Brave New World: Capitalist Revolutionaries

Milling around before SoCap08

"The revolution needs revolutionaries." This sentence stuck out to me while reading Umair Haque's "Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution," mentioned a few days ago in previous post. It got me thinking of all the revolutionaries I've had the honor of meeting in the last year.

My last job was in a big corporation. I enjoyed the strategy and marketing aspect of what I was doing, but couldn't stomach the amount of money being wasted right alongside what seemed to be to be a pretty marginal CSR commitment. I left after a year with a strong feeling that I needed to work for an organization doing something positive for the world. That's a pretty broad statement, but it was a pretty broad feeling. I decided to take some time off to volunteer and see the world. I landed in Ayutthaya, Thailand, a sweltering hot city about an hour outside of Bangkok. After three months of being berated by small Thai children on a daily basis I was burnt out. I am now a firm believer that a good teacher is worth millions. I would value my own skills on the pennies level

I could not believe how little structure there was in the nonprofit I was volunteering for. I was given no books, no translator and no resources. I went in enthusiastic and left jaded. A lack of research on my part in terms of the organization I worked with and a lack of resources on the organization's part made the whole effort seem futile and definitely not what I had dreamed of when I decided to spend time living and volunteering abroad. I began to wonder if this might be a common problem.

But then I started traveling. I saw incredible for-profit/non-profit hybrid organizations that came in to work with local Thais and Laotians to empower them with a trade and create earned income. I was amazed at the power that capital brought. These non-profits did not come in and create a dependency on their charity. Instead, they gave the power to the people themselves to build their own future and were compensated for their services. Social enterprise was my calling!

So I came back and put in a long haul of mining my alumni network. My best piece of advice to all of you graduating seniors is to hit your alumni network and hit it hard. I must have had about 40 coffee meetings with alumni of all ages and from all sectors. It is by far the most interesting and fruitful way to land a job. Luckily, I was put in touch through a fellow alum to the organizers of the Social Capital Markets Conference, Kevin Jones of Good Capital and Gary Bolles of Xigi Media. Everything they said just seemed to click. Why are we keeping our investment dollars in one pocket and our philanthropic dollars in another? How can we increase the amount of funding given to entrepreneurs starting businesses that do well by doing good?

For the first few months of coming onboard as the Associate Producer of the SoCap08 conference last year, convincing speakers and participants to commit to talk about the idea of putting your money where your mouth is was a tough sell. Everyone was doing it, across VCs, traditional banking structures, development agencies and foundations, but no one was sure they wanted to talk about it. There was a fear on the side of the investors that it would look like a disregard for profits and a fear on the side of organizations that it would look like greenwashing. Overall there was a feeling of uncertainty that there was really enough momentum behind this movement to validate blended value investing, the seeking of social as well as financial profits...then the financial markets crashed. Suddenly the question was not about why you are incorporating a triple bottom line ethos into your organization or potential investments, but why hasn't everyone been?

Two-thirds of our attendees signed up after Lehman Brothers went under. Our two hundred-person conference expanded to over six hundred people. People sat on floors and spilled out of rooms to hear panels on new wealth management and mission-related investing. I saw heads of traditional investment banks talking to small-scale social entrepreneurs who had raised money to get to the conference from Uganda. There was a clear call and camaraderie around a new way of looking at the creation of and investing in businesses.

We are starting to plan for SoCap09 in September. We'll have a strong focus on for-profit enterprises that are committed to effecting change in the world and social venture funds that are investing in them. I'm not going to give you breakdowns of new deals or financial structures in this blended value investing. Mostly because I couldn't explain it if I tried. What I will bring are stories of revolutionaries. Those guys on both sides of the coin who make you believe in a new way of looking at the world.

Amy Benziger is the Associate Producer of the Social Capital Markets conference and Events Director for a collaborative working space for social entrepreneurs in San Francisco. She writes a bi-monthly column about blended value investing and the blended value movement on Socialentrepreneurship.change.org.