Our great friends, the inspiring change agents at the Unreasonable Institute have been doing some excellent interviews with social entrepreneurs and impact investors on the SoCap blog ever since the event ended last August.
During what any humble, reflexively sarcastic entrepreneur would think of as a week with no other good interview candidates, we got an email from Teju Ravilochan, co-founder of Unreasonable, asking if we’d be game for the experience.
The results turn out pretty well, it seems (you might need to turn the volume up, or else the onboard speakers on this aging computer are loosing their umpf).
Since we last reported on the then-named Sustainable Business Model meetup we launched in Boulder last year, we have merged with the Boulder-based social entrepreneur meetup, and have hosted four session in our new, revised format.
Today, the re-named Sustainable Ventures meetup is consistently gathering between forty and fifty change agents (which we expect to grow) every two weeks in Denver and Boulder for an exchange of ideas, advice and learning that benefits everyone in the room. From non-profit staffers to clean-tech execs, and including investors, advisors and entrepreneurs, the sessions are providing a venue for advanced discussions about how to run a sustainable venture, regardless of sector.
More relevant than my perspective is the feedback from members that sheds light on the experience. When asked “why should others join this meetup group?”, Ashoka Fellow Lynn Price said, “To engage with individuals who dare to do what they think should be done – in a spirit of unselfish and supportive collaboration.” Kent McBride, founder and CEO of the Make The Difference Network adds, “if you want to be around people who intentionally use business to improve the quality of life on the planet, then this is the meetup for you.” Continue reading
In December, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announced that Denver is the first North American city and second city globally to be chosen by Ashoka as a “Change Your City” location. This project, first created in Dublin, Ireland, works to raise awareness and get people involved in change-making. The video below, created by our friends at In The Telling, summarizes the project well.
There is much more detail to come on this project in the weeks and months ahead. If you’re dying for more inside scoop, get in touch with us. The wheels of progress are turning on this project right now, and we’ve got a few good friends who are centrally involved.
The second meetup in our series on Sustainable Enterprise Models was designed in response to questions coming out of the first one, namely:
Why are we getting together to create another meetup?
What are we going to try to accomplish together?
What is the language of sustainable enterprise, and how can we ensure we have a similar frame of reference as we move forward?
We organized the session to allow participants to engage with one another, and not simply be “talked at” by another guru. This led to a diverse and wide-ranging discussion about what sustainable enterprise is really about, and how we want to engage an authentic and participatory discussion in our community. Continue reading
In a new report, Sustainable Economic Development, nuPOLIS partner James Nixon details the comprehensive approaches that that cities and regions are using to build sustainable green economies. The paper, developed for the newly launched nonprofit Urban Sustainability Associates consulting service, addresses what sustainable economic development is, why it matters, and how it is similar to and different from traditional economic development. It presents a set of sustainable economic development initiatives and programs for cities/regions, with descriptions of each initiative and program, along with possible delivery partners.
The heart of Nixon’s paper presents eight distinct Sustainable Economy Initiatives: Continue reading
We’ve been party to lots of discussion about “who owns what” in the social enterprise space, from metrics to concepts, and from online profiles to the intellectual property within the discussions. And frankly, they have all been a little bit depressing.
Check out #SoCapCO on twitter to track the discussion of all things related to social enterprise in Colorado. The hashtag’s origin starts at the SoCap conference, but also implies lots of aspects we like about the social enterprise movement, with the multiple meanings for social capital, and the “co” representing Colorado, collaboration, collective and lots of other things we do together.
Topping a ten-day period of sustainability-inspired thinking pervading economic reporting in the gray-flannel-media, the old gray lady reports (PW req’d) that French President Nicolas Sarkozy initiated a shift in how the French government reports economic activity (story tip to three of favorite tweeters: @NurtureGirl, @kevindoylejones and @byrnegreen).
President Nicolas Sarkozy told the French national statistics agency Monday to take greater account of factors like quality of life and the environment when measuring the country’s economic health.
Mr. Sarkozy made the request after accepting a report from a panel of top economists he had charged with reviewing the adequacy of the current standard of fiscal well-being: gross domestic product.
The panel, chaired by two Nobel economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard University, concluded that G.D.P. was insufficient and that measures of sustainability and human well-being should be included.
When The Wall St. Journal Online covers the growing complementary currency movement in the same week that The Economist talks about triple-bottom-line values encroaching on traditional investing, it appears that maybe, just maybe, the consciousness around money is finally changing.
In the most recent installment, WSJ’s video report covers a wide range of popular currency initiatives, including reputation- and attention-based incentives. Our long-time partners at the Metacurrency Project and The New Currency Frontier blog were featured in the piece, even though their ground-breaking work does not suit a 101 crowd.