?
The Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP) is heading into its fourth year. Attendance is booming and investors and social entrepreneurs alike, from nearly 75 countries, are clamoring to attend the meeting of money and meaning.
Social impact investing has even made its way into the Wall Street Journal?with news that nearly 10 percent of some 4,000 high net-worth users in Silicon Valley would like to know more about what this ?impact investing? is all about. It?s no longer a buzz word, or a passing trend?social impact investing is not going away.
Launched just last year at the Clinton Global Initiative, the ImpactAssets50 includes a global index of fund managers who seek social and environmental returns in addition to financial returns. These fund managers now represent $9 billion of capital invested across multiple asset classes, including microfinance, community development, and fair trade. Assets across the sector are expected to grow to $500 million over the next three years. When launched by the Cordes Foundation, Calvert Foundation, and Giving Assets, their initial objective was to unleash $2 billion of new capital by 2016 to address pressing social issues around the world. Turns out they weren?t thinking big enough.
In partnership with JP Morgan, Rockefeller Foundation recently released a report calling impacting investing ?the emerging asset class of the decade.? Antony Bugg-Levine, former Managing Director at Rockefeller and Executive Director of the NonProfit Finance Fund, made an important distinction between traditional socially responsible investing which generally just seeks to prevent negative consequences, while social impact investing proactively seeks positive social and environmental impact. Just within the last year, the field also made big strides in addressing two major challenges including an issue of supply?institutional investors, individuals, private banks are all out to play, and infrastructure?GIIN and IRIS have not only added much needed standards, but have also made it possible to measure social returns, alongside the financial.
While the field has grown by leaps and bounds in the last year, so many concerns and questions leading up the conference last year about impact investing are very much being addressed. But just a few months ago, FastCompany called social impact investing a crock. Why? Dean Karlan, professor and head of Innovations for Poverty Action Lab at MIT, says that serious impact evaluation just isn?t happening and investor analysis ?lacks rigor.?? Using the example of microcredit, he asserts that we measure repayment rates and business growth over time, but without examining how the people lives? are actually impacted, we don?t really know what would happen if they didn?t receive a loan. Granted the title of the piece may have been overly inflammatory, but it does raise a good point?with all the strides the field is making, are we digging deep enough to understand the social change we are driving? Or are we paying too much attention to the financial return on our investment.? At SOCAP Europe in May, Femke Bos, Fund Manager of the Triodos Microfinance Fund, said that impact investing will only gain traction if it can prove that the investments have resulted in long-term social change, with impact ?woven into the fabric of the organization.?
Perhaps this year?s SOCAP will help us dig our heels in a little more. Kevin Jones, cofounder and convener of the conference, is convinced that the problems of our world are too big to be solved by philanthropy or public sector funds alone. Lara Galinsky, Didier Sylvain, and I will be at SOCAP this year, with more Fellows than we can count, including Shivani Siroya, Elizabeth Scharpf, Mohamad Ali Niang, Jaime Yang, Melanie Edwards, David Auerbach, and Jason Aramburu. SOCAP 2011, with tracks in technology, sustainability, design, and more, perhaps will help us explore further the challenges that impact investing needs to overcome next.
Source: http://www.echoinggreen.org/blog/socap-2011-digging-deeper-into-impact-investing
the hunger games movie adele homecoming dresses neyo neyo justin bieber and selena gomez martin luther king jr
No comments:
Post a Comment