CONTENTS

3 SEIZING A UNIQUE MOMENT TO CONVENE THE TRIBES

6 POWERS OF TEN
13 WHY SOCAP WORKED
18 IMPACT INVESTING THROUGH THE YEARS
21 SOCAP08
25 SOCAP09
29 SOCAP10
33 SOCAP/EUROPE
37 SOCAP11
41 SOCAP/DESIGNING THE FUTURE
45 SOCAP12
48 KEEPING MEANING AT THE CENTER
51 SOCAP13
55 SOCAP14
59 SOCAP15
63 SOCAP16
67 SOCAP17
70 A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF SOCAP
72 FREQUENT FLYERS
74 MY PATH TO SOCAP
80 TOWARD THE FUTURE OF IMPACT INVESTING
82 THE POWER OF 1000S
2
SEIZING A UNIQUE MOMENT
TO CONVENE THE TRIBES
There were many of us who believed it was
possible, that strategic investment of capital
could advance community level impacts. Over
several decades, a diverse set of actors from
across what we now call the impact investing
spectrum – community development, micro-
finance, small business lending, socially
responsible and ESG integration, social
venture capital and venture philanthropy –
had become active in proving out the thesis.
While many of these actors knew of each other
and would cross paths in the course of their
work, we lacked a forum that might bring us
all together to talk, learn, and exchange what
were the emerging best practices in our work.
At the time, it was like we were all dancing to
the music of our own block parties in the City,
building our communities of interest, yet we
weren’t connecting in a leveraged way across
those interests.
With the introduction of the term ‘Impact
Investing’ in 2007, many objected, saying they
had already been doing that for many years!
But, in short order we found – regardless of
specific definitions and heritage – the term
proved to be a banner under which a host
of practices might gather. The block parties
rolled off the blocks and onto the Avenue to
become a new, much larger parade of diverse
marching bands spread as far as the eye could
see, up and down the Avenues!
Then, with the advent of the 2008 financial
crisis, something else occurred. Thousands
of professionals within the financial services
industries found themselves either out
of work or grappling with a sense that
traditional finance had betrayed not only
their clients across America and the world
who had placed their trust in them, but also
3
 the very values upon which they’d based their
professional careers. Using different terms and
from diverse backgrounds, these individuals
realized ‘business as usual’ was not going to
be enough. They weren’t quite sure where they
were heading, but a return to the traditional
practices and institutions of Wall Street was not
an option. These folks were looking to join a new
community and, as events unfolded, found it in
what has come to be the annual family reunion
of SOCAP.
In 2008, Kevin Jones, Rosa Lee Harden, Tim
Freundlich, Gary Bolles, Mark Beam, and Heidi
Kleinmaus – the founding team – realized that
there was a unique moment to convene the
tribes. The idea was to bring us all together in
a celebration of what was then a still emerging
set of related investors, philanthropists, social
entrepreneurs, corporations, NGOs, and
academics to explore all we had in common,
debate issues we felt were key to our future,
and chart a wide-ranging but common course
forward for our field. The vision was less about
promoting a single approach or even group of
funds, as much as creating a collective sense of
‘We’ – a community of overlapping and shared
reality – and then nurturing our shared learning
process, as well as creating an open, inclusive
on-ramp to the practice for those looking to get
involved. It quickly became, as I said a few years
later, Burning Man meets Wall Street!
Today, our community has grown as a result
of our advancing a ‘big tent’ vision of impact
investing. There are many different voices and
understandings of what impact investing entails,
4
how its performance should be assessed and
just who should be able to lay claim to the title,
“Impact Investor.” We celebrate this diversity and
the rich debates and innovations it promotes! At
the same time, as the field grows exponentially
and we continue to scale the size of the deals
being executed and the numbers of mainstream
institutions now embracing our vision, we look
forward to keeping our course set toward the
North Star that has always guided our work:
Mobilizing Capital to Change Both Community
and Capitalism.
As we continue to infiltrate Wall Street and build
on the financial innovations of past decades, we
must never forget that our goal is not simple
capital gathering or making money in a way
that makes us feel good. It is about community
change, the integration of justice within markets
and the promotion of finance as a tool to help
solve the problems that traditional investing and
capitalism have created around the world.
We are thankful that you are a part of the impact
investing parade. We celebrate the many and
diverse practices that we all promote. And we
look forward to working with you over the coming
ten years, as we continue to help realize the
promise of sustained impact.
Happy 10th Anniversary!
Let’s keep this party
going!
JED EMERSON
Vice-Chair
SOCAP Group
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5
POWERS OF TEN
As we reflect on the first 10 years of SOCAP, and
look around at this space we find ourselves in,
we’re amazed at the exponential power of the
community we’re a part of. These are some of the
people from across the globe who have made a
difference in this space, and in the world.

