After six years of preparation, the Pulteneytown People’s Project (PPP) has opened a new £3.9million Community and Regeneration Centre in Pulteneytown, Wick.

PPP was established in 2004 to help address ongoing social and economic problems in Wick, one of the most deprived areas in the Highlands, by providing services such as childcare, training, youth projects and sporting facilities.

Where previously these services had been delivered across a number of different schools and council houses, the new Centre allows the charity to bring all of these services together within one state of the art facility.

The Centre houses a multi-purpose hall with sports facilities, which doubles up as a venue for 120 with seating for theatre productions, conferences and youth discos. A community café offers a ‘hub’ for the community, with soft play area, a youth cafe running in the evening and a training kitchen for aspiring chefs. ‘Drop In’ crèche facilities provide ad-hoc childcare for offshore workers, shift workers, or occasional childcare needs, so parents can attend classes, groups or personal appointments. The Centre also provides classroom and training facilities, an artist studio, a dance and hobbies room, band practice space and office accommodation for small local businesses.

Since setting up, PPP has made a huge difference to the surrounding community, generating more than £1million to benefit local people through the provision of its services. Construction of the £3.9M Centre has been part funded through a £500,000 investment from the Scottish Investment Fund through Social Investment Scotland, Scotland’s leading alternative funder to the third sector.

Chairman of the PPP, Grant Ramsay, said: “The organisation brings the entire community together, working with everyone from soon-to-be-mums, children, teenagers and older citizens.  It provides services and amenities for locals to improve their opportunities, potential and life skills and has secured millions of pounds in funding with a view to creating a vibrant community with skilled, employed people who can realise their ambition.”

Alastair Davis, Chief executive of Social Investment Scotland, said: “Our goal as a funder of Scotland’s third sector is to support growth in our communities, and I am convinced that this new Centre will allow PPP to do just that. It’s an incredible facility that will not only improve the way that PPP can deliver its services to the Community, but will also provide a focal point for local people whose lives are being transformed by these services. We look forward to working with the team and helping them realise their ambitions for the Centre.”

A pioneering study by the Third Sector Research Centre suggests that there is a vast amount of local community activity not captured by traditional surveys of the sector.

Researchers mapped self-organised activity within two very small geographical areas of England. They identified 58 community groups operating in and around just 11 streets – offering an insight into the scale and range of community activity taking place ‘below the radar’ of official registers.

The report describes how groups and individuals operate to support their immediate and extended communities, and the networks and resources they draw upon to do so. 

Many of the groups identified were embedded into their communities and operated within a very specific socio-cultural context. This implies that most are unlikely to be suited to the delivery of wider public services, but that they are already delivering services to their immediate local communities. 

The research highlighted the importance of shared space to groups. Several operated with small overheads and few financial resources. But many were supported directly and indirectly by paid and unpaid staff working in the buildings that they use. The study also demonstrates the importance of key individuals in creating and supporting community activity. 

Andri Soteri-Proctor who conducted the research said, ‘Our research offers a glimpse of the vast array of community activity operating ‘below the radar’. None of these activities would be captured by the majority of surveys and research data. Making this sector more visible to policy makers and the wider public can help increase understanding about their role, capacity and contribution within the wider third sector and society at large.’

Other key findings

• A diverse range of services and activities are undertaken by groups beneath the official radar. These are based around a particular topic of interest or operate for a particular ‘target community’, such as a faith or ethnic community, elderly or disabled people.
• Self-organised activities need some form of resourcing to exist – whether this is time, space, skills, or financial support. Groups innovatively generate resources by ‘tapping in’ to their own users, e.g. charging nominal fees or asking for donations, and ‘tapping out’ to others, through entrepreneurial activity, small grants or donations in kind.
• While groups often exist for their users, many also ‘give out’ to their wider community, locally or in other countries.
• Groups are connected to and draw on others’ resources, such as membership to specialist networks, support from voluntary and environmental organisations and local infrastructure agencies and use of space in, for example, a church or voluntary organisation.
• Community activity can be seen as collections of individual ‘bricoleurs’, people who draw on a mixture of resources to support their and others’ activities. ‘community bricoleurs’ pull together resources for several groups and individuals.
• Many opportunities arise from use of shared space, including the sharing of resources, joint working and use of ‘community bricoleurs’.

