• First, it seems contrary to the spirit of Wikipedia itself as an open forum where opposing viewpoints are aired.
• Second, the concept of social enterprise and business dates back at least 150 years in the UK to the Rochdale pioneers, founders of the cooperative movement, and the great Victorian social businesses (like Cadbury’s) and the mutual societies. The Wikipedia entry contained no reference to these. Such historical revisionism gives me a slightly Orwellian chill.
• Third,ClearlySo has an undeniable commercial interest in a broader definition. Many of our 1400+ social business and enterprise (SBEs) members from over 40 countries would be unnecessarily excluded from the ranks of social business, although this is how they see themselves.
• Finally, there is a risk that by limiting the category only to non-profit businesses you undermine the basis for much social investment in the UK, Europe and the United States. This would be seriously damaging and seems unnecessary.

• Is there no room for several definitions of what a social enterprise/business is?
• Can we recognise that the Grameen approach of leveraging substantial amounts of corporate capital in exchange for the CSR benefits is but one approach to enabling the social economy?
• Is it not possible that opportunities for social investment in Europe and the US are very different from those that exist in Bangladesh where Grameen was founded?

What Will It Take For Disaster Response To Do More Good and No Harm?

1. Structuring Response: How can disaster response be structured to tap local community-led solutions and resources in the impact zone, foster resilience and avoid dependency? 
2. Applying Social Entrepreneur Tenants: What tenants of social entrepreneurism can be applied to coordination of agency efforts in the disaster zone to avoid tripping over each other?
3. Buying Local: How can local or regional producers of food and essential supplies become the source of same so that the local economy is not unintentionally undermined?
4. Donor Education: How can individual donors make better giving decisions by tapping the best of both their emotional and rationale brains in a time of wrenching human need?

• Deepening Donor Commitment: Katya Andresen, COO of Network for Good and I wonder: How can donors giving via cell phone or on-line be converted from one-time emotional responses to on-going engagement and support?
• Donation Designation: There is starting to be more discussion about the relative impact of different kinds of disaster response. Should NGOs provide donors an opportunity to designate what their donations do? Fund immediate needs for food, water, tents. Fund permanent housing and infrastructure rebuild. Fund initiatives to change building codes, reduce poverty and prevent future disaster fallout...

• Do you think entrepreneurs should talk more openly about their underlying beliefs or is it simply not relevant or useful?
• Do you feel like there is an unspoken taboo preventing the sharing of personal beliefs?
• Do you feel comfortable expressing your own beliefs openly and would you like other entrepreneurs to do the same?

• Setting clear objectives
• A method of engagement: capacity-building
• Critical listening
• Validation imago/reflection
• Crucial conversations
• Conflict-to-cooperation conversations
• Deliverables
• Coaching/mentoring
• Sustainability
• The cycle continues: more capacity-building

If you look to the left (I mean that literally—to the left hand column of the Social Edge homepage) you will see a rather silly photograph of me and the words A Clearly Social Economy.  This is meant as a clever play on the name of our business (ClearlySo) and the social economy we all wish to help bring about. But just because we want desperately for something to happen does not mean it will, and I have a profound weakness for hopeless causes. My football team (soccer, to you Yanks) has little chance of surviving in the top division and my political party seems to be a perennial third place finisher in a two-horse race. Is a truly social economy just a pipe dream?

On the investment side, despite all the talk, the flow of funds is just a trickle. Foundations, with few exceptions, keep talking about social investment but doing little—here the USA is uniquely advantaged because of the requirement to spend at least 5% of fund assets each year (a requirement absent in most other countries), against which “Mission Related Investment” counts. So that is relatively good, but where else would we applaud entities who dedicate 5% of their assets to their core activity as a success but in social/impact investment? What about the other 95%!!

SRI funds, although they are growing at a clip, make investments in the same large listed companies as mainstream investors—no hope there, right?

We speak often of the massive tidal wave of wealth that could come from the HNWIs (High Net Worth Individuals), but the private bankers which guard those assets are conservative to say the least. Less well-off retail investors, even those inclined to make social investments, are blocked from doing so by securities regulations.

And what of the social entrepreneurs? Despite all the hype and charisma, where are the big success stories—the social sector equivalents of Google or Facebook? We cannot blame it on time, as these two businesses are recent hits. Those which make a big difference and become household names (The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s and others in the UK whose names will not be widely recognised) cash in their chips as soon as they achieve scale. Will there ever be a big social enterprise (apart from Mondragon of Spain, the exception that proves the rule)?

Absent financial success, do we really imagine the funding will continue to flow to unsustainable (though eminently worthy) social enterprises in a fiscally constrained world?

