“Nonprofit executives, to their detriment, are not as explicit about their funding models and have not had an equivalent lexicon,” till now, say the authors. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Working with Hewlett on a non profit marketplace idea for Socap09.
the-hub.net’s deal with socap, goodcap founders, ground the movement locally through a national netword of local nodes. acclerate the flow of capital to good.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
MEDIA CONTACT: MEDIA CONTACT:
Good Capital Hub World Ltd
Alex Michel Patrick Tatham
415-285-5545 + 44 7976 309 190
alex@hubsf.net patrick.tatham@the-hub.net
HUB World to Enter United States
A Place Where Social Innovators Create Change Every Day set to Enter the San Francisco/Bay Area
SAN FRANCISCO, CA and LONDON, UK ¬– March 20, 2009 – Hub World, a global network of spaces for people creating social change, has entered into a collaboration to bring its model to San Francisco. A new local operating company will expand the concept throughout the Bay Area with backing from Good Capital, a social venture capital firm, and Social Capital Markets Media, which produces the SoCap conference, along with a small circle of angel investors.
The Hub organization exists to promote physical platforms that fuse workspaces, meeting spaces, galleries, events and relaxation spaces, with on-line and face-to-face support structures and tools for social innovators. Hub World currently has more than a dozen sites up and running on four continents: from London to Amsterdam, Johannesburg to Sao Paolo. These sites bring communities of entrepreneurs, funders, activists and thought-leaders together to share workspace, convene events, and collaborate to change the world for the better.
The first U.S. site will be located in the San Francisco Mission District and is scheduled to launch in Fall 2009 (possibly as early as the SoCap09 conference from Sept. 1-3). In additional, the local team and Hub World are discussing further collaboration in terms of a potential roll-out of sites around the U.S.
“We are thrilled to be working with the guys from Good Capital and SoCap, and the stellar team they’ve put together,” said Jonathan Robinson, co-founder of the Hub organization. “We have known them for years and are impressed at what they have accomplished at the forefront of a new kind of investing, and at the way they have been able to convene and build strong community.”
Good Capital manages a venture fund that provides expansion capital to social entrepreneurs to help their businesses and their social impact go to scale. It is incubating the new operating company for the Bay Area alongside Social Capital Markets Media (SoCap), which produces the leading conference on social venture investing in the world, attracting 635 people from 26 countries and six continents last Fall.
“Bringing Hub concept to the Bay Area and beyond is a natural extension of what we are already doing,” said Kevin Jones, a founder of both Good Capital and SoCap. “We convene many of the people who are making the social capital market happen in an annual conference, but this is where the rubber hits the road every day of the year.”
Good Capital and SoCap have assembled an exceptional team to execute its Bay Area strategy and support efforts to expand in the U.S., including Alex Michel as Managing Director and CK Semlani as Chief Development Officer for Strategic Partnerships and National Expansion.
According to Alex Michel, “Our goal is to ground the movement locally, across a national network as a way for people to show up daily in a physical space that honors and amplifies social entrepreneurship.”
“We want to empower social entrepreneurs and help create a nationwide platform where they can interact and collaborate with likeminded people with a common mission to make change in the world,” said CK Semlani.
About Hub World (www.the-hub.net)
The Hub organization is a global community of people drawn from every profession, background and culture committed to tackling the world’s most pressing social, cultural and environmental challenges. It is a social enterprise with the ambition to inspire and support imaginative and enterprising initiatives for a better world.
About Good Capital (www.goodcap.net)
Good Capital manages the Social Enterprise Expansion Fund, which leverages the power of venture capital to increase the impact of social enterprises. The fund provides growth capital to expansion stage social enterprises that create market-based solutions to inequity and poverty and gives them the tools and guidance they need to scale. In addition, Good Capital actively leads the development of the emerging social capital market. It shares a deep commitment to the creation of a new, informed, and passionate world of investing that strategically moves more capital to good.