More

Download full paper: ‘Little Big Societies: micro-mapping of organisations operating below the radar’, Andri Soteri-Proctor (pdf, 829KB)

See more information 

For more information contact Naomi Landau: n.landau@tsrc.ac.uk / 020 7520 2421

An invitation to a

SEMINAR

SCOTTISH RURAL PARLIAMENT

TUESDAY 29 MAY, HOLYROOD HOTEL, EDINBURGH

9:30 – 16:30

During the day, the meeting will hear from representatives of established European Rural Parliaments including Sweden, The Netherlands, Estonia and Slovenia.  They will describe the way their parliaments operate, the issues they have faced and the benefits their parliaments have brought to their countries.

The Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment, Richard Lochhead MSP, will also be attending the seminar and make a speech.

The emphasis on the day will be to give delegates the opportunity to put forward their views and ideas on the concept of a Rural Parliament for Scotland.

If you would like to register for one of the remaining spaces please email angus@scottishcommunityalliance.net 

For a briefing paper on the proposal to establish a Rural Parliament click here.

Monday 30 April 2012, Community Energy Scotland

CARES loans have new strands and new guidelines – can they help you advance your plans?

Speaking at the Scottish Highland Renewable Energy Conference in Inverness on Thursday 26 April 2012, Mr Ewing restated his Government’s priority to give help to developers of smaller scale renewable energy projects.  Local community groups and rural businesses such as farmers and estate owners are to be encouraged to develop their plans for wind, hydro and other renewable energy technologies, seek consents and work-up business plans.

Community Energy Scotland will be responsible for delivering these Scottish Government funds in the year ahead.  The loans will be provided for the Scottish Government by the  Energy Saving Trust.  The main focus of the funds is to reduce the barriers to community or local rural business entrepreneurs who want to test and develop additional renewable energy generation projects.  Even if there is no dedicated strand to assist a project, prospective developers should still advise Community Energy Scotland of what they require to overcome obstacles to progress.

There are now a number of CARES strands to help different types of development.  All have detailed terms and conditions to which applicants should refer, and there is a competitive application system.

CARES LOANS Rural Businesses 2012/2013

This strand is for rural businesses, typically farming businesses who want to put a renewable energy generation project on land they own or can lease, CARES LOANS will cover up to 95% of PRE DEVELOPMENT costs such as Environmental Impact Assessments and technical feasibility.  The maximum loan per entity is £150,000. Applicants must contribute a minimum of 5% and must fund any recoverable VAT.  Credit checks are undertaken, but security is not required.  Interest is charged at 10% per annum from drawdown of each instalment.  If the project is prevented from proceeding for an insurmountable reason, the loan drawn down to that point can be written-off. If the project proceeds, the developer must make an annual payment of at least £10,000 per megawatt of installed capacity to a local community organisation – for 20 years.  The community group will use the funds for community development purposes. Loans are to be drawn down during the current financial year and the financial year 2013/14 – last date for drawdown 20 March 2014. These loans are repayable at financial close – when the capital stage of the project is financed. The first stage of the process is to register your interest with Community Energy Scotland.

CARES LOANS Communities 2012/13  

This strand is for community groups and charitable bodies to take forward plans for renewable energy generation schemes on land they own or can lease.  CARES LOANS will cover up to 95% of PRE DEVELOPMENT costs such as Environmental Impact Assessments and technical feasibility.  The maximum loan per entity is £150,000. Applicants must contribute a minimum of 5% and must fund any recoverable VAT. Credit checks are undertaken, but security is not required.   Interest is charged at 10% per annum from the date of each drawdown.  If the project is prevented from proceeding for an insurmountable reason, the loan drawn down to that point can be written-off.  All proceeds of the generation business after costs must be applied to a community development plan.  Loans are to be drawn down during the current financial year and the financial year 2013/14 – last date for drawdown 20 March 2014.  These loans are repayable at financial close – when the capital stage of the project is financed. The first stage of the process is to register your interest with Community Energy Scotland.