And earlier today, at the Said Business School at Oxford, where I spoke at the Skoll Emerge Conference to high-powered students looking for guidance, a young woman asked me if she should not “clear her debts” and work for an investment bank. It was not just the money, but she valued the competitive, highly-charged atmosphere. Could I really pretend that this was available in abundance at firms in the social finance field? To whom do I owe my loyalty? To the keen MBA? To the sector?  To “Truth”?

Join ClearlySo CEO Rod Schwartz in the conversation. And be honest!

Last week I participated in a

These are tricky issues to address in print; one feels on a cliff edge in doing so, but this seems important. There is much research which suggests that women are better equipped at exhibiting balance—at being aware of and acting in accordance with a wide-range of conflicting objectives. In a financial meltdown caused by a lack of balance, are these not sound arguments for a more feminine approach to the economy—or simply more women in more senior places?

Rwanda, in the aftermath of its 1994 genocide, has since seen women attain many senior positions and the majority in Parliament. More recently, Iceland was bankrupted by a set of reckless “cowboys”—now women have been given the political and economic reins. In both cases this was not a planned or decreed handover; the people merely turned to women to sort out their mess (see a ClearlySo blog post on this subject). Do we need to do the same elsewhere?

In the social economy this has already begun. Think of some of the prominent figures in social business, enterprise and investment. Anita Roddick was co-founder, driving spirit and the face of The Body Shop, one of the sector’s first mega-success stories and a business that changed how we think about consumer products. The co-heads of Justgiving, the leading charitable giving website, are both women (Zarine Kharas and Anne-Marie Huby), and the two leading UK fairtrade brands, Cafe Direct and Divine (chocolate) are run by Anne MacCaig and Sophi Tranchell. There are some great men as well, but compared to the traditional business sector, the extent of this female presence is unique.      

• Do we need to encourage this further? If so, how?
• Could we be going too far in this direction? If so, what are the risks?

Although it is a bit weird feeling that history is making my gender somewhat useless—our position is much of our own making. I look forward with enthusiasm to seeing a more feminine economy, in the social enterprise sector and elsewhere. We have had our chance!

Join ClearlySo CEO Rod Schwartz in the conversation, and be provocative!

What does it take to lead the charge on poverty? It seems easy to conclude that people who have nothing want something, and that anyone who can and wishes to give them that deserves to be in the game of poverty alleviation.

The endeavor implies that those who undertake to help others have enough material or personal well-being to think about others: in Maslow’s terms, they have attended to their physiological and other lower-order needs, and can now seek a purpose through “self-actualization,” which means, at least for some people, actualizing others.

How the for-profit, socially responsible businessperson, the social entrepreneur, or the non-profit leader sees the fundamental relationship between giver and taker in the exchange makes all the difference in how he or she leads. That vision will affect organizational culture and determine both the stated values of the organization and the actual practices leadership puts in place to deliver on its mission. Leaderly values influence managerial practice, and can surface in socially responsible practices across a range of fields, not just poverty alleviation.

That said, they can also generate a tension that is inimical to the health of the organization and its mission. The tension between leadership presence and institutional sustainability is nowhere more salient than in the question of ends and means. Poverty alleviation is an age-old mission, and it is easy to assume that doing good in its name will at least occasionally justify doing bad. 

At the turn of the 21^st century, Enron’s leadership claimed to be doing social good, and until very near its end was lavishly praised for just that; at the other end of the spectrum on both mission and revenue, non-profit start-ups will occasionally justify primitive operating practices, both internally and externally, in the name of the social good to which they have committed. 

We need leaders in the quest to end poverty, but we also need systems to manage them and the quest itself. How we accomplish that end will depend in part on the answers we offer to the following questions:

• In the workplace, regardless of mission, how does one articulate and then maintain core, guiding principles?
• How do we hold accountable individuals in organizations who have seized, or to whom stakeholders—employees, customers, the community, the larger society—have granted, the moral high ground on poverty?
• How do we build values-driven organizations and institutions that go to the heart of poverty alleviation?
  

Join Sara Olsen in the conversation.

In a speech delivered by proxy in 1994, the Myanmar Nobel laureate and human rights activist Ang San Suu Kyi, then under house arrest in her home country, argued that economic development would not produce the culture of peace and democracy that the poor need in order to feel empowered and enfranchised. 

In the face of the economic downturn of the past year, the same might be said for the poor even in developed countries where democratic traditions seem firmly established, and where at least domestic peace has prevailed. One might conclude that, no matter where we stand in the course of national development, market-style economic instruments will not secure us the fulfillment that Aung San Suu Kyi’s rights discourse seems to promise.

