Rob Katz has recruited a stellar crew of bloggers to live blog the event. We’ve passed 325 in registrants, btw, and the facility has a stated maximum capacity of 400. But I’ve done these industry forming events before and people are rarely all in the same space at the same time. There is a lot of outside, pier and walkway space at Ft. Mason. People who know these things say we will be ok up to about 600 people. Assuming the sun shines.

There’s a great (and free) webinar happening tomorrow late morning/afternoon that I want to make sure everyone is on everyone’s radar.

The discussion will cover the following and more:

-How do investors factor Human Impact into their investing decisions?

-How does sustainable investing differ from traditional approaches?

-Is it real, is it big, and is it growing?

Where: Online web meeting - details after your RSVP here: http://dogoodmakemoney.eventbrite.com/ <http://dogoodmakemoney.eventbrite.com/>

When: 25th of September  (11a pacific, 12n mtn, 1p central, 2p eastern)

How long: 60 minutes

How does this HIP web-event / “webinar” work?
On the day of the event, go to your computer, and click on the link we send you to participate. After entering the “room name” and password, you will see the presentation on your screen and be able to send questions directly to the speakers. Simultaneously, you can dial into the conference call to interact live with the speakers and other attendees. It’s that easy!

Markets convene in conversations, not in taxonomies or on trading floors. That was true when investors in ships going to or coming from the spice islands convened in Amsterdam coffee shops to figure out how to share risk and return in the exploding opportunity ahead of them. Those transaction-intensive, one-off deals created the Dutch Bourse.

Similarly, a couple of hundred years later, traders in the new trading empire of Manhattan gathered under the Buttonwood Tree on Wall Street to devise on the fly a shorthand means of understanding the value held by the man under the other limb, abstracting the relevant elements, assigning a future value to the current cost, and making a deal. A gathering in San Francisco in October, Socap08, will be a significant step towards creating and clarifying the opportunity presented as the social capital market emerges.

The social capital market is a market with an additional dimension. It’s a market that says no to the old, Milton Friedman-infused definition of a business as purely and properly focused only on its own profit. This is a market that measures risk, financial return and the additional element of social impact. But it is still a market – a place where profit is an important measure of success, but social good is a measure of success as well. It is a market that is not willing to make compromises that have been made in the past but that still wants to create economic value.

Because of that new third element, what some would call social externalities emerging on the balance sheet, this event is bringing together a fundamentally new gathering of funders and investors with entrepreneurs. It includes foundations, development and aid agencies, and for-profit but mission-focused social investors breaking out of their silos to talk together. The third dimension creates what may perhaps be an ontologically new kind of economic value. The value that is emerging in the social capital market is what Jed Emerson calls blended value – a value that has many dimensions, social, financial and environmental, a systemic value that is greater as a whole than any of its parts.

This is an excerpt from an article by Kevin Jones in Alliance Magazine, the UK social enterprise journal

SoCap08 would like to get engaged with you via our web 2.0 sites. Join the conversation at:
Just Means (Company and Event Profiles) - Social Capital Markets Conference
LinkedIn (Group) - Social Capital Markets Conference
Facebook (Group and Event Pages) - Social Capital Markets Conference
Twitter - SoCap08

Please join Good Capital, Hanson Bridget, and SoCap08 for an energetic cocktail hour to connect with investors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, managers, consultants, philanthropists, students, wealth advisors, and other professionals interested in using business to create social change.  This month’s mixer will be hosted at Hanson Bridgett’s beautiful offices in downtown San Francisco.  Come enjoy wine, hors d’oeuvres, and good company, and feel free to bring along colleagues and friends interested in learning more about social capital markets.

When: Monday, September 22, 5:30pm-8:00pm

Where: Hanson Bridgett Office, 425 Market St., 26th Floor, San Francisco, CA

Register (admission is free): http://socialcapitalmarketmixer.eventbrite.com

 

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Hanson Bridgett is a green-certified law firm that is also a founding B Corp and provides legal counsel and business advice to purpose-driven organizations.

