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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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Mar 20 2012
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Announcements, Impact Investing

Update – International Impact Investing Challenge 2012 – Finalists Announced!

UPDATE – Round 1 of I3C is finished now and finalists have been announced! Was a fun list I went through with neat ideas and glad to see 11 teams advancing to San Francisco for the April 13 live presentations.

Finalists below. Congratulations to folks from Columbia SIPA, Duke Fuqua, Kellogg, Stanford IPS, Berkeley Haas, UCLA Andersen, Chicago Harris School, USC Moore School, and USC Marshall School – excellent job!

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Mar 12 2012
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Announcements, Impact Investing

Shoutout – International Impact Investing Challenge 2012

Don’t ask me why they thought I would be good for this, but somehow I find myself this week with the honor of helping out at I3C with the evaluation of submissions for innovative ideas around financial instruments and vehicles for impact investing proposed by sharp graduate students from all over the place.

In the words of the competition:

The International Impact Investing Challenge is a pitch competition focused on designing investment vehicles that create sustainable impact and are of the size and scope that would be of interest to institutional investors. Graduates students are challenged to propose and defend a sustainable investment strategy for an institutional investor who makes sustainable investments.

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Feb 19 2012
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Announcements, Good & Gasp

Announcement – Introducing Good & Gasp

Dear Good Generation,

We all are busy nowadays clicking on countless tweets, Facebook posts and blog news all over the web, and I would be the first to admit it’s a bit tiring as I’d love to find more summaries of interesting stories like the ones you get on Acumen Fund’s “Seen and Heard” and Echoing Green’s “The Buzz”.

In the spirit of “replicaneurship” (this past Weekly Ponder #5‘s topic), I would like to start something similar. That is, a weekly or periodic list of articles and discussions around the online ether that I found cool, interesting, or where I even left comments myself (“Good”) or that I found, rather uncool, superficial, superfluous, incomplete, or that made me simply angry (“Gasp”). Either way, I figure it’s a win-win for all. Readers (you) get another summary of “must-reads” or “must avoids”, authors get more traffic (for better or worse) and I might get the satisfaction of more people reading my raves and rants outside of this blog.

Oh, that reminds me. If YOU feel like being charitable, please forward me some good or terrible stuff on our favorite “do-good” and “careers” topics that you see on the net. I might check it out and include it on “Good & Gasp”.

For now, all the best roaming and reading for the next interesting story!

Sincerely,

Thien

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Feb 07 2012
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Announcements, Forum, Good Profiles

Announcement – Introducing the Good Profile

Dear Good Generation,

After a bit of preparation, I am excited to finally bring you the “Good Profile” series, which features the voices of fellow members of our do-gooder community. They may be a few years out active in the field as entrepreneurs, employees, consultants, and more, or they may also be students just at the beginning of their “do-good” careers.

What they have in common with you is that they too thought hard about what they wanted to contribute, and went through their own reflections, experiences or rationalizations for why they do what they do now. For some, the answers were obvious as to what their path should be. For others, they may still not be sure if what they do best fits what they wish to accomplish in terms of impact and change in the world. But they are taking a chance, nonetheless.

They all come from different backgrounds that some of you will hopefully identify with as not being too different from your own. They all had alternatives and choices for career paths but for some reason chose to get into the “do-good” business. They all, not unlike you, are talented, bright and with a unique set of values that they wish to align their world to.

Lastly, one important note. If you know of people, including yourself, whom you think would make for a great Good Profile, please tell me or click the “Good Profile Sign-up Sheet“ on the bottom menu of the blog. Tell me a little about yourself or the person you have in mind. If it’s you, leave me a contact e-mail. If it’s someone else you are referring, I will ask you for an introduction if their story seems interesting. I am periodically looking for representativeness across do-good sectors or occupations, among professionals (mid-career or entry-level) or students (undergraduate or graduate all okay). Whether you are someone in the field or just looking for the way and have a unique perspective or struggle that you can articulate, I would love to hear about it.

This is also a great opportunity for you to raise awareness about your organization although the emphasis is clearly on you.

For now, hope some of you find the profiles helpful to your own reflections.

Sincerely,

Thien

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Jan 24 2012
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Announcements, Lists

Happy Lunar New Year 2012 – The Black Dragon Arrives!

