I found the video above of a recent lecture given by Antony Bugg-Levine of the Rockefeller Foundation, when he came to visit MaRS in Toronto back in early April, to be one of the most insightful and compelling talks on impact investing and social finance that I have come across.

If you are currently working in the private capital investment sector or perhaps with a non-profit or charity organization, interested in social enterprise and sustainable revenue generating models, I would highly encourage you to take some time out of your day to watch this video. It may change your perspective on the traditional view of only using the for-profit model to make money, while only using the charity and non-profit model to address social problems.

In this day and age, where the problems we are facing are accelerating at a pace and complexity never before seen in history, it is evident that we require new approaches and tools that will enable us to tackle these problems at their scale and level of complexity. In the coming decades, experts have noted that we will begin to see rapid systemic changes on many levels, from the weakening of national public institutions, widening gaps between rich and poor, increasing scarcity of energy, and worsening damage of our environment as a result of climate change.

With this in mind, how are we to tackle many of these emerging globally complex problems, given the traditional models of charitable giving and our reliance on government to solve these issues for us?

The simple answer is that we cannot, given the current tools that we have at our disposal.

Antony, who leads the Harnessing the Power of Impact Investing initiative at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, argues that through impact investing–generating a viable social and environmental return while requiring a market-rate risk-adjusted financial return–we are no longer limited to giving money away to charity or waiting for government to take care of the problem, impact investing has given us a third and complimentary tool for solving social problems. He showcased the promise of impact investing by sharing the compelling stories of people from the slums of Hyderabad to farmers in the Congo, and even close to home in Toronto, who now have opportunities at a better quality of life made possible through the use of for-profit investment.

However, Antony also identified a number of challenges that need to be overcome, including advocacy and awareness building of impact investing, if we are to get to a point where it is considered both economically feasible and morally acceptable to tackle a social problem with a for-profit investment.

Until such a time when there is a major shift in cultural beliefs around using for-profit investment for social impact, as well as the emergence of the basic infrastructure (including intermediaries) that will allow actors from all levels (e.g. private investors to pension funds) to engage in impact investing, online platforms such as SocialFinance.ca and organizations such as Causeway and SiG, can continue to inform, convene and organize debates and discussions around this emerging sector and the possibilities that impact investing holds.

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This is perhaps THE most compelling video showcasing the urgent need for collective action on climate change that I have come across to date.

Courtesy www.euronews.net

“In 1998, scientists predicted that the Chacaltaya glacier above La Paz would have completely disappeared by 2015. Now experts say it will already be gone completely early this year.

The 2 million residents of the city of La Paz and its suburb El Alto depend on the surrounding glaciers for some of their water needs. El Alto has expanded from 220,000 residents in 1985 to almost one million today, increasing the demand for water. Half the electricity of the country is also produced from hydro-power, meaning the lack of rain and disappearance of glaciers may create an energy crisis in the future when the glaciers have gone.

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I will be sharing a TED Talk every Wednesday beginning this week, in an attempt to personally keep track (as well as document) many of the mind-blowing ideas, perspectives and projects that exceptional people are working on, from all over the world.

This approach to blogging is quite new for me as up until now, my blog posts have been (in)frequent and based on a random schedule of when I feel like putting up a blog post.

Looking over my (rather short) blogging history, there have been certain periods of time where you can tell I was inspired given I was able to produce 3-4 solid blog posts in a week, sustained for weeks at a time. Then there are cases such as September 2009 where there was not a blog post to be found considering how busy the month was for me, together with my lack of motivation for writing (similar to the case between January-March 2009).

This is my attempt at working on my new year’s resolution for 2010 and incorporating ‘working smarter, not harder’ into all aspects of my life, including blogging.

If there is one thing that I have learned from having maintained a blog for a year and a half now, is that the keys to being succesful at blogging are

1. Quality of Content
2. Consistency
3. Knowing exactly why you are writing.

Of course, you need to throw in a little spontaneity and randomness every now and then, just to keep things interesting.

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Ashoka Canada Induction 2010

Join us to celebrate the 11 new Canadian Ashoka Fellows

RSVP: http://ashokainduction.eventbrite.com/

Thursday, January 14th, 2010
5:30 pm
MaRS Centre Auditorium
101 College Street, Toronto, ON M5G 1L7

Light refreshments will be served

Featuring

* The eleven new Canadian Ashoka Fellows
* David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World
* Célia Cruz, Ashoka Canada Director
* Fellows Mary Gordon & Al Etmanski, Masters of Ceremonies
* Guests will have the opportunity to engage with leading social entrepreneurs

For more information, contact:

Elisha Muskat
emuskat@ashoka.org
(416) 646-2333

Leading Transformative Change

Ashoka is the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs—men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Since 1981, we have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows in 63 countries. In Canada, 27 Fellows are leading transformative change, inspiring others nationally and globally to be changemakers.