 

Social Capital Markets 2008 is a new event designed to bring together all of the people and organizations with a similar deep passion to change the world through sustainable businesses. 

Good Capital is an investment firm that accelerates the flow of capital to social ventures that create innovative solutions to the root causes of inequity.

An exciting development is taking shape in Vermont and North Carolina that represents the forefront of a growing national trend towards blended value economics. The Low-Profit Limited Liability Company (L3C) proposed by Robert Lang of the Mary Elizabeth and Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation creates “a form of Limited Liability Company, [that] would be a for-profit entity organized to engage in socially beneficial activities.

The traditional LLC provides a flexible ownership structure whereby different owners of a single company can receive different economic benefits. Lang’s proposed L3C takes the concept one step further. The L3C’s unique structure would allow foundations to invest by using an alternative to grants—program-related investments (PRIs). It can have different classes of investors—such as individuals, government agencies, nonprofits, and for-profits—with foundations taking the most risk. The L3C’s investment structure would be designed to bring new pools of funds such as pension and endowment investments to bear on problems normally treatable only by nonprofit dollars.”
For more information visit:

http://www.americansforcommunitydevelopment.org/

Those interested in the phenomenon of philanthrocapitalism can consult SoCap’s keynote speaker, Matthew Bishop’s lastest book Philanthrocapitalism: how the rich can save the world.  A debate about philanthrocapitalism has run on openDemocracy at http://www.opendemocracy.net and another at the Global Philanthropy Forum https://www.philanthropyforum.org/forum/Discussion_Forum1.asp

It’s official - David Erickson of the Federal Reserve Office of San Francisco will be speaking on a panel at the conference. Panelists will discuss how the willingness to break down silos is the keystone of the new social capital movement.

Panel attendees will learn how big, established players (from the UN Development Program to the Federal Reserve to a coalition of the largest US foundations) are coming together to make sense of the emerging social capital market and create a new kind of impact, from urban America to the developing world.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Got this in an email from Andy Kuper, formerly of Ashoka, Grameen and Brac, who’s now started Leapfrog Investments, a global leader in microinsurance: “We all work so hard in this field to deal  with the opacity of the market and paucity of information, so your success in (this convening) is really needed.” I couldn’t have said it better, and plan to repeat it, in fact when I moderate a panel this week, get interviewed on a green radio show, get interviewed on a local TV station and blog for the Stanford Social Innovation review. Small, repeatable nuggets like that, that are appealing but take you a while to chew on, are the best things you can have to promote a convening in a complex ecosystem in a new market.

We are bringing our peers together to combat both of those problems, market opacity and information paucity. The market doesn’t get us, or see us correctly; we are opaque to them. And they don’t know how many of us there are and the wave we are riding; information paucity.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that the business development folks for several multibillion dollar very sophisticated financial service companies have registered in the past couple of days, so the smart people are realizing that Socap is going to create a whole new depth of information about this market, and make what has been opaque much more clear.

If you haven’t already, it’s not too late to RSVP for the upcoming Good Business Network salon, The Good Capital Movement: How Everyone Can Be a Social Investor. The Bay Area is home to a new generation of entrepreneurs and investors who are doing well by doing good, and transforming the landscape of business, investing and philanthropy.

Come learn about the emerging “good capital” movement that is changing the world through sustainable businesses designed to impact global and local problems, and how everyone — for-profit companies, nonprofits and individuals — can be part of it.
Leading our discussion are social entrepreneurs and investors propelling this new wave of business, including  Kevin Jones of Good Capital, Tracey Pettengill Turner of MicroPlace, Ben Black of New Cycle Capital, Dina Bitton of Digital Divide Data, and John Olson of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Center for Community Development Initiatives.

Event Details:
Tuesday, September 9th, 6pm to 8pm

Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP
The Orrick Building
405 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA  94105

TO RSVP: email molly@thegoodbusinessnetwork.com.