Since 1948, the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights has served as the standard for international efforts to establish rule of law and a modicum of peace and justice around the globe. At the same time, most of the signatories to the Declaration do not completely live up to the challenge expressed in the document, and the universality of the Declaration has been challenged on grounds that it expresses a Western hegemonic intent towards Asian countries and cultures. Malaysia’s Mahathir bin Mohamad has been perhaps the most vociferous proponent of this view, but it might equally be read out of Lee Kuan Yew’s complex invocation of Western as well as Confucian values as he built his Singaporean success story, and similar claims for traditional values from the leaders of developing countries in the Middle East and Africa.

As we continue to address the problem of global poverty, we will need to determine what standard we apply, at the level of multi-lateral as well as non-governmental organizations, to ensure that the UN Declaration either stands or—if it is deemed irrelevant because outdated—does not obstruct the establishment of a different standard by which to engage in helping the world’s poor. 

We have seen versions of that other standard in the proselytizing for a globalized market economics; nativist political agendas; more evolved, pluralist, cultural traditions such as the democratic institutions Amartya Sen identifies in traditional cultures; and religious fundamentalism that resurrects old values for a new era.

In order to get at the beginnings of a solution, we might ask the following questions:   

What are the intellectual property rights and social capital of the poor?

Is political freedom possible without economic independence?

Property rights and wealth underpin social organization and governance in virtually every society. Given that truth, does economic development by definition upset traditional community values and power?

What role do religious groups play in countering or reinforcing the last half-century’s rights discourse?

Join Theresa Fay-Bustillos in the conversation.

We have a long history of explanations for the existence of poverty:

• Sociology:  the poor are poor because human beings instinctively look to differentiate themselves from one another, and someone needs to be at the bottom of the pyramid
• Economics:  the poor are poor because economic forces depend on a mass of impoverished workers to provide the labor that makes our societies run
• Psychology/Physiology:  the poor are poor because individuals have unequal faculties, and in a society that does not compensate for those inequalities, someone must wind up at the bottom
• Scarcity:  the poor are poor because there aren’t enough resources to go around
• Environment:  the poor are poor because of regional environmental conditions—climate, topography, soil, etc.
• Spirituality:  the poor have chosen material poverty because they have found, or have been endowed with, immaterial sources of wealth

The list goes on. For good or ill, societies usually commit to token relief from poverty when it affects large numbers of people, suggesting that we generally view poverty as a negative state, an unfortunate circumstance for humanity.

We know the quotations from ancient wisdom literature, “The poor ye shall always have with you” (The New Testament, Matthew 26:11); and more recent, secularized versions, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau, Walden).

We seem content to allow isolated individuals to commit to a life of abstinence—hermits, spiritual leaders—but for people at large, we deem poverty unacceptable, and structure programs to alleviate it.

Those programs will reflect the attitudes towards poverty that underlie it. With that practical impact in mind, we need to ask the following questions:

• What are the competing visions of poverty today?
• What forces condition our solutions to poverty and dependency?
• How do our social ideals define the relation of the individual to society, with regard to material and spiritual well-being?

 Join Carola Barton in the discussion.

This week is Social Capital Markets week!

The SOCAP 2009 conference is taking place in San Francisco, and we're here to keep the conversation flowing online, too.

Kevin Jones (picture by Global X here), co-founder of SOCAP and founding principal of Good Capital, talked to the Huffington Post about this year's conference: 

You know, there are a lot of conversations about the future happening around the world, but mostly they're taking place inside walled gardens. The thing that I'm most proud of is that this conference builds bridges between these gardens, and between them and the street.

Specifically, he said, "SOCAP brings together the big players and their rigorous processes with the folks who are just starting out" as social entrepreneurs.

That's bridging a gap we've talked about a lot here on Social Edge -- the gap between a bright, even brilliant, idea and the funding organization that can give it impetus.

How can we best bridge that gap?

At the moment, there's terrific duplication of effort when many small social entrepreneurs do the same research to find out what funds might be available -- and there's also the issue of the "poor fit" whereby one funding agency's requirements my differ so greatly from another's that a small outfit may spend needless hours filling out different forms as part of similar applications.

Another issue that has come up here is that of the startup that finds it needs to present itself in a way that aligned with foundation or investor interests, but tilts it away from its own driving passion - perhaps just a little at first, but in such a way as to significantly reduce its vision over time...

• What's slowing you down, in terms of getting needed funding?
• What do you need to know from funders?
• How could you most easily find it out?
• What are your questions about funding?
• Have others asked them before you?
• Do you have access to their research?
• Would you be willing to share yours?
• How does collaboration work in a competitive market?
• Could some kind of software ease the burden?
• Who will build the application that solves their problem -- and yours?
  