CARES LOANS Cluster Developments

There is an allocation of loan funds to assist innovate clusters of groups, individuals or firms working together towards substantial locally-owned renewable energy projects.  If your group has a proposal, and needs loan funds to develop it, please contact CES.

CARES INFRASTRUCTURE GRANT – Community Only

There is a limited allocation of funds for innovative infrastructure costs associated with making community connections to the grid possible. Businesses are not eligible. Generation plant is excluded.  Contact CES for more details.

CARES LOANS – Longer term funding – Community Only

There is a limited allocation of funds to community projects which require a loan, generally after planning consent has been obtained, to meet the costs of reaching financial close.  These loans (max £250k per entity) are at 8% interest, have no write-off facility and are repayable over ten years, with the option of no repayments during years 1, 2 and 3.  The purpose of these loans is to meet a gap between commercial borrowing and project costs.  Contact CES if you are interested.

The over-riding message is that if you have a plan to harness renewable energy – whether for the benefit of your own rural business or your community, loan funds from CARES could reduce your risks and allow you to participate in Scotland’s renewable energy future.

England director Dharmendra Kanani says the BLF will put hundreds of millions of pounds into initiatives lasting up to eight years

Announcing its priorities in England to 2015, the BLF said it could award between £100m and £150m in each of three or four cause areas to fund schemes lasting up to eight years.

The funder will decide on the geographical areas in England with the greatest need that it wants to target over the next few months for the long-term funding. Partnerships, which could include charities, community groups and councils, can apply for grants to develop their schemes and, if the pilots are successful, they can get longer-term funding.

One of the cause areas would be tackling entrenched problems such as alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence. Another would be projects for older people, and two more cause areas are yet to be announced.

Dharmendra Kanani, BLF’s England director, said: “Rather than tackle them in silos, we want to look at where they come together and have a negative impact.”

He said he did not yet know how many projects would be supported, but the BLF was keen to be able to measure the impact of the projects.

Kanani said the BLF was considering the use of social investment in some projects in various funding programmes, where appropriate, and helping projects develop the skills to attract social investors.

A spokesman for the BLF said it had the power to make loans. “But we really want to understand where we can add value and what would be most appropriate. We cannot make a profit on anything, so if we were to make a loan, in that respect we would have to think about how that requirement would work.”

Third Force News 10/05/2012

A NEW £6m fund for community-led regeneration initiatives across Scotland was launched this week.

The People and Communities Fund will invest in community organisations that provide a focus for community activities and people – so called community anchor organisations.

While community organisations welcomed the fund, some expressed concern about the definition of a community anchor organisation and the restricted remit of the fund.

Ian Cooke of Development Trusts Association Scotland (DTAS) said: “DTAS welcomes the launch of the new People and Communities Fund and particularly the recognition of the positive role which different kinds of community anchor organisations, such as development trusts, can play within community-led regeneration.

“However, to restrict the funding priorities to employability and preventative action (while both potentially key issues) seems to be unnecessarily restrictive and unconducive to the ability of communities to set their own agenda, surely a critical component of meaningful community-led regeneration.”

Pauline Barbour, policy consultant at the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA) also questioned whether the fund will be able to support housing associations to deliver community regeneration.

She said: “Aspects of the fund continue to require further examination, such as the fact that the in kind work undertaken by associations will not be considered within any funding bid.

“In addition, there will be an extra duty on national housing associations to demonstrate local community involvement, and at this stage there is no commitment to the fund beyond March 2015.”

Written by Thien Nguyen-Trung on April 30, 2012 in Social Earth – Entrepreneurship

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.

The interesting question for me is this: why the heck does everyone – from funders and media to entrepreneurs themselves – seem (so obsessively) to equate the scaling of impact with the scaling of the actual organization?

