For the last 10 years, Chris Payne has headed up an innovative program to drive hyperlocal investing in the province of Nova Scotia. Chris doesn’t use the term ‘hyperlocal investing’, but it seems apt. Nova Scotia’s Community Economic Development Investment Funds (CEDIF) offer unique opportunities to help local farmers and small businesses gain access to capital on a county-by-county and town-by-town basis, and sometimes even more local than that.
How close is too close? The new UK Conservative government has cut the Office of the Third Sector and is changing how social enterprises in the UK gain access to financing. The Office of the Third Sector was located in the Cabinet Office and had close attention of Labour who created strategies for driving capital and building skills towards social enterprise.
A great debate on the Census is raging from coast to coast. We rarely experience such storied excitement, intrigue, and interest in public policy matters, from abrupt but principled resignations, to heroic acts to save swimmers from drowning, to headline news in the venerable New York Times. [It does seem oddly Canadian that we would shift our focus from "lakes and beer" to the Census.] We have decided to ride this wave of popularity to launch the first ever Social Finance Census.
A year ago, I started quietly along a path to understand the legal and regulatory structures and challenges of social enterprise. It was a quest for knowledge and was parlayed into a course on public policy for nonprofits. For six months, I diligently read everything published on the topic with the hopes that my knowledge in the topic would expand and I’d be able to influence the topic. Starting out slowly and independently, I never imagined how quickly the ball would start to roll.
How do you spot the difference between a fad and a trend? When you've hung around the social sector for decades you learn to be discerning. At the outset they appear the same, capturing interest, attracting pilot funding, developing constituencies, attracting academic research, even influencing policy. Inevitably there is a fork in the road. Despite the rhetoric, fads disappear.
Jeff Mowatt on Three Business Models for the Bottom Billion
Sep 03, 2010