Our Vision

Ashoka envisions a world where Everyone is a Changemaker: a world that responds quickly and effectively to social challenges, and where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any social problem and drive change.

Posted via web from renjie’s posterous

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DigitalMediaCamp Toronto (#dmcamp) took place this past Saturday, where participants gathered in an attempt to address the question,

“How can we work together to propel Toronto’s technology, content and design communities into the future and make Toronto a globally competitive hub of digital media entrepreneurship and innovation?”

Facilitated by Mark Kuznicki, and supported by the Canadian Digital Media Network, some excellent conversation took place throughout the day around this question, with some concrete action items attached to specific timelines emerging at the end of the day. A number of blog posts have popped up following #dmcamp, providing an overview of the day’s proceedings, including a blog post over at TechVibes by Karim Kanji. For a much more comprehensive listing of blog posts to do with #dmcamp, please visit dmcampto.slinkset.com

The day’s events were captured in real-time, on the #dmcamp Toronto wiki, as well as on ScribbleLive, where any tweets or blog posts with the hashtag #dmcamp, were automatically fed into the ScribbleLive feed. It was almost disarming to find a picture of yourself projected on the wall in real time whilst engaged in a group discussion (look closely at picture 6 and 7 in the photo gallery above). It is interesting to see how social media is changing the way conferences and events are being communicated in real-time for those unable to attend, as well as documented for future reference.

#t4change at #dmcamp

Nick (@petten), Ruby (@rubyku) and myself (@renjie), took part in a conversation facilitated by Gabe Sawhney later in the day, where the topic revolved around connecting the technology industry with community organizations in order to create real change on the ground. Notes from this session can be found here.We brought up Time for Change, known as #t4change in #dmcamp-speak, and how this model is based on the original Timeraiser concept where we value time over monetary donations. We highlighted our pilot event on December 3rd as an existing ‘action’ item that we were already pursuing, and we acknowledged that we did not have all the answers as of yet, but were keenly interested in learning and adapting as the project unfolds.

A lot of people seemed to take interest in this, judging from the quality of the conversation at #dmcamp, as well as the number of times the hashtag #t4change appeared alongside the hashtag #dmcamp on Twitter. We outlined that we were looking to redefine the terms ‘volunteer’ and ’service’, and that we were focused in our efforts to engage young professionals working in the corporate sector, utilizing their professional skills and matching them with opportunities in the community best suited to their skills, interests and passions.

Next steps for #t4change

One of the concrete action-items that emerged from #dmcamp was a commitment to host a roundtable discussion on #t4change at the Centre for Social Innovation sometime in early January 2010, with the help of Mark Kuznicki and Gabe Sawhney. Notes from this session can be found here.

We invite all those interested, including those who attended Time for Change on December 3rd, as well as #dmcamp this past Saturday, December 12, to join us to discuss possible next steps forward with #t4change. We will be posting more information on our blog as well as on Twitter once we have finalized a date and time for the roundtable discussion at CSI.

For now, we are extremely excited for what lies ahead with this project, and will continue to learn and adapt as the project emerges. We want to make it clear that we would like to continue to be the holders of the process for #t4change, but we do not want to control the process. We want this emergence to be a product of co-creation, and we certainly welcome any input or critical feedback provided. As of now, we do not know if #t4change could spin-off into its own independent organizational structure, or become a project embedded into an already existing system infrastructure.

It is exciting for us to have people excited about #t4change. This project has certainly resonated with each one of us (myself, Nick, Ruby and Kristina) and perhaps this has to do with the much broader trend of young people in today’s world, wanting to pursue their passions and create meaning in their lives.

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See and download the full gallery on posterous

I attended a lecture this past Monday evening where the keynote speaker was George Roter, co-founder of Engineers Without Borders Canada. This event was part of the Change Agent Series hosted by Capacity Waterloo Region, in partnership with a number of organizations including Social Innovation Generation.