The Myth of the Heroic Company – Why do we care so much about organizational growth?

For one, those of us so excited about social enterprises have usually partially or fully taken our enthusiasm in seeing their traditional corporate counterparts’ success stories unfold, which at best goes like this: start-up, growth, IPO exit, ever increasing growth, world domination. Money and legacy for all. Happiness.

The equivalent dream for social enterprise enthusiasts must have been: start-up, growth, mysterious infusion of more money, mysterious “triple bottom line” business model moving from breakeven to profits, ever increasing growth, global scaling of the mission (feed the poor, provide healthcare, etc.). Honor and Nobel Prize for the founders. Widespread admiration. Happiness.

Now what’s wrong with this picture? For starters, it doesn’t seem to work!

Chasing Credit (is scale = growth?)

To this very day I do not understand why it is the dream of so many social enterprises to not only create the greatest impact but in fact to seek to BE CREDITED for the impact all over the world in whatever field they are targeting. While it is understandable to me why a corporation has a mission to put X brand television in every family’s home in the world, it appears somewhat ludicrous to me why social enterprises, who can barely make money, have the same ambition to be THE de-facto known provider of X social/environmental service to the world.

That brings me back to the idea that we in our culture seem too obsessed with the cult of the individual company reaching its heroic arc and spreading its message/product/service to the world. When we speak about “scaling impact”, we still tend to mean “scaling the company”. When we talk about scaling a company, we talk about how to make it bigger, set up more offices, hire more employees, receive more funding and spread its logo as far and wide as possible. Why are we then so surprised when we realize there’s not enough money (revenues + grants + equity) anywhere to make that dream actually happen (as fast as we’d like at least)?

Reconsidering the Role of Social Enterprises

What if we don’t need large social enterprises to achieve large scale?

Think about it. The role of the social enterprise is to introduce a disruptive, innovative way of achieving social impact in the most sustainable way possible. The role of the social enterprise has never been to become huge while doing so. In a way, think of social enterprises like inventors of new ways of providing energy. They find ways of extracting energy from the most unusual places, maybe even patent the approach, and hope to help many people in doing so. But the same people do not have the means – nor were they ever meant to have them – to transmit and distribute this energy to all those who need it. That is why we call utilities sometimes an “electricity offtaker” of energy produced by any number of providers (coal plants, solar farms, wind mills, etc.).

Question then: why don’t we consider more in the world of social enterprises the role of an “impact offtaker,” which takes existing innovation to scale far and wide, just like utilities do for energy producers?

The Role of the Impact Offtaker

Evaluation Criteria

What properties are important for an impact offtaker? Three come to mind for the right entity to possess.

1. Resource potential – must have lots of money and resources to make the scaling of impact possible

2. Permanency – must be around for a long time (preferably forever) since impact scaling also takes time

3. Mission alignment – must have an institutionalized reason to support social enterprises and not be too susceptible to the vagaries of changing leadership

Finding the Right Entity

Who could be an impact offtaker then, according to the three criteria above? How about…

Foundations? They like social enterprises. They’re around for a long time. Problem is, in order to be around a long time, they don’t like spending much of their money so they can hang around next year and the one after. That limits their ability to offtake or scale much impact.

Corporations? They have lots of resources. They may even like social enterprises. But their shareholders don’t want them go around paying for those things that produce no financial return. As they fight in the bloody market place, they are certainly not guaranteed to be around for the long-term.

Governments? They have lots of resources. They have high alignment with the “social” stuff that gets done. And whether you like it or not – they will be around for a very long time in most countries.

Key Objections to Government as Impact Offtaker

What are you already scared about as we consider governments as our preferred impact offtakers? Let me guess.