And to sum them up:

Who is stepping up to help make the whole sector more efficient rather than trying to solve only part of the problem internally just for their own organization?

These aren't easy questions, and they're all the harder when they're asked in a context where beginning entrepreneurs are talking among themselves -- the funders need to be in on the conversation, too.  We all want to help, we all want things to go more smoothly, for the best ideas to get effective implementation...  But sometimes we need a bridge to get across the gaps.

SOCAP offers us one such bridge.  Let this conversation be another, in parallel with SOCAP.  It's time we talked! Join Charles "hipbone" Cameron in the conversation.

If that’s the half-truth, what’s the full truth? Join Jessica Margolin in the conversation.
 

On the one hand, charity demands justice: recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of individuals and peoples. It strives to build the earthly city according to law and justice. On the other hand, charity transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving. The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion.
 

Again, the language is religious, but the meaning extends "to all people of goodwill" and indeed means goodwill, means the consistent application of a standard in all of life's dealings -- individual, familial, neighborly, social, political, global -- that holds giving what is only just and due to be the minimal acceptable position, and begins to measure real worth moving on upwards from that beginning.

The Pope accepts that the global economy has "lifted billions of people out of misery" while calling for "a profoundly new way of understanding business enterprise" -- does something there sound familiar?

And there are other relevant aspects of his critique buried in his encyclical -- the letter itself runs 144 pages.  How's this for a challenge to us all?

One of the greatest challenges facing the economy is to achieve the most efficient use — not abuse — of natural resources, based on a realization that the notion of 'efficiency' is not value-free.

It's my sense that the Pope has issued a major broadside, challenging the present world culture and its ways of thinking about money and power, generosity and need -- and in doing so, given us the opportunity for a global discussion in which social enterprise will have a significant role to play.

The AP report, from which I've quoted here, hitting the highlights.

The encyclical itself.


We have discussed Islamic approaches to economics in a previous SocialEdge event, and in another, the opportunity provided by the Obama administration to move the public discourse forward -- here is a third such opportunity.

Let's talk.  Let's seek out the most telling quotes from this long document, and build them into our word of mouth.

• What does this encyclical mean in your part of the world?
• How can we generate the global conversation we all want to have?
• What opportunities can we see in collaborations with local or global Catholicism?
• What are the parallels with this statement, in the doctrines and documents of your synagogue, church, mosque or temple?
   

Popes have sparked considerable debate with previous encyclicals -- let's not let this one go to waste.  Please join Charles "hipbone" Cameron in exploring its implications.

Is Dignity Necessary to Empower the Marginalized?

Tuesday, October 20^th is officially Global Dignity Day.  The concept of Global Dignity Day was incepted by Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum, a group of under-40 wunderkind from all sectors. The mission of the Global Dignity organization is “to implement globally the universal right of every human being to lead a dignified life.” 

In the strategies of empowering the marginalized, how important is dignity?  Is it a ‘must’ or simply a ‘nice to have’? 

Let us compare two different paradigms of development – a social entrepreneurial approach and a pure commercial interest (we’ll leave aside multilateral efforts as 60 years of work and trillions of dollars have yet to yield conclusive, and cost-effective, results).     

‘Base of Pyramid’ solid waste management (SWM) entrepreneurs exist all over the world – working with marginalized waste pickers to provide them more rights and develop profitable livelihoods. The transformation from Lima (Peru) to Patna (India) is phenomenal as waste pickers are no longer persecuted by authorities and earn a living wage. One can tangibly see the pride and dignity of a waste collector as she wears an official uniform signifying her role. It is an example where the marginalized are given an opportunity to create their own dignity and in turn are recognized by others. 

Chinese Infrastructure and Investment in Africa: Much has been made of Chinese investment across Africa – both good and bad. Whether you take the moral stance against the lack of environmental/ corruption business practices or a cynical view of China providing more than Western colonial powers ever could and without moral condescension, the impact is staggering: $100 billion in investment by 2010; rapid build-out of important infrastructure; and vast employment of local populations in the commerce generated from such investment. Nowhere in this paradigm does one hear (nor expect) dialogue about dignity.           

• Is Chinese investment any less effective in poverty alleviation than the waste picker example? Does the China model develop dignity in another way? 

• How should we best facilitate dignity?

• Is the intent of providing dignity required in such efforts? Or can it simply be a secondary effect?

• How do we ensure it is not just a buzz word thrown around but actually implemented?

• Where have you seen dignity (intentional or unintentional) make a difference?

Join BoPtimist Parag Gupta in the conversation.