I first met George Roter when we invited him to give the opening keynote at the inaugural Waterloo Conference on Social Entrepreneurship, held at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University in November 2007. Back then, we were simply a group of students and recent graduates from UW and WLU, looking to foster a dialogue around social entrepreneurship and social enterprise in the Waterloo Region. The WCSE eventually became the Laurel Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, and for two years, we found moderate success mainly in the university student community, running a lecture series, a 3-day social enterprise ‘bootcamp’ intensive, as well as a follow-up conference on social enterprise in November 2008, with Marc Kielburger as the opening keynote speaker.

Alas, for a number of reasons (which I hope to eventually highlight in a future blog post), the Laurel Centre for Social Entrepreneurship no longer exists. However, I have taken lessons from that failed start-up organization and will certainly carry them forward with me.

When George Roter spoke on Monday, he shared lessons learned from Engineers Without Borders through the years. Each one of them resonated with me, and I thought that I would share them here:

LESSON NO. 1: CHANGE IS MESSY

Since its founding in 2000, Engineers Without Borders has always had as its mission statement: “Promoting human development through access to technology”

George talked about fostering a culture of continuous learning within the organization, and in the years that EWB has been doing international development work overseas in Africa, they have begun to realize that perhaps the social change they are looking to affect is not as simple as “promoting human development through access to technology.” George admitted that the process of social change is complex, and perhaps EWB’s role in international development in Africa is to help create the institutional framework that allows innovation to occur. That is why at the EWB Conference back in January 2009, George stood before an audience of 750 fellow EWB members, and perhaps more dramatic than he intended, burned their mission statement on stage as a symbolic gesture of embracing change and uncertainty.

Change IS messy.

It was important to communicate these changes to EWB members across the board. However, for an organization that has grown as large as EWB has in the past 10 years (30+ EWB chapters across Canada, with close to 50,000 members), this task has certainly posed a challenge. George admitted that they underestimated how long it would take to get this message across their membership given the obvious challenges of geographical distance between chapters; and even more so to come up with a new mission statement for EWB. But that is ok, as you will see from the next lesson he shared.

LESSON NO. 2: THE FAILURE PARADOX – IMPORTANT TO LEARN FROM MISTAKES

George then spoke about being prepared to fail. “If you aim to be wildly successful, you need to be prepared to fail”

For any social venture to be successful, they need to be open to failure and uncertainty. This does not mean that you go out of your way to fail, you certainly need to have your i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Rather, you need to establish a culture of openness and risk-taking very early on in the organization, and this requires leadership from the top. In other words, it is OK to go out there and take risks. If the risk pays off, then well done, you continue to grow and manage your organization from there. If it does not, then you acknowledge your mistakes and learn from them, and see if you can achieve the desired result in a much more effective manner. Since EWB published its first annual report way back when, they have always included an ad-hoc “failure report section” where they highlight lessons learned from out in the field. Only recently have they begun to publish an actual “Learning from our mistakes” report, that is sent out to all their members and staff, as well as their donors and board of advisors.

George recommended reading the following book, Getting to Plan B, to get more perspective on this. So often in the social/voluntary sector, do we place a heavy emphasis on ourselves to plan for, and execute Plan A, without allowing ourselves to even consider a Plan B, C or D. Of course, this is not as simple as it sounds, as there are issues of non-profits and charities being tied to funders/government agencies averse to taking risks, and so forth. It seems that EWB has been lucky in this respect. Because they have always been regarded as “shit disturbers” (George’s words, not mine), they are given the leeway by their donors and board of advisors to take on opportunities while managing risk, and thereby learning from the process. They are currently helping their partner organizations in Africa to adopt a similar mindset of managing risk, reporting and learning from their mistakes, but perhaps presenting it in a much more diplomatic fashion given the context of the culture in Africa.

I read a great blog post recently on what makes a good (social) entrepreneur that should be required reading for any startup founder, wannabe entrepreneur or leader within an established organization. What it comes down to in the end are four letters: JFDI (a play on Nike’s Just Do It).

LESSON NO. 3: HUMBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP

And lastly, the notion of humble entrepreneurship, is certainly an intriguing one. George talked about the opposing forces of humility and entrepreneurship, where more often than not, it takes a daring and charismatic leader (entrepreneur) to lead a team of people from the very beginning. As the organization grows, more emphasis should be placed on the organization and its mission, rather than on the entrepreneur. However, sometimes ego gets in the way and founders have a hard time time letting go of control, stifling innovation and debate in the process, and thereby risking the future of the organization.