1. Inefficiency – bureaucracy, corruption or sheer lack of coordination/motivation capabilities risks poorly translating the brilliant models devised by social enterprises

2. Volatility – political vagaries and whims subject any program to risk of being downsized or even eliminated after every election cycle

3. Control – fear of losing control over program design and execution once a carefully developed change model is “given” to “Big G” to scale

In Favor of Passing the Baton

The idea of impact offtakers is a big one, and cannot be fully addressed in its complexities in a single post. Clearly, objections can abound and be legitimate reasons to fear the involvement of government. Nonetheless, I cannot see how continuing distrust and focus on making our tiny social enterprises a bit bigger every year with such increasingly limited funding available, will or should be the ultimate goal of social enterprises.

Whether government is the right player for this, or whether some other entity exists to play impact offtaker remains to be debated case by case. Meanwhile, those of us serious about spreading the best models far and wide would be better off to think hard about if they really care mostly about impact (reaching as many as quickly as possible) or credit/control (doing it all in small, controllable environment with satisfaction of getting credit by the fanbase).

A copy of the project report can be downloaded here.

In recent years, politicians across the UK have talked of helping communities to help themselves. Scotland already has a rich and diverse voluntary sector, together with a strong policy record on community ownership.  In ‘Housing Associations and the Big Society: Lessons from Scotland’s community housing sector’, Dr Kim McKee suggests there is much the rest of the UK can learn from this experience. 

Research published today, funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, suggests community-controlled housing associations, led by local people, hold the key to successful community regeneration in Scotland’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. More than just landlords, these organisations are anchored in their communities, providing vital services in an era of reduced public spending. 

McKee of the Centre for Housing Research at the University of St Andrews said:

“Housing associations are key frontline agencies in Scotland’s low-income communities. They harness the talents and energy of local people and support grass-roots solutions to local problems. These organisations provide a strong vehicle to rethink public service delivery at the neighbourhood level and have an important social role in the communities that they serve, acting as catalysts for community development and regeneration. 

Despite these strengths, associations face a number of barriers in unlocking their potential, as changes to the funding and regulation of social housing in Scotland represent challenging obstacles to developing their wider role. Government support is vital to enable associations to flourish in their capacity as anchor organisations.”

A copy of the project report can be downloaded here. More information can also be obtained from the report author, Dr Kim McKee, Lecturer in Geography at the University of St Andrews.

Author: The Guardian, Severin Carrell, 24/04/12

The charity’s Scottish arm has used measures including health, transport, family life and employment to evaluate quality of life.

Anti-poverty campaigners at Oxfam have created a new technique for measuring quality of life and social justice in Britain which they claim has found major flaws in mainstream policies on jobs and economic growth.

The charity said its new Humankind Index, launched on Tuesday, was a far more accurate measure of people’s wellbeing and happiness than focusing on GDP and employment rates, and had found deep-seated and significant problems which had been ignored by successive governments.

It said the index – designed by Oxfam’s Scotland office using 18 measures ranging from health, transport, family life and experiences of work to access to parks – found most people put much greater weight on the quality of their lives and work than on material wealth and success.

While quality of life for most people in Scotland had improved slightly, by 1.2%, between 2007-08 and 2009-10, this was chiefly due to improvements in their health and community spirit.

The index, which is now being evaluated by UK government statisticians and Scottish government civil servants, estimated that in contrast, there had been a 43% fall in people’s financial security, a 26% fall in the number of people who felt they had secure and suitable jobs and a 24% decline in those who felt they had enough to live on.

It had also detected a growing “lag” in the wellbeing and experiences of the most deprived communities compared to the average; Oxfam said that raised serious questions about the damage being done by the recession and the stress from flexible, temporary and part-time working demanded by government ministers and the modern jobs market.

Over the same two-year period, while the index overall had gone up, for the poorest it had fallen behind: they had experienced a 40% gap in the quality and safety of their local environment and streets, a 16% difference in their ability to manage financially, and a 10% gap in their health.

Judith Robertson, the head of Oxfam Scotland, said the index “goes beyond simplistic economic measures like GDP. It reminds us that the economy should serve its people, not the other way around.