About SoCap (www.socialcapitalmarkets.net)
The flagship product of this San Francisco-based events company is the 600+ person annual Social Capital Markets (SoCap) conference, attended by individuals and organizations from 26 countries. Good Capital helped found and incubate this events company in its early days before the first conference, and some of its partners overlap in management.
“Imagine if the President were to ask corporations to consider measuring their “water footprint” in their annual reports,” asks Jonathan Greenblatt, for CEO of Good Magazine and the founder of Ethos Water. “There would be widespread ripples if the Administration re-calibrated its development program based on the water-related needs of the Bottom Billion.” Ties in with new EU studies on the value of ecosystem services and the new way value is being imagined or formulated.
Tim and I are talking with Jonathan after I get back from the Skoll Forum, talking about next steps for what he’s going to do.
“There is a real opportunity for social enterprise to demonstrate that value is more important, more fulfilling and more sustainable than wealth. I am finding this resonates more and more with people since the crisis started. I think we need to be thoughtful about seizing the moment! ” Steve Hardgrave, Gray Ghost. The thread at Change.org on the nature of value keeps getting better with a lot of my favorite smart folks chiming in.
People are talking about the nature of value in a lot of new ways, post meltdown and here. Lots of harder to quantify but deeply valuable things are starting to be counted and built in from the ground floor. The Kashklash framework kind of reminds me of the social equivalent of environmental services; the benefits we all get from things like wetlands, that we don’t pay for are part of the way people are building this new emergent economy. Holistic is a word that gets used too quickly, but I like their questions. Trading, from international currency swaps buying from your local bodega, requires trust and mutual agreement on value and expectations. Now that we are questioning what we trust and what we trusted that we shouldn’t have in new ways, it leaves room for new kinds of value to be built and to get on the balance sheet.
Why, with a year to spend anywhere or everywhere in the world, Rob Whiting studies poverty
His response to my questions: I live and have grown up on Amelia Island, FL with my two younger brothers in a middle-class family. All through high school I was pretty involved in service organizations, but never really found a definite passion. I was a decent high school runner, and improved enough to make and become a leader on the Vanderbilt cross country team.
I certainly don’t see myself as a visionary. I guess I fit into an entrpreneur mold (I love developing projects to their fullest potential and having an impact on a problem). I only like research if there is an application to it, but certainly don’t shy away from it. For example, last summer I researched China’s rural education system through site visits and interviews (I’m proficient in Mandarin, and have visited China every summer during college. It is one of my main passions).
This investigation allowed me to understand China’s rural-urban gap. I still don’t know how to solve it, but I hope this journey will give me some ideas. I’d say my most prominent trait is my is self-motivation. I’m the first to admit that I’m not the smartest guy, but I think there are few individuals who will outwork me. An illustrative story: When I was 8 years old, hickory nuts in our front yard became excessive, so my mom offered me and my brothers a penny a piece for every one we picked up. My brothers went for a few hours and then called it quits. I went until the it was too dark to see. This continued for an entire week…every day after school I would be out there picking nuts. After day 4, when I hit $20, she realized it was getting more expensive than she expected and told me to stop. I negotiated for 1/2 a cent. By the end of the week I had close to $30 and my mom had a clean yard.
Why poverty? As a graduating high school senior, I was fortunate to receive numerous college scholarships. Talking to other students, I found that they had similar backgrounds, or that their parents were footing the bill. For students like us, attending college was not a question, it was simply a matter of where. Through sociology classes and seeing the situation at a local high-poverty high school, I realized that this wasn’t the case for many students who may not have grown up in a middle-income, loving family environment. The just-mentioned high school was where I saw an educational environment much different than my own high school’s. I talked with students and heard about others who “would have attended college, but didn’t know you had to apply”, in the words of one guidance counselor. A huge scholarship program at the school was dissolving.
