And in the next exciting episode...
So Thursday morning started with an early session about Web 2.0 and how it might be useful in this context. This was facilitated by Stuart Gannes at Stanford. I also found myself sitting opposite Gillian Caldwell who heads up the marvellous Witness. They are wanting to combine their existing work with some sort of tag-tastic hub / YouTube-y type thing. [NB - Gillian explains it better here]. Anyway, this was a brief intro to this brave new world, but nothing massively new for me, although some neat links and sites (see platial / techsoup / civicspace / clustrmaps )...
DAY TWO proper started with Sir Ronald Cohen of the Bridges Community Ventures Fund, the UK's first community development venture capital company....this was interesting, and coherent (and impressive, with no notes for about half an hour)....but the key point was about value / social returns and the need to be able to measure them in some shape or form....make them quantifiable.
Next up was a panel including Bill Drayton (of Ashoka fame), Jed Emerson (of Blended Value fame), David Carrington, Alan Watt and Jacqueline Novogratz....Jed Emerson started off at full pace for a ten-minute introduction to social venture funding (and was literally breathless by the end of it)...Bill Drayton talked of the need for citizen-based initiatives (he hates the words 'non-profit') to be funded in their third phase....and for "dealflow" (intermediaries between funders and initiatives)....Alan Watt talked mesmerisingly of "stictching together shiny pebbles", though I'm not sure what that meant; more itneresting were his focus on the need for quality.... Jacqueline Novogratz talked about enterprises that transcend sectors....and David Carrington, who spoke most sense in the shortest amount of time, gave his list of what a 21st-century foundation should look like:
- DO NO HARM
- GO BEYOND GRANTS (but starting the "grants are OK" campaign)
- MAKE FULL USE OF ASSETS....
The next session I made it to was Paul Harrod, who started up a social enterprise called Aspire, based on homeless people selling fairtrade gift catalogues. The high-profile venture, which had undergone a rapid franchising, collapsed in 2004. What made the session extremely interesting was that Paul was very open to being questioned about mistakes, problems, reasons and so on, plus the fact that one of Aspire's original funders was in the audience. Gave a real insight into the dangers of overpromising, the dangers of becoming a kind of 'pin-up' for the sector (and, therefore, the government), the difficulties of franchising and so on. Thanks to all in this seminar: good stuff. Paul now works at SetSquared
The final part of the day were the Skoll Foundation Awards, which were inspiring and uplifting and, best of all, populated by practitioners, which grounded the day in reality (a world away from social equity, venture capital and so on....it seemed). See the full list of amazing winners here on the Skoll Foundation site.
The (short) day three to follow...including the 'social stock exchange', how ignorance is a blessing, and the concept of the non-loss company....
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