“We’re often told that we live in a materialistic world, but Scots are not saying they want to be millionaires. They want a stable, secure income that allows them to care for their families and take part in society. Many people don’t have that and they told us that Scotland’s economy isn’t working for them.”

In a major collaboration with the New Economics Foundation, the Fraser of Allander economics thinktank at Strathclyde university, the pollsters YouGov and the Scottish TUC, the Humankind Index was developed by Oxfam Scotland after more than 3,000 people were interviewed using conventional opinion polling; focus groups and workshops which included groups such as African refugees, and those on low incomes; setting up street stalls and online questionnaires.

The new methodology, which weighted each type of measure based on the importance that the public gave them and then applied them to official data, is now being studied by experts at the Office for National Statistics in Newport, who are working on David Cameron’s “happiness index” to measure wellbeing.

It is also being considered by senior Oxfam executives for use across the UK and as part of the charity’s work on sustainable living and on new measures of inequality, as well as by Oxfam offices overseas in “middle economy” countries such as Brazil.

Dr Katherine Trebeck, the Oxfam UK poverty project adviser who oversaw the Humankind Index, said the new method was far more sophisticated and far-reaching than Cameron’s “happiness agenda”, which was influenced in turn by the work of the London School of Economics professor Lord Layard, author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science.

“This isn’t about ‘happiness’. We’re not asking people ‘are they happy,'” Trebeck said. “It’s about collective wellbeing; it’s about what communities need and is more asset-focused, rather than saying to someone ‘are you happy?’.

“The Indian economist Amartya Sen said you can bear adversity cheerfully, but that doesn’t mean you’re not experiencing adversity. This is about inclusion and social justice.”

Stephen Boyd, assistant director of the Scottish TUC, said the index had strengthened his belief that the current dominance of part-time, temporary and casual work was having a “hugely detrimental effect” on people’s quality of life, by confirming that many people in work felt insecure and dissatisfied.

Scottish government figures showed more than 500,000 people, nearly a fifth of the total workforce, were “underemployed” and in unstable jobs. “There are huge issues with the quality of life and work for our citizens,” he said.

“We’ve been told for 30 years that flexible labour markets are the absolute lynchpin of economic success. The Humankind Index suggests that we’re not as successful as perhaps we’ve been told, compared to other nations.”

Gehan MacLeod, the founder of GalGael, an alternative employment charity in Govan, Glasgow, was closely involved in the project and said the index offered policymakers the chance to finally address the root causes of drug addiction, mental illness and repeat offending experienced by her charity’s clients.

“It gives us different anchor points to judge our success or otherwise as a society: we need large-scale structural change,” she said.

“It’s a framework by which that shift in values can be taken to the policy and decision-making level; to inform decisions and policies which should be more appropriate and more relevant, making more of a difference to the experience of our participants.”

Author: Jason Saul

Takeaways from the 2012 Skoll World Forum by Jason Saul

A new brand of social entrepreneurship is emerging.

The Skoll World Forum—an amazing alchemy of the world’s greatest social entrepreneurs, big thinkers, financiers, philanthropists, and academics—is often a zeitgeist of the latest thinking in the social sector, and this year didn’t disappoint. While the officially programmed theme of the conference was “flux,” the real themes played out in informal hallway chatter, over drinks with colleagues at the Oxford Retreat pub, and in the Twittersphere.

Having participated in a number of these informal “sessions”—in addition to moderating a formal one—I sat down to consider what I heard. Here are my five main takeaways:

1. It’s OK to make an economic return from solving social problems. There was a sea change in thinking this year; social entrepreneurs seemed increasingly fascinated by the market as a mechanism to advance their social agendas. Scott Gilmore at Peace Dividend Trust (PDT) is a case in point. PDT renamed itself Building Markets (the name transition says it all) and even created a spin-out for-profit affiliate called Anchor Chain to leverage the private sector in advancing its mission of building local supply chains. I also spoke to the founder of a leading nonprofit consultancy who confided that he wished he had founded his organization as a for-profit instead, admitting “It really doesn’t matter these days, and the transparency is a real problem for us.”