This reminds me of a conversation that Rod Schwartz of ClearlySo and Liam Black of Wavelength, had a couple of months ago on the notion of the charismatic social entrepreneur. It is certainly worth revisiting:

“In the early stages of any entrepreneurial venture, social or otherwise, it is the energy and drive of the single entrepreneur (or sometimes a duo of co-preneurs, à la Google) that keep the “show on the road”. Her (or his) passion, drive, connections, persuasive powers etc. are what enable the venture to get through the impossibly difficult early days.

In social entrepreneurship this is even more the case. As there is often no equity upside, the financial incentive is essentially non-existent. Moreover, the social nature of the organisation gives the enterprise the element of a “crusade”. In this regard the CEO/Founder’s vision is the lifeblood of the enterprise—the source of strength on which others often draw.

Yet frequently this strength becomes a source of weakness instead, especially as the organisation matures. So impassioned is the leader by the mission, so violently consumed by this personal passion, they stifle innovation, debate, staff development and, inevitably, the enterprise’s future. Such dysfunctionality is often the rule, in the dozens of social enterprises I have observed over the past decade.”

George mentioned that one of the challenges of operating in the social/voluntary sector, is that we do not force high performance. This is why it is important to invest time, money and energy into smart and passionate people, those who have a passion for what is possible, regardless of credentials. Creating value for what you ultimately want to achieve and see in this world is really what drives people in the end.

George then ended the evening by relaying the story of a farmer in Malawi named Justin Panja whom he met several years ago. Justin, with the help of EWB, has been able to grow 14 different types of crop on his farm in the village of Mulere to earn an income. He is a man with no formal education having only completed the 4th grade. Yet, Justin has the passion, drive and energy to work as hard as he can in order to realize his dream of sending his three children to university. Will this dream be realized? Nothing is for certain. However, Justin is held up as an example of a person who has the passion for what is possible, and will do what is necessary to accomplish his goals.

***

Overall, I enjoyed the lecture and it certainly sparked a lot of thoughts for me (hence, this long blog post).

I spoke to George after the talk, and asked him the question of what was crucial to getting EWB off the ground in its infancy, relating my previous Laurel Centre experience. He said the one important factor that was absolutely critical to EWB’s early success, was attracting and putting together a solid board of advisors who believed in what they were doing, and leveraging their intellectual capacity as well as their connections to key resources in the industry. Of course, having a great team from the start helped out as well.

It seems that both George and Parker Mitchell, had a support system of people who believed in them and their ideas right from the very beginning; allowing them to take risks, make mistakes and learn lessons along the way, and thus growing Engineers Without Borders Canada into the success that it is today.
For some insight into the EWB experience from a personal perspective, below is Jon Fishbein who gave a talk titled “Meet the Real Africa” at Ignite Waterloo recently.

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Founded in March 2007 by Nick Petten while an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo, Out in the Cold is a grassroots, student-run event held every November, where students and community members are invited to spend the night outside on campus, to raise money and awareness of homelessness issues in their local community.

We are continuing the Out in the Cold initiative by sharing a model by which other schools and universities can adapt to their respective campus and local community. www.outinthecold.ca was launched in October 2009 as an online portal to document the growth of this grassroots initiative. It is our goal to provide the tools necessary for people in other schools and universities to organize similar events in order to provide a better understanding of issues surrounding homelessness, poverty and housing stability.

Causes of homelessness include poverty and a lack of affordable housing. Root causes of poverty include low income, unemployment or underemployment, social isolation, racism, low literacy, poor education, and many more. Addressing homelessness is effective social, health, and economic policy.

• Learn more about the issues

After three years at the University of Waterloo, the Out in the Cold model was successfully adapted at the University of Toronto campus. In November 2009, Out in the Cold was run simultaneously at both campuses, and was organized by teams of students led by Kaija Saarinen (Waterloo) and Jenna van Draanen (Toronto).

• Learn more about Out in the Cold 2009
• Out in the Cold in the news

Out in the Cold Timeline

Out in the Cold has raised over $10,000 for organizations tackling the issues of poverty and homelessness in the local community.

March 2007: University of Waterloo

November 2007: University of Waterloo

November 2008: University of Waterloo

November 2009:

University of Waterloo & University of Toronto

www.outinthecold.ca launched

November 2010:

Our goal is to apply this model to schools and universities across Canada. Please contact us if you would like to host Out in the Cold in your local community.

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Out in the Cold 2009

A big THANK YOU to InsideToronto.com for putting together this video of Out in the Cold, held at the University of Toronto on November 20-21, 2009.

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