In mid-2006 I founded Vanderbilt Students for Students to do something about this situation, and shortly after we transformed it into Students for Students, Inc., a registered 501(c)(3) link Our organization aims to make college a financial reality for students at under-resourced high schools in the Nashville area. Through this experience I’ve learned a lot about running an organization, and a lot about the non-profit sector. While we have had many successes, I have experienced all too often the many pitfalls of the non-profit organization. Having to spend close to 40% of our time fundraising, when we could be doing service, is my biggest complaint. I’ve read Yunus’s “Creating a World Without Poverty” on social business and am now reading “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”. I’m really excited about the prospect of having the social good and the fundraising (or revenue generation) be the same thing.
Students for Students has been a great endeavor, but now I am thinking in a different way than when I founded it. I want to use the knowledge I gain to help me direct my career in poverty alleviation. Probably first I’d hope to join an organization that matches the profile of what I find to have all the right stuff. Then, after gaining more skills and a better understanding, start my own. I’m not sure where I would do my work, but it would most likely be international. I hope this helps.
I’m going to be Sasha who led Acumen’s fund raise what he learned, what messages are working, that are resonating and which ones are not, with all the various audiences he ran into during his quest. Here’s something he wrote about getting the raise right as he was flying back from Socap08. It’s called a non profit CEO Manifesto. The interview with Sasha will run in the GoodCapitalist newsletter that will be out next week.
see anything, and wanted to learn about poverty and how business can help solve it, what would you do? Rob Whiting has that opportunity.
He asked me what I thought he should do or how to contact people he already knows about.
Here’s our email thread:
Rob. how amazing. i think I can help. but i want to know more about you. you want to know about poverty and market based solutions. what are you good at? what is natural to you? are you a researcher, an entrepreneur, something in between? a charismatic visionary who will start an organization? you have an amazing year set ahead of you. what are you best equipped to turn this unique opportunity into?
why poverty? tell me about your family, cultural things, class things, stories from your childhood or high school.
On Mar 14, 2009, at 3:30 PM, Rob Whiting wrote:
Mr. Jones,
I found your info on the Social Capital Markets website and think you might be able to help me, or put me in touch with someone who can. I am a graduating senior at Vanderbilt University and have recently been named the 2009 Michael B. Keegan Traveling Fellow (www.vanderbilt.edu/travelfellowship/). The Keegan Traveling Fellowship allows one graduating senior the opportunity to explore an idea that he or she is passionate about, and to do so in a global context. Broadly speaking, I am interested poverty. During my travels I will 1) work to better understand poverty and the poor, and 2) investigate the impact that for-profit, Bottom of the Pyramid, and social business organizations can have on poverty. Over the next year I will have complete freedom to investigate market-based approaches to poverty any way I see fit: traveling to any countries, volunteering or interning, or just doing home stays. I hope to use this experience to direct my career.
From what I can tell, you are quite familiar with the type of organizations I am interested in. I am wondering if you could help me connect with some organizations, through your contacts or even directly. I am interested in organizations that Ive listed below (my sample itinerary not concrete) and any that are applying innovative market-based approaches to poverty alleviation. I would also be very open to any suggestions that I have not come across. My cell phone number is 904-206-0866. Please dont hesitate to contact me.
Best,
Rob
Proposed Itinerary
(Please note: this is not a completely inclusive or exclusive list of organizations.)
Early July late July
New York
Harlem Childrens Zone: aims to break generational poverty using a business-like approach and a holistic system of education, social-service and community-building programs.
Late July early September
Kenya
KickStart: develops/markets new technologies that are purchased by local entrepreneurs to start small businesses.
Health Foundation/CFWshops: provides affordable healthcare through for-profit incentives of micro-franchising.
One Acre Fund: empowers farmers by providing materials (e.g. fertilizer) to increase farm value and also connects them to markets.
Ethiopia
Nutriset (Plumpynut): Plumpynut is a peanut-based food for use in famine relief sold by Nutriset.
World Food Program: distributes food to improve nutrition and quality of life, especially during emergency situations.
Population Services International: as the worlds leading social marketing organization, encourages healthy behavior through selling subsidized, health-promoting products.
Early September mid October
Bangladesh
Grameen Bank: a microfinance institution that provides loans to the poor. It is owned by the borrowers.
