May 28 2012
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Good Profiles, Social Entrepreneurship

Good Profile – Roy Lachica (Koios Project)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What are you up to nowadays?

For a living I work as a software developer in the private sector. On my spare time I use my expertise as a programmer to develop koios.org, a free online problem solving platform for complex social issues.

Koios is a long term nonprofit R&D project that aims to create a web based service for systemic innovation.

At the moment the project is in a proof of concept feasibility study phase and we are testing the conceptual underpinnings of the system. At this early stage it is mainly me working on the project although there are a few contributors from around the world.

Our website koios.org is gradually making more sense as we continuously do prototyping, comprehensive literature studies and state of the art reviews. We are also gradually establishing contact with relevant people around the world who contribute with valuable ideas and feedback.

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May 10 2012
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Development, Good Profiles, NGOs, Social Enterprise

Good Profile – Krystina Nguyen (US Peace Corps – Cameroon)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What are you up to nowadays?

I’m currently serving as a Small Business Advisor for the US Peace Corps in Ngaoundere, Cameroon.  The Peace Corps is an independent U.S. government agency that places volunteers in developing countries in various sectors across business, education, health, agriculture, environment, and community development. Peace Corps Volunteers serve for 27 months (two years of service after three months of technical, cultural, and language training) living at a level next to those they are serving. Each Volunteer is placed with a partner organization and can branch out to various other projects in the community. I will be finished with my contract in July 2012.

There are currently two core competencies for my Community Economic Development division: 1) Enhance opportunities for income generation and 2) Build local capacity for economic growth.

My partner organization is MC2, a microfinance organization found throughout Cameroon.  I serve as a consultant on various projects including strategic community outreach, benchmarking the loan review process, and training staff in IT.  I also manage and organize micro-credit cooperatives in the VSLA model; when individuals are too illiterate or marginalized for a traditional microfinance institution, the cooperative provides access to credit, a mechanism for saving, and an opportunity for low-risk investment.  As youth under twenty-five years old make up 60% of Cameroon’s population, I work with A2Empowerment to provide scholarships and income-generative activities for teenage girls who have dropped out of school.  My last weeks will be spent overseeing the final logistics to organize a market for a community of 8,000 people.

That being said, every Peace Corps position, even within the same division, is different. This is because the needs of each community and each Volunteer are different.

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May 07 2012
9 Comments
Impact Investing, Polls

Weekly Poll #6 – Should Impact Investing Become An “Asset Class”?

Weekly Poll #6:

Should Impact Investing Become An “Asset Class”?

In a recent book I reviewed, the authors Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson ask an important question: should impact investing be considered an “asset class”, i.e., the view favored by some bankers or wealth managers in search for new business?

The other view is this: should impact investing otherwise not be considered a “transformational paradigm” by which all our investments should be subjected to their social + financial returns? Is that even possible, practical, or desirable?

Of course I have my own view, and I am interested to take that discussion further in the future but for now, I would rather love to get YOUR opinion which view you favor. Feel free to leave comments with your rationale.

Results are immediately visible as you click!

As always, please do feel free to share any suggestions for future polls you may find interesting to learn more about your fellow Good Generation comrades and their views on various topics. I’d be happy to pick up on some of these ideas in the future.

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May 04 2012
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Development, Good Profiles, Impact Investing

Good Profile – CJ Fonzi (Dalberg Global Development Advisors / The Global Impact Investing Network)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What do you do for a living nowadays?

I am currently a Senior Consultant with Dalberg Global Development Advisors, based in the Johannesburg, South Africa office. Dalberg is a management strategy consulting firm, that works with governments, NGOs, foundations, and for profit businesses that are seeking to address social and environmental development issues. Since joining Dalberg my focus has been on impact investing, impact measurement, and SME growth.

I joined Dalberg 2 months ago after spending over 2 years working for the Global Impact Investing Network (the GIIN). The GIIN is a not for profit organization which was set up to accelerate the growth of the impact investing industry. At the GIIN I managed the Impact Reporting and Investment Standards initiative (IRIS), which provided a common language, and a set of metrics for investors to measure the social, environmental, and financial performance of impact investments.

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May 01 2012
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Reflection, Weekly Ponder

Weekly Ponder #9 – The Philosophical Blind Spot Of Technology or: “Cool! But What FOR?”

Weekly Ponder #9

The Philosophical Blind Spot Of Technology or: “Cool! But What FOR?”

If every person could be characterized by a single question that defines their interests or outlook on life, I feel sometimes that the word most appealing or fitting to the vast majority of our generation would be “what?” As a person who would mostly characterize his outlook on life with “why?” that would put me in the minority then, I suppose.

One area where this applies is our popular celebration of science and technology as that which makes us as a species the best and greatest since the dinosaurs died off. A little while back, I saw two TED talks, one by University of Pennsylvania professor Vijay Kumar, and one by Regina Dugan of DARPA. Both made me think about this topic of whats and whys. The first talk was essentially a celebration and discovery of nothing short of amazing technology that Kumar and his students had developed to show off little flying robots that could hover (like humming birds), fly formations with advanced AI, and even play the song from James Bond in their own band. The second talk was also about humming bird robots (that even looked like humming birds) and also about a new Mach-20 flying supersonic glider.

