An important note: there are only a few days left to submit a session in the SOCAP Open experiment! Submissions close June 17th, so don’t miss your opportunity to tell us what you want to see at SOCAP13 this year. Voting will remain open until July 2nd.
——
Have you seen the recent announcement on SOCAP Themes? This year we’ll be diving deep on Health, Meaning, Communities, Investing, and Oceans. Reviewing all that is new in SOCAP Open since our last update (63 ideas to date!), there was a surprising amount of alignment with our newly announced SOCAP content themes; only Oceans is unrepresented. The community is, however, calling on trends in other fields — from agriculture to fashion — helping draw attention to important developments shaping the new good economy.
You’ll find the latest round-up of fantastic new submissions below.
SOCAP: Investing
Impact Investing & Philanthropy
Unsurprisingly, our community continues to submit important innovations and developments in impact investing and philanthropy:
- Focusing on Latin America, Why is the missing middle still lost? is looking to explore new approaches within impact investing that are more inclusive and contextually relevant to help build a genuine and mainstream pipeline of social entrepreneurs.
- How do I become a more active shareholder is tracking the new environment of Shareholder activism and calling for a return to this important methodology.
- An interactive workshop Venture Funds, what every investor should know, proposes a discussion on the realities of participating in a venture fund.
- Accelerating the accelerators breaks down the ever-increasing role of accelerators in the ecosystem, and the work of a new network and tools to connect these accelerators and increase all of our impact.
Measurement, data, and impact continue to be an important theme. Using data to drive impact! proposes an interactive workshop helping participants set goals, use evidence and data to drive impact. Measuring the immeasurable is another interactive workshop that will share the lessons from the efforts of governments, NGOs and development networks to measure and track impact and help small groups explore ways to overcome the challenges they face in defining and measuring impact and tracking performance. Impact Measurement: Say No to a Social Metric Burden; Say Yes to Profit-with-Purpose Performance puts a call to all practitioners: if there is a true business case for impact, let’s move away from a box-checking metric exercise that can create a “metric burden,” and towards a more value-adding approach that enables entire businesses to drive around profit-with-purpose performance.
SOCAP: Meaning
Connecting Mission to Me
It’s great to see a session tackling some hard questions about poverty. Impact Investing and Spirital Belief: Breaking the cycle of persistent poverty will discuss how the intersection of impact investing and spiritual belief can create enterprises that help break the cycle of persistent poverty.
SOCAP: Health
Investing in Health and Well-Being
Falling squarely into the very exciting Health track, Mobilizing Impact Investment to Fill Gaps in Health Systems wants to discuss the critical need for investing in infrastructure in the developing world.
SOCAP: Communities
Place-Based Innovation and Development
A proposal on place-based innovation will look at the Bay Area Impact Investing Initiative and how it’s working to facilitate more institutional impact investing in geographically focused mission-oriented funds.
Building Better Social Enterprises
Outside of our content themes, building better social enterprises seems to be the most popular theme on SOCAP Open this year; we saw three new submissions. Re-Work wants to discuss Hiring for Impact and the ever important talent questions. Succession planning for social enterprise is a panel full of social enterprise power hitters discussing alternative forms of corporate ownership and succession planning that may be more appropriate for social purpose organizations. And, The road to 100% Giving aims to build on the success stories of Kiva, Universal Giving, etc. to break down how it’s possible to build truly resilient and self-sustaining social enterprise models.
Industry Developments
Adding some diversity and perspective on the field, below you’ll find submissions that call our attention to more specific industries.
- Sustainable fashion is looking at the sustainable fashion revolution, discussing the latest advances in sustainable fashion and the critical importance of the movement.
- Investing in sustainable agriculture is looking to get their hands dirty. Tackling the challenge that while investor interest in sustainable agriculture is high, good investment options in the sector are few, far between and often small-scale, this session brings together experts with hands-on experience in running or investing in sustainable agriculture ventures.
- How corporations can fund and foster social innovation is examining important trends with corporate impact and the role of intrapreneurship in the social sector.