Heidi Kuhn, Roots of Peace founder, and her daughter Kyleigh are the perfect inter-generational metaphor of the times: Both aim to impact the quality of life for Afghanistan’s poor, but in very different ways. Heidi founded a nonprofit to remove landmines and help Afghan farmers tap into the market by teaching new, higher-value agricultural practices; Kyleigh created a for-profit business called Twenty Four Suns to help local artisans in Afghanistan by creating a market for them in the US.

Also, funders themselves seemed increasingly open to the market as a force for change. One foundation director I spoke with openly contemplated investing in for-profits alongside traditional grants: “Why not?” she asked, “If we’re really about impact, it shouldn’t matter!”

2. Measurement is no longer optional. Measurement had its big coming out party at Skoll this year as the foundation announced its first attempt at portfolio-level measurement. The language and references this year were different too. In past years, there was always talk of “effectiveness” and “accountability,” but this year, I heard more about “returns,” “moving the needle,” and measuring “value.”  Foundations and corporations alike appeared universally obsessed with measurement—no doubt due to upstream pressure to demonstrate some ROI.

I had a fascinating conversation with Andrea Coleman of Riders for Health who found the Skoll Foundation’s focus on outcomes liberating from the regime of randomized control trials imposed by other funders. It was good to see Jed Emerson (father of social return on investment) make a return to the forum and say that he was glad to see the measurement conversation finally happening in earnest.

3. We’re in an age of social entrepreneurship 2.0. This year I observed a new breed of social entrepreneur—more entrepreneur than social. These entrepreneurs (mostly nonprofits) have flipped the paradigm; they see social change more as a business strategy than as a charity program. These social entrepreneurs are finding new and creative ways to leverage the market to advance their social agenda.

Kiva.org is a good example. Kiva’s head of development, Bennett Grassano, and I talked about the evolution of Kiva’s strategy—going beyond microfinance to become a source for microlending to other “social markets,” such as education (for example, scholarships) and affordable housing. Ned Breslin from Water for People is another example of social entrepreneurship 2.0. Ned describes his organization’s work as creating new “water economies” in emerging markets like Rwanda and Honduras, and has leveraged the private sector to catalyze his market development efforts.

4. It’s cool to be corporate. “I never thought we’d have a McDonald’s representative sitting at the Skoll World Forum … and I’m massively excited!” So said Pamela Hartigan, who directs the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford and moderated a panel on partnerships between social entrepreneurs and big business. In opening the panel, Pamela observed that there is an exciting movement inside companies led by social “intrapreneurs” who are leveraging the core business to make positive social change and profits. McDonald’s presented together with the Marine Stewardship Council to discuss the rollout of sustainable fisheries and eco-labeling Filet-O-Fish sandwiches in Europe.

McDonald’s was just one of 150 companies at Skoll this year-more than double the companies who attended in 2011. Corporations have crossed over into the mainstream of social change. It’s no wonder: Last year, corporations in the US. generated $1.6 trillion in profits, representing the single largest potential source of funding for social agendas. In the session I moderated, Beyond Charity: from Reporting to Returns, Cisco made a presentation about its new approach to market development partnerships (MDPs).

5. People want to move the needle. This year, the dialogue seemed more elevated and urgent than in the past. Entrepreneurs and funders are increasingly impatient with the pace of change; the conversations seemed much more focused on transformation, scalability, and sustainability than ever before. There appears to be a growing distinction between those who are content to “do good” versus those who are committed to “solving social problems” within our lifetime. Some of this urgency is driven by the growing number of living mega-donors, including Jeff Skoll, Gordon Moore, and Bill Gates, and others who are increasingly impatient with the charitable approach of funding nonprofit programs and hoping they add up to something. Questions I heard time and again were:  “Are we really moving the needle?” and “How do I answer the ‘so what’ question?”

It’s clear that there is a “new” brand of social entrepreneurship emerging—one that is more market-driven, measurement-oriented, and corporate-friendly than before. The question is: Will these trends lead to greater social impact?