunity to drill down and better understand the business models and what is working/ what isn’t working was priceless.  So what exactly are we learning: the health related enterprises can enhance their business models (especially with clinical care) by learning from each other, high paced growth can present major challenges for human resource management (motivation, training and retaining talent, role definition and performance management), personal relationships with the entrepreneur and investor are not always easy to develop and take a great deal of energy and resources to get right.

 

Again, it wasn’t a new person or enterprise concept that inspired me (as they did in the first 3 years of the Forum), it was the chance to understand better the stitching of threads that make up my existing relationships and known concepts.

 

Another highlight was to spend time with the Skoll Foundation team, which I used to be a part of, and my fellow bloggers on Social Edge.  It was lovely to talk with Jeff Skoll again, who Sally Osberg so eloquently referred to in her speech as the Charles Dickens of our time, sharing stories of the humanity of the poor with his readers- inspiring social change through storytelling.  Although Jeff’s media company and foundation initiatives are making waves in influencing the general public (the film An Inconvenient Truth raising climate change issues for example), Jeff so humorously urged Sally not to set “Great Expectations” and called her the master editor behind Dickens who turns crazy ideas into masterpieces.

 

As the media partner for the Forum, Social Edge hosted a wonderful dinner on the second night of the Forum where I enjoyed talking to the Berkeley Bottom Line Bloggers about everything from Telegraph Ave to the opportunity in front of us to reshape corporate America and capitalism as we know it.  One of them (Edwin) I already knew from his days at Benetech, but the others (Ellen & Rob) each were also finding great stories at the Forum (you can read their blogs here

.   I graduated from Berkeley many years ago, and I always find the students there to have a very open and idealistic perspective on the future—these peeps certainly did-- Go Bears!  

 

I also had a great meeting with the new Dean of the Said Business School (Colin Mayer) and the past and current Skoll Scholars on Social Entrepreneurship.  The five current Scholars had just completed a tough sleepless term of wild financial modeling, marketing madness and group new business projects—given the intensity of this one year MBA for social entrepreneurs, we were lucky they were still alive to tell the tale.  After a round sharing our background and hopes for the future, we co-constructed strategies to engender leadership and a sense of community among Skoll Scholars past and present.   

 

So this year’s conference theme was about innovation.  In a session with Peter Wheeler (co-founder of www.social-impact.org), he challenged us “to make innovation history,” saying that there are so many great models for social change out there that just need more support in enhancing their impact.  In many ways, I felt like my time at this conference was more about mining the existing knowledge and relationships I have for diamonds of inspiration and collaboration rather than searching for innovative new ones.  What a wonderful discovery.

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At first we wondered:  will anyone show up at 8am for our session at the Skoll World Forum? Luckily, they did… likely due to our promises of the provision of chocolate and due to the creative use of bright colored flyers handwritten with messages such as:

 

“Can you afford a mosquito net?”

and

“SEX (education) DRUGS (to cure malaria) and ROCK & ROLL (Acumen Fellows)”

 

All strategically placed around town, in Oxford’s business school’s bathroom stalls (captive audience!), and passed around throughout the conference.

 

The discussion focused on three challenging themes:  marketing, pricing and operations for scaling.  We shared what each of us has been learning by working with Acumen Fund’s social ventures creating goods and services for the poor in the areas of health, water, housing and energy.  In pricing, we struggled with the challenges of whether subsidies are effective in the long run and most models examined found that some form of subsidy (at least in healthcare) was necessary to address pressing health problems.  In marketing we found that traditional methods are simply not working.  Medicine Shoppe in India, for example, was well branded with clean signs in English in poor areas.  This intimidated some of the people in this community and prevented them from coming into the store for fear it would be too expensive for them.  Instead, Medicine Shoppe went door to door telling the community about its free health clinic services and new pharmacy, which worked much better.  In operations, strong supply chain systems and MIS systems were the key to effective management when scaling.

 

Greg Dees, pioneer academic in the field of social entrepreneurship, asked us a good question:  What is our definition of “market-based solutions” to address problems of the poor?  Do we consider models that are just cost recovery for the enterprise or profit- maximizing?  I will blog a much longer post on this in the next month, but I will leave that to the readers…what is your definition of market-based solutions?

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The official ceremony for the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship highlighted several amazing stories of social entrepreneurs working around the world.  I am a fan of calling social entrepreneurs heroes for a while.  I can only hope that one day the kids in my neighborhood aspire to be more than a Michael Jordan or the hottest new gangster rap star.  What if they actually did say, “I want to be just like Jim Fruchterman whose passion led to creating technologies to benefit humanity…or just like Muhammad Yunus whose passion led to millions moving out of poverty through microfinance… or just like Ann Cotton, whose vision of educating African girls led to empowerment of thousands…or even just like Florence Nightingale whose passion led to a reshaping of the provision of healthcare by nurses?

Having heroes actually calls attention to the entire sport or industry for us novices out there.  Some of us may never had watched a basketball game if it weren’t for Michael Jordon- hero.  Our field of social entrepreneurship is in an exciting transition from being thought of as marginalized “charitable work” to being considered necessary mainstream “entrepreneurial approaches” to social and environmental development.  In fact, Bill Drayton claims that the citizen sector is the fastest growing sector overall.  During this transition, we must try as best we can to highlight the good news.  Highlight the fact that social entrepreneurship is working.  Human beings best identify with individuals, so the most effective stories to hook people in the meantime are going to start with an individual.

Now there is much concern about the individual social entrepreneur getting too much attention.  For example, Jessica Shortall has written about it in her blog.  I completely agree that we do run this risk of missing the point that there is a whole ecosystem engaged in making social change models successful, including a hard working team.  In fact, often there were dynamic duo teams recognized at the Forum, such as Nick Moon and Martin Fischer of Kickstart, which creates appropriate technology for small scale farmers like the ones in my town in Tanzania.   The importance of team was never more evident in Oxford’s magical Sheldonian Theater this week when the Skoll Foundation shared the story of CIDA City Campus led by Taddy Blecher and his team in South Africa.  CIDA is the first free university in Africa.  The school itself is almost entirely student run so the costs are low and the students also get exposed to valuable experiential learning opportunities on the principles of operations and management.  In addition to their classroom learning, they strengthen their work ethic and learn valuable skills by doing all the school’s cleaning, paperwork processing and planning. Without Taddy’s vision, this university would not have materialized, but without the students’ management, it would not be successfully run.  Taddy has a vision for opening such educational institutions run by students across the whole of Africa.  Without Taddy though, how many people would have heard of this amazing model?  Simplicity in stories is what makes them easier to grasp and then spread.  We must keep things simple.

For the long term, I agree we eventually need to move away from only highlighting the hero social entrepreneur, but for now, I think it is a risk to speak in complex generalities about our nascent field without highlighting the leaders that inspire the world to do more.  It is these stories of individuals that are giving us momentum towards the mainstream where attracting more talent and capital can increase our impact.