Reports from Alliance magazine

The Philanthropy UK Newsletter is grateful to Alliance magazine for its permission to reproduce the following summaries of its event reports. The full reports can be accessed at www.alliancemagazine.org.

by Sean Stannard-Stockton, Tactical Philanthropy Advisors CEO

1-3rd September 2009, San Francisco, USA

Attendance at the 2nd annual Social Capital Markets Conference cleared 1,000 people, representing a 70% increase over last year. Attendance at the 2009 Council on Foundations conference in May of this year was 1,200, a 35% decline from previous years.

Something big is happening at Fort Mason in San Francisco. In just two short years the SoCap conference has emerged as one of the few must-attend events for people interested in social capital markets. SoCap doesn’t feature awards, dinners and vendor booths. Instead it is full of fast-moving breakout sessions where up to half the time is taken up with questions from the audience. At the end of the session at which I presented about building a new narrative for social capital markets, I only half jokingly suggested that I and the other panellist move to the audience and let audience members like Dennis Whittle of Global Giving, Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO, Janice Schoos of Growth Philanthropy Network, and Tris Lumley of New Philanthropy Capital take our place and run the session for a second time with a new take.
 
One of the fascinating aspects of the SoCap conference is the way the starting point for conversations seems to be for-profit organizations. In fact, my greatest criticism is that it almost seems that someone threw a social change conference and forgot to invite the non-profits and foundations. I don’t believe that ‘philanthropic capital markets’ are separate from ‘social capital markets’.
 
There is a single spectrum of capital that runs from pure philanthropic grants to pure market-rate investments. But all of that capital results in positive or negative social impact. Personally, my interest is focused on how philanthropic capital can be provided to non-profits to produce social impact. But that’s just my entry point for exploring social capital markets. People like SoCap organiser Kevin Jones might be more interested in how for-profit or ‘low-profit’ enterprises can affect social change, but again that’s just a frame of reference for viewing the integrated social capital markets.
 
What I found most engaging about the conference was the way it represented a different world view from so many philanthropy conferences. I had a conversation with a leading philanthropy scholar a few months ago about how we might map various philanthropic approaches. He suggested that one axis along which various philanthropic world views fell should be labelled ‘Constrained vs Unconstrained’ (he was not referring to the definitions of those labels that are circulating in political circles. His use probably more closely reflected the terms’ use in optimization problem solving). To this professor’s way of thinking, ‘Constrained’ philanthropy assumes that there is a set number of inputs we can use to create social impact. Our job is to optimise these inputs to create the most social value. ‘Unconstrained’ philanthropy, on the other hand, believes there are an unlimited number of inputs and the range of potential outcomes has no bound.
 
To me, the SoCap conference represents ‘Unconstrained’ approaches to social impact. Almost every session focused on questions of ‘how might we build something that doesn’t yet exist?’ At many traditional, ‘Constrained’ philanthropy conferences, the sessions focus on identifying what the rules are and how we might best play by them.

Sean Stannard-Stockton is CEO of Tactical Philanthropy Advisors and author of the Tactical Philanthropy blog.
sean@tacticalphilanthropy.com

by Andrew Milner, Alliance associate editor

18th November, Amsterdam

There are four things social enterprises need from venture philanthropists, according to Caroline Casey of Kanchi, “We need you to believe in us; we need you to help us become financially sustainable; we need you most in the scale-up phase; and we need you to allow us risk.” This was the conclusion of a rousing (at least by philanthropy conference standards) opening presentation to the EVPA’s annual conference in Amsterdam, last month.

There are one billion people in the world with disabilities, she said. “They don’t have leadership, they don’t get educated and they don’t get funded”, not because people are bad but because they feel it’s nothing to do with them. She might have taken a similar view at one time but, 10 years ago, she said, a rare eye defect caused her to become severely visually impaired, in fact legally blind. She realised then that disability had “everything to do with me. It’s who I am.” Since then, the social enterprise she founded, Kanchi, has worked with business, government, media and the Irish public to help put disability on the public agenda in Ireland. It has launched the televised O2 ability awards in Ireland, and Telefonica is about to launch a Spanish equivalent. Kanchi is now working towards the development of Ability Awards International. “We want to be the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ of disability,” she said.

In his welcome address, EVPA chair Serge Raicher said the conference was putting forward social enterprise as a model when other models have been put to the test and found wanting. Moreover, continued conference chair David Carrington, it is a model that venture philanthropy could play a crucial role in supporting. The conference title is an assertion, not a question. There is much debate over what constitutes a social enterprise, he said, but he urged delegates not to become obsessed with definition. The main purpose of social enterprises is to pursue social and environmental returns, not to pursue profit maximization.

Rod Schwartz, CEO of ClearlySo, who had the misfortune to follow Caroline Casey (“Glad she went first,” he wryly remarked), had an even simpler definition of social enterprise – “it does good”. He thought of current world leaders as like “bad parents of a very dysfunctional family”. They won’t make the necessary changes. People like Caroline Casey will, he argued. ClearlySo, a social business marketplace based in the UK, is a ‘social business ecosystem’ which gives social enterprises access to capital, information, discounted professional services and visibility. Operational in the UK since March this year, ClearlySo Canada is about to launch, with Brazilian and Indian counterparts soon to follow.