*Note: Forgive me for less frequent activity or articles this week as I’m celebrating lunar new year with my wife on a nice beach. I could negotiate bringing the laptop, but not the hours it takes to write articles, sorry! Be it as it may…

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Dear Good Generation,

Thought I was excited about January 1 when I shared my 2012 New Year’s resolutions? Think again, because actually NOW is the time to really get started!

Not only is it the official lunar new year for folks of Asian heritage like myself, but it’s a special year to begin with. According to the calendar of elements astrology, this year is the year of the dragon. More precise, the astrology symbol is the dragon and its element in the 12 year cycle this time is water, related to the color black. In other words, it’s the Year of the Black Dragon.

Although I can’t say I am particularly religious about astrology, I do like it when the Chinese predict that my natural element, when combined with the element of a particular year, ends up in an auspicious combination. Word has it that this year, I should “do well in social activities.” Whatever that means, interpreting this liberally to the activity of blogging, I certainly hope that Good Generation will continue to grow its community of readers and contributors as it has to-date. Of course, I don’t expect this to happen just out of nowhere. There’s things I’m looking forward to include going forward.

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Jan 18 2012
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Announcements, Forum, Polls

Announcement – Introducing the Weekly Poll

Dear Good Generation,

In addition to the “Weekly Ponder” series, I’d like to add yet another item: the “Weekly Poll”. Not only do I like to change things up as you know from plain vanilla articles and questions, but I also am highly interested in collecting on the community’s behalf some more information, which I then can share and mention in subsequent posts.

My opinion about the best way to fight our notorious lack of data in the area of do-good careers is to start somewhere, keep it simple and hopefully find some surprises and interesting nuggets along the way. I’m serious, don’t show this to the folks at Gallup, they would probably turn in their graves by the lack of finesse and design in my poll – oh well.

Oh, and yes, I deliberately inserted my poll in the middle of a (apparently popular) post series. The cost of the next few articles has just gone up by a few clicks! That’s right, I’ll offer an incentive for participating in the mini-poll: once I get a minimum number for participation, I’ll post the next part of the series. Consider this a retaliation for all of you who ignored my benign (and arguably poorly marketed) request for some participation in the last Weekly Ponder!

More on this in the actual Weekly Poll, though. For now, thanks for joining in and as always, please do send me your suggestions for interesting poll topics and questions as it relates to our blog community, so I can consider them for the future.

Sincerely,

Thien

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Jan 10 2012
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Announcements, Forum, Weekly Ponder

Announcement – Introducing the Weekly Ponder

Dear Good Generation,

To start adding some new things up besides my typical long-style posts, I wanted to start a weekly habit of throwing out a question that usually reflects some of the underlying issues found regularly in our blog posts, and hope that some of you will have the courage to share your unique, personal views with the community here.

The purpose behind this is that, in my experience, dealing with tough questions inside our heads keeps us in loops and eventually never moves us forward in affirming our values and let them guide our decisions consistently. Therefore, by articulating our thoughts on paper (or screen, that is), without the pressure of having to arrive at “The” answer, helps us air our concerns, receive reactions and frees us to take in new ideas. Hopefully this will then get us to the next incremental step on our quest to “figure things out” for ourselves.

That said, everything said (respectfully) is fair in the Weekly Ponder: comments, reactions, challenges, (attempted) answers, more questions, or response to others, including to me of course. Short responses are just as appreciated as longer ones.

Note: Although I call this “Weekly”, please continue to add to this when you see fit. I prefer conversations stay alive as long as people find them appealing and personally relevant.

Lastly, feel free to send to me your suggestions for YOUR weekly ponder question that may be broadly helpful for others as well to go through on this blog.

Looking forward to hearing from you, wherever you are.

Sincerely,

Thien

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Jan 01 2012
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Announcements, Lists

2012 Resolutions

Dear Good Generation,

Here we go again. One year comes to a close, with another one just around the corner. Personally, it’s been a quite fulfilling year for me with a nice wedding and many opportunities to see family and dear friends that I’ve known anywhere from one to over twenty years already. Of course, launching the blog has been rewarding as well and I look forward to Good Generation’s first anniversary twelve months from now. Thanks for all your support and readership so far!

My usual tradition is to fold up a piece of paper with resolutions for the upcoming year, sign it with a ballpoint pen as an act of making it quasi-legally, (and definitely fully symbolically) binding for myself, and carry it with me in my wallet for the next 364 days. Fear not, I will spare you the lethally boring personal stuff here (and no, losing weight is not part of it), but I would still like to make a few public promises I hope you can keep me accountable for.

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