By Kevin Jones
Movements happen when people who thought they were alone discover valuable strangers who become unlikely allies. I am flying to Armenia tomorrow to keynote the Impact Investing for Development Summit (IID) convened by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and knowledge partner INSEAD Social Entrepreneurship Initiative. The Summit will bring together development agencies, sovereign funds from the Nordics, Eastern European and Middle Eastern impact investors so that development practitioners can figure out how to work seriously with impact investors. The reality of climate change and societal risk has led IID Summit participants to recognize that public funds and philanthropic funds are not enough to handle the task.
At the same time, we at SOCAP are convening a session in June in Manhattan to see what it will take to integrate impact investing with Wall Street at scale. That initiative, The Good Capital Project, (GCP) will be a two year online mapping project that will convene people from Wall Street, the financial sector, impact investing and the social capital market to catalyze collaboration and accelerate capital flows into purpose driven investments. After our first meeting in June, GCP participants will convene again at SOCAP in San Francisco in October, and on other event platforms as the participants require. These people may have never worked together before GPC, but SOCAP’s secret sauce is bringing the people out of their tents at the oasis; valuable strangers discovering they can be unlikely allies. Movement building, even among strangers, is right up our alley.
Author: Kevin Jones
http://www.socialcapitalmarkets.net Kevin Jones creates information businesses inside emerging markets. He believes that markets emerge in conversation, as people try to explain and understand value. But this market is not like others he’s been in, and that’s what makes it more interesting and more important. The social capital market adds the dimension of impact, what your money actually does in the world before it comes back to you as a gain or loss, to the traditional risk and reward investment equation. Looking at impact is what has enabled SOCAP to be at the vital intersection of money and meaning, Kevin said.
Besides SOCAP, Kevin is founder of Good Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in social enterprises. He is also part of the team launching the first U.S. node of the Hub, a network of more than a dozen work spaces for social entrepreneurs in cities across the world from Cairo to London.
His previous six businesses all achieved market dominance before he left or sold them. As a journalist, he has been a columnist for Forbes and Business 2.0 magazines. Early in his career as a journalist his reporting sent a sheriff to prison on 53 counts of fraud. He has been on the boards of Social Enterprise Alliance, the association of non profit social enterprises, and Social Venture Partners International, a network of engaged philanthropy circles. Kevin also led a malaria project in Zwaziland and Mozambique, working with Jeff Sachs of The Earth Institute at Columbia University. Finally, during his 20 year business career in Mississippi he was heavily involved in public school advocacy. He twitters @kevindoylejones.