Breakout sessions followed on scaling-up social enterprises, on whether social enterprise is a passing fad or a ‘killer application’, and on the perennially vexing question of measuring social impact – a notorious hard nut of any approach to philanthropy, in fact the hardest, reckons Deirdre Mortell of One Foundation. When and how do you know what your impact is, she wondered? Often, you have to fall back on outputs as proxies. For example, improved literacy in children is a good predictor of improved future prospects, so if you can show the one, there is a good chance that the other will follow. In a presentation in the closing plenary, she observed that, of the six achievements One believes it has to its credit, only three were planned. The others happened accidentally.

The perfect couple?

A number of presenters mentioned the affinity of venture philanthropy and social enterprise – Gerit Zalm, chair of the Managing Board of conference sponsors ABN AMRO, described them as “the perfect couple”, and Rod Schwartz spoke of the approach of social entrepreneurs as being in ‘the sweet spot’ of venture philanthropy.

In an afternoon workshop on setting up a venture philanthropy fund, Stephen Dawson of Impetus Trust acknowledged that the extent of involvement in management is often a difficult area. The key maxim, he said, is “don’t do it for the organization, help them to do it”. Both this session and another afternoon session on the relationship between venture philanthropists and social entrepreneurs stressed the importance of honesty and clarity to the relationship.

In the same workshop, Andrew Muirhead of Inspiring Scotland remarked on the fact that venture philanthropy funds do not always come from private sources. Scottish government funding, he said, has proved crucial in attracting private investment to Inspiring Scotland, and later on the government will be the natural follow-on funder in Inspiring Scotland’s exit strategy. However, he advised, ‘keep away from politicians’, both because their tenure of office is contingent and because their attention span can be short, depending on public or party opinion. The key relationships are with the civil service since they offer greater continuity.

Other afternoon sessions included roundtables on managing international investments, supporting early-stage entrepreneurs, social enterprise and the climate challenge, the use of debt and equity alongside grants, and fundraising for venture philanthropy in difficult times.

In a closing plenary presentation, Deirdre Mortell counselled patience. Echoing comments by both Andrew Muirhead and Stephen Dawson, she remarked that “everything takes longer than you think in the systems change business … Frustrations are always with us,” she concluded in paradoxical fashion, “satisfaction is guaranteed.”

In closing, John Kingston of EVPA reminded participants that the diversity of EVPA and the purpose of the ‘rainbow of funding mechanisms’ it brings with it is to achieve impact. He also counselled the audience to avoid complexity and jargon, speak clearly, practise humility (“none of us knows the only way up the mountain”, he said), aim high look for systemic change, and recognise that we’re on a journey. The relationship between venture philanthropy and social enterprises is a potentially fruitful one but needs to be nurtured. All relationships go through bumpy patches and it is important to realise this.

Finally, he urged participants to “Remember how lucky we are!’ It is a privilege to work with social entrepreneurs”, he said. Ultimately, if anybody is to change the world, it will be them, not venture philanthropy funders.

The full text of this article can be found on the Alliance website.

Andrew Milner is a freelance writer and editor. He is associate editor of Alliance and edits the EVPA Newsletter.
am@andrewmilner.free-online.co.uk

For more information
www.evpa.eu.com

by Caroline Hartnell, Alliance editor

16th October 2009, Kiev, Ukraine

Business magazine Expert has been running CSR conferences for the last three years, but its first philanthropy conference was held in October in Kiev. Growth of the philanthropy sector faces formidable obstacles in Ukraine. Mistrust of wealthy people runs deep, as in other Former Soviet Union countries. The conference title, 'Philanthropy: altruism or rational egoism?', hints at the dubious motives often imputed to donors, such as cleansing a bad reputation and the taint of privatisation of state assets, and more generally compensating for the stigma of wealth.
In addition, the lack of trust between sectors is striking. A workshop session on social partnerships made quite clear that the last thing most people running a foundation want is a partnership with anyone else – from government, business, media, or the NGO sector.

This conference, bringing together 150 or so people, mainly from corporate foundations with a sprinkling of private donors, media and NGOs, may be a first step towards a rapprochement between the sectors. The very visible presence at the event of Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko, best known as the ‘Bond girl’ Camille Montes in the most recent James Bond film Quantum of Solace, may also help. “I am interviewed often and people listen to me,” she said. “Instead of reading what I had for my breakfast, I can tell them about charity.”

According to Svitlana Kuts of the Center for Philanthropy, the government has been supporting philanthropy since the Orange revolution of 2004 – though the sector started to develop much earlier, between the start of Perestroika in 1985 and Ukraine's independence in 1991. In 2007, the president of Ukraine decreed that the second Sunday of December would be a day of philanthropy. The winner of Ukraine’s third Philanthropist of the Year competition will be announced on this year’s philanthropy day.

 There are around 66,000 NGOs in Ukraine and about 12,000 charitable foundations. Of these, most do public fundraising campaigns and operate their own programmes. Kuts knows of only five to ten that actually make grants. 

Caroline Hartnell is editor of Alliance magazine.
caroline@alliancemagazine.org.

The full text of these articles and others are available on the Alliance website: http://www.alliancemagazine.org/