In both cases, my first impression was “wow!” My second was “why?” My third was “what for?” Not sure if in that order, actually…

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Apr 29 2012
2 Comments
Impact Investing, Reviews

Book Review – “Impact Investing”

Recently read:

Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making A Difference (Antony Bugg-Levine and Jed Emerson)

My grade (1 to 5): 3 – attempt to bring into one book the history, definition, implications, examples, controversies around and potential of impact investing to create a world where investors are more aligned to achieve “blended value” of both financial and social returns to their money; technical content insightful but evangelizing language and metaphors a bit overdrawn and slightly exaggerated

Key Ideas:

  • The first part of the book is dedicated to definitions of impact investing and spends some time with color around the many different areas that it encompasses, such as international development, microfinance and social enterprises. The second part of the book talks about the implications of impact investing in terms of how our systems, leadership style, measurement systems and attitudes must change to embrace the opportunities presented by blended value approaches, and why those approaches should become mainstream in the future.
  • The authors spend considerable time with case studies to illustrate the various instances of impact investing at work by various stakeholders, such as asset managers, investment bankers, private equity practitioners, development professionals and of course, social entrepreneurs. Throughout the book, the authors try to provide suggestions of how to overcome what they call a currently “bifurcated world” with investing for purely financial return on the one end, and giving money away through charity motives on the other.

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Apr 26 2012
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Career, Development, Good Profiles, Impact Investing, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneurship, Sustainability

Good Profile – Chelsea Katz (Kellogg Net Impact / Fresh Takes Kitchen)

Good Profiles feature members of our Good Generation who are either out there in the field doing interesting work or still in the trenches of schools and institutions waiting to make their mark on the world. Have your own story to tell? Know someone who would be great to be profiled? Please sign-up or leave a note here!

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What are you up to these days?

I am wrapping up my final quarter at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and will complete my MBA in less than two months!  While at Kellogg, I’ve focused on Social Enterprise (SEEK) and Entrepreneurship academic concentrations and have taken several great experiential or project-based courses including Sustainability Lab, Innovate for Impact, and Impact Investing (taught by David Chen of Equilibrium Capital Partners). I’ve also been heavily involved in the Net Impact Community.  This year I served as the VP of Careers for the Net Impact Club and chaired the Innovating Social Change Conference.  In my first year I led the Social Impact Career Trek to the Bay Area and the Global Health Initiative HIV/AIDS diagnostics market research trip to Kenya. 

What did you do prior to school?

I spent three years in Accenture’s Talent & Organization Performance practice where I provided consulting services to a variety of cross-industry clients with a focus on change management, organization design, and talent strategy. While at Accenture, I also provided extensive pro-bono consulting services to a number of nonprofit organizations including Accenture Development Partnerships, i.c.stars, and Junior Achievement.  I was also very involved in Corporate Citizenship efforts and developed a collaborative internal network of social impact enthusiasts dubbed the “Accenture Network for Social Impact” and managed Accenture’s sponsorship of the national Net Impact conference.  After a year as a pro-bono consultant, I transitioned to a full-time strategic project manager role with i.c.stars – an innovative Chicago nonprofit organization that uses project-based learning and full immersion teaching to provide opportunities for change-driven, inner-city community leaders to develop skills in business and technology. At i.c.stars I managed a portfolio of social enterprise consulting projects, fundraising events, and strategic initiatives, and led a cycle of interns through the first project in the training program.

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Apr 23 2012
10 Comments
Reflection, Social Enterprise, Weekly Ponder

The Importance of “Impact Offtakers” – Why Growth Is NOT The End Goal Of Social Enterprises

As a corporate strategy person, I totally get why traditional for-profit companies seek to grow: to make ever more money for their shareholders. Fine. But what I don’t get are social enterprises – however you define the term – when they talk about the “do-good equivalent” of the word “growth”, which is often referred to as “scale”. If the end goal of a for-profit corporation is to make as much money as possible (infinity + beyond $$$), what is the end goal of a nonprofit or for-profit social enterprise?

As a famous person once said: It’s the impact, stupid! And so the discussion becomes, in every single conference since the term “social enterprise” entered the mainstream a decade ago, about how we in fact can scale the impact of such organizations over time. A recent session during the 2012 Skoll World Forum, for example, was focused exclusively on the idea of how to envisage scaling beyond initial seed funding and “exit strategies” for social enterprises.

Although the panelists in this session touch on the subject, I feel not enough space in today’s literature is dedicated to a question that has somewhat plagued me for a long time – in fact, it has plagued me ever since I got interested in social enterprises.

The question is this: why the heck does everyone seem (so obsessively) to equate the scaling of impact with the scaling of the actual organization? In this post, allow me to make an argument for the importance of finding an “impact offtaker” as a critical scaling mechanism that supersedes that of organizational growth when it comes to social enterprises.

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Apr 21 2012
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CSR, Good & Gasp, Justice, Philanthropy, Social Enterprise, Sustainability

Good & Gasp #4 – Scaling Social Enterprises, iPhone Guilt, Ethical Rankings, Philanthropy Limits

Good & Gasp #4

Scaling Social Enterprises, iPhone Guilt, Ethical Rankings, Philanthropy Time Limits

Themes that caught my attention, interest or made my eyes roll while roaming the web world of doing good:

  • Scaling Social Enterprises – how can social enterprises scale post seed-investment stage?
  • iPhone Guilt – is Apple or its loyal consumers (you) to be blamed for the Foxconn debacle?
  • Philanthropy Limits – should foundations consider spending their money quicker and winding down (dying) earlier?
  • Ethical Rankings – if weapons companies make the list of most ethical firms, what exactly do we mean by “ethical”?

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Apr 18 2012
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Announcements, Impact Investing

Update – International Impact Investing Challenge 2012 – Winners Announced!

UPDATE – I3C is finished now and winners have been announced, along with all the finalists’ presentations!

Congratulations to Stanford School of International Policy Studies (1st), Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management (2nd) and University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy (3rd)!

Too bad I couldn’t be in San Francisco for the  final judging rounds but very interesting to see 2 policy schools and only 1 MBA program in the final selection bracket – now how many impact investors nowadays have public policy school graduates in their teams? Would be interesting to hear for sure.

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