Friend, advisor, sustainable investing activist and “our hero,” Jed Emerson (who is more of a Charles Barkley “I am not a role model” kind of hero) just published a piece in Forbes that  points to some trends that would startle the traditional investing community.
The little secret of this past year’s capital crisis is that while [...]

Colorado State University has an incredible program within the Business School — Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise — that “seeks to provide sustainable enterprise solutions to some of the most stubborn issues of our time including poverty, disease, malnutrition and environmental degradation… [equipping students] with the tools and network to become a global social entrepreneur, [...]

Welcome to our report of what happened at the inaugural Sustainable Business Models Collective meetup in Boulder. Here’s what we set out to do:
PURPOSE
The purpose of this meetup is to provide a place to discuss the specifics of funding, creating and running a sustainable social enterprise. This emerging sector, which spans the for-profit and non-profit [...]

The Angel Capital Summit (ACS) is scheduled for November 17th, with last week’s call for presenters, and an application deadline on October 15th.  The ACS runs on a more-or-less traditional pitch format, with 40 organizations pitching in a day.  Dozens of partner organizations nominate businesses into the semi-final judging round (run on Business Catapult services) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There were many great discussions at the three-day Social Capital Markets (SoCap) conference this week at Fort Mason in San Francisco.  We’ll keep reporting and referring to these in the days, weeks and months to come.  Among their many accomplishments was a mastery of social media, including a dense twitter feed, viewable at #socap09, as [...]

August was another fascinating month over at nuPOLIS.  A quick survey around the network reveals a peek from behind the scenes of the Chicago climate change planning process, a redux of a piece on Ethical Travel drawing on the first round of feedback, and a look at why Detroit is a hotbed for school reform.

Not only did I have a great flight on Virgin on my last trip overseas, but this image from the Virgin mothership is one of my favorites in a long time.  The image comes from their page about running a sustainable company, which is worthy of your attention, as well. (Amazing what an image search [...]

As part of our partnership with Innovation Network for Communities (INC), we spent a week in mid-July at the Social Innovation eXchange (SIX) with 120 social innovation leaders from 24 countries.
Our two-part report ran this week at the nuPOLIS blog.

Part 1 covers our observations about the field of social innovation.  In short, the field of [...]