Who's Sponsoring the Good Capitalist Party?

Last week, I wrote about the Good Capitalist party being held tonight at the South By Southwest conference. What started as a chance for a couple hundred social innovation lovers to get together in the midst of 15,000 ravenous social media fanboys and girls has turned into a must-attend event with over 2,000 RSVPs.

Allowing my academic side to come out for a minute, I thought it'd be cool to pre-game for the party with a primer on its myriad sponsors, who represent an impressive cross-section of the social entrepreneurship space.

Conveners and Field-Builders: Everyone sponsoring this party is a field builder to greater or lessor extent, but a couple of the sponsors represented have that at the core of their mission. The Social Capital Markets conference, for example, is an annual event in its third year that brings together about 1,000 people from across the social enterprise space. For the impact investor community in particular, it's a must-attend event. Social Edge is a media property established by the Skoll Foundation, which curates the voices of entrepreneurs from around the world in a conversation about the field's most important issues. Big Bang is a new, Texas-based event that is a great example of how the social impact space is getting regionalized. Other field builder sponsors include Beyond Profit Magazine, Good Magazine and The Hub.

Incubators and Funders: A number of the groups on the sponsor list are building this space by actually opening up access to resources for entrepreneurs. GoodCompany Ventures is a Philly-based incubator program along the lines of Y Combinator or TechStars, but with a more active curricular and educational component. Changemakers is an ongoing Ashoka initiative that effectively acts as a crowdfunding mechanism for new ideas. The Acumen Fund is a bottom-of-the-pyramid venture firm that, although it's a nonprofit itself, funds for-profit companies. StartingBloc is an education and acceleration program for young entrepreneurs that runs a number of annual global institutes.

Products For Good: One of the most notable things about the list of in-kind sponsors is the number of "good" product companies there are. For beverages they've got Runa, Sweet Leaf Tea, Rock Room wine and Green Mountain Coffee. They also have clothing companies like Good & Fair Project, t-shirt recycler Hello Rewind and more. These are examples of the entrepreneurial companies actually trying to demonstrate the financial viability of this new market segment, and it's great to see so many involved.

All of these segments of our space are fast-growing, and it's awesome to watch them teaming up for this event. I can't wait to hear more about how people are finding out about this and why they decided to come. For all those in Austin tonight, throw one back (sustainably, of course) for the Change.org team!

Photo Credit: howieluvus