Grameen Danone: sells nutritious yogurt to enrich diets of Bangladeshi children.
BRAC: tackles poverty from a holistic viewpoint, transitioning individuals from being aid recipients to becoming empowered citizens; worlds largest non-governmental organization by number of staff.
Mid October November
India
SKS Microfinance: a new generation microfinance institution using for-profit tools to access capital and developing technology to reduce costs.
WaterHealth International: provides access to clean drinking water through innovative, cost-effective technology designed for the poor and a franchising model to simplify marketing and distribution.
Aravind Eye Hospital: uses McDonalds assembly-line model to provide cheap cataract surgery for thousands of poor; most productive eye hospital in the world.
D.light Design: sells high volumes of very affordable light and power products to underserved customers without access to reliable power.
December
Laos and Cambodia
Digital Divide Data: provides disadvantaged youth with the education and training they need to deliver competitively priced IT services to global clients.
Room to Read: builds education infrastructure to end the cycle of poverty; connects donation dollars to exact projects to allow investors to know exactly where money goes.
Friends-International: involves street children in creative projects to help them reintegrate into society.
January
China
Shokay (Tibet): a startup for-profit venture that sells Tibetan yarn at competitive prices to improve lives of Tibetan herders.
Asia Development Bank: an international development finance institution that helps member countries reduce poverty.
February
Russia
(A post-Communism country with rural poverty and much room for social entrepreneurship expansion)
Early March Late March
Sweden
(Or another low-poverty nation)
Late March early April
Nicaragua
Manna Project: a Vanderbilt-founded non-profit that has spread to other campuses; uses a holistic approach toward community development.
Purchase for Progress: this pilot program of the World Food Program seeks to aggregate local agricultural demand among poor farmers and purchase the food that it uses for hunger relief.
Early April early May
Argentina
Responde: promotes local development in rapidly deteriorating rural villages through economic projects attracting tourism for example.
Early May - June
Mexico
Opportunidades: the principle anti-poverty program of the Mexico government; provides cash transfers to families for regular school attendance and health checkups, offsetting the loss of a farmhand.
The reason why money can’t buy love is because, ultimately, love is the value that money represents. Money is a proxy for value and value is that which holds us together and makes us relevant, love. Steve Wright of Salesforce on Change.org
That’s why there’s a crisis in confidence. The narrative, belief structure and expected return from your actions and investments has been shown to be built on a false premise. Part of that false premise is that growth is something you can always and infinitely expect to continue at an accelerating rate. People need to build businesses now that thrive with lower resource expenditures, that serve people who now have less money to spend, and where sharing the resources maximizes their impact. That means things like coworking. Coworking for social entrepreneurs is what I have in mind.
When you work in a coworking space, your eco footprint goes down by as much as 2/3, since you are sharing space, electricity, heating, cleaning, etc. that is being used by other people during other parts of the day. City Car Share for offices. You don’t need an office all the time. You don’t use an office all the time. It’s better on the planet if you share your office space, not have a fixed desk that you claim as your turf.
But you really only want to do that with people you’d really like to be around. People who would help you do the things that are important to you, or that are doing important things too. So the coworking I have in mind would not let everyone in. Being the top sales guy for a web analytics company and an all around good guy is not enough. The bar we’re lookng at setting is that you’d have to be actively doing something to change the world. We’d be most likely to attract the people who are using business to make that difference, though a lot of non profit folks who are using the earned income social enterprise non profit business route would also be at home there.
We’d just want the people we think, as we meet them, would want to help to build a supportive community that would be open to cooperating with others on their projects and startups and programs, as time and resources allow. Committing to help another member five hours a month is not the ante, but we’ll be looking for people who want to help and are likely to need help themselves. It’s not a requirement, but it is a fact that “pathologically sharing” to use Willie Foote’s term, is a characteristic of people involved in this movement.
Sharing space together, with a lower carbon footprint is only one of the ways they’d be sharing, as I envision a network of social entrepreneur focused coworking spaces rolling out.