– MARGARET MEAD

6
 FIRST MOVERS
Pioneers from 20 Years Ago or More, Who Had an
Idea that Created the Platform
• Through Domini Social Investments, Amy Domini showed
investing in good public companies could produce competitive
returns. • The BlueOrchard, led by Jean-Philippe de Schrevel,
created the investable category of microfinance. • Jed
Emerson’s original Blended Value approach made sense to
people trying to understand impact investing. • Joel Solomon’s
Renewal Funds was an early, successful investor in organic
foods also moved early into impact investing. • Muhammad
Yunus founded the innovative Grameen Bank that made
microfinance huge. • ShoreBank was one of the earliest and
largest community investment firms, with a holistic approach.
• Penelope Douglas, co-founder of Pacific Community
Ventures, is a long-time innovator now building an arts bank.
• Wayne Silby was pivotal in creating Calvert, Investors’ Circle,
and Social Venture Network. • Woody Tasch, launched Slow
Money, a network of angel investors investing in local organic
food businesses. • PAX World Fund was one of the earliest
sustainable investment firms letting investors align their
money and their values.
VISIONARIES
People Who Had the Right Idea Early
• Bert-Ola Bergstrand uses facebook and webinars to create
international networks of changemakers. • 350.org’s Bill
McKibben galvanized people with the need to reduce carbon
emissions. • Speaker and author Dan Pallotta told us it’s time to
pay non-profit execs reasonable salaries, and to stop obsessing
about overhead. • Hunter Lovins tells a compelling story about
holistic investing for climate change. • Game designer Jane
McGonigal makes games that create meaning and change.
• The Runway Project’s Jessica Norwood highlighted the
friends and family gap as the critical inflection point to start
eliminating racial wealth discrepancy. • Morgan Simon, of
Transform Finance, established non-extractive investment
principles and guidelines for impact investors. • Paul Polak,
creator of Windhorse International, was an early pioneer and
inventor creating low-cost change in the developing world. •
Pierre Omidyar, from Omidyar Network, fashioned a vehicle to
apply whatever kind of capital is needed to create the outcome
you are looking for. • Pope Francis linked the gospel and justice
to investing with values.
PEOPLE WHO MOVED THE FIELD FORWARD
Thought-leaders, Doers, Movers and Shakers
• Arjan Schütte, of Core Innovation Capital, showed that
financial inclusion could blend high return without losing
impact. • Morgan Stanley’s Audrey Choi moved a big bank
forward to do more. • Brian Trelstad, first at Acumen and
now at Bridges Fund Management, is investing to eliminate
poverty. • Bain Capital’s Deval Patrick left politics to do more
investing for good behind a big firm. • Gloria Nelund, of TriLinc
Global, is a financial system innovator doing big deals. •
Kesha Cash founded Impact America Fund and showed that
African Americans are a great consumer market for venture
funds. • Blue Haven Initiative, led by Liesel Pritzker-Simmons,
catalyzes ultra high net worth family office investing toward
impact. • Maya Chorengel, of Elevar Equity, showed what
scaling impact investing looks like. • Paul Breloff, of Accion
Venture Lab, is an early stage funding innovator. • Encourage
Capital’s Ricardo Bayon is a conservation finance innovator
and leader.
PIONEERING INVESTORS
Once the Space Was Opened up, These Folks Led
Some of the First Investments that Moved it Forward
• Bob Pattillo’s Gray Ghost Ventures was earliest and right in
more sectors than anyone else, from microfinance to education.
• Ed Dugger III, of Reinventure Capital, has been successful
multiple times as an African American venture fund investor.
• Gerhard Pries, of Sarona Asset Management, systematized
and scaled the unique Mennonite approach to impact investing.
• Wim van der Beek, of Aavishkaar Goodwell, was successful
in multiple early microfinance exits. • Gil Crawford’s MicroVest
Capital Management was the first microfinance equity fund;
it grew from $6m, to $30m, to $60m with the third fund over
$100m. • Through LeapFrog Investments, Jim Roth showed
that investing in micro insurance was a huge opportunity. •
Josh Mailman, of Serious Change, is an intuitive investor who
always gets better terms. • Lisa Hall led Calvert, and now
leads Anthos Asset Management, a large European family
investment platform linked to a foundation. • Nancy Pfund’s
DBL Partners is a high performing impact venture fund leader;
now in deals like Tesla that started with subsidies from Ford
and MacArthur. • Aavishkaar – led by Vineet Rai, who also
owns an event and analysis platform – is the largest Indian
impact investor.
7
 GROUNDBREAKING FOUNDATIONS
Some People and Foundations that Led the Way
• The Heron Foundation, led by Clara Miller, was the first to
have a total portfolio in impact investing. • Debra Schwartz,
of the MacArthur Foundation, was an innovator and an
early subsidizing investor in impact ventures. • Halloran
Philanthropies, with Harry Halloran, was the earliest SOCAP
supporter. • Jean Case, of Case Foundation, mapped the
space to make sense of it for all. • Jeff Skoll, through his
eponymous foundation, funds major convenings in the space.
• The Autodesk Foundation, led by Joe Speicher, is a corporate
foundation that’s the real deal. • Rockefeller Foundation, with
Judith Rodin, was a leader in establishing the field of impact
investing. • Paul Hudnut, through the Bohemian Foundation,
was unique with his creative approach to problem solving. •
Victor Hwang, of Kauffman Foundation, was instrumental
in validating system entrepreneurs, aka community
quarterbacks. • Luis Duarte, of Gary Community Investments,
guides an innovative local foundation.
COLLABORATIVE
Leading Cohorts and Collaboratives to Invest and
Learn
• Abigail Noble, of The ImPact, leads an ultra high net worth
coalition who are using their inherited wealth to make change. •
Andrea Armeni, at Transform Finance, outlines clear principles
to make sure investors are not extractive but transformative. •
Agora’s Ben Powell forged an evolving collaborative in Central
America. • Bonny Moellenbrock brought Investors’ Circle back
to life and newfound strength. • Charly Kleissner, at Toniic,
created an international angel network of impact investors.
• Christie George, of New Media Ventures, is guiding angel
investors who support new, meaningful, disruptive media. •
Opportunity Finance Network’s Donna Fabiani is guiding CDFIs
into a new era. • Pymwymic’s team, Frank van Beuningen
and Margaret McGovern, are leaders in the European angel
investor network. • Randall Kempner, of ANDE (Aspen Network
of Development Entrepreneurs), leads capacity building
organizations to fund small and medium size businesses. •
The team behind Social Venture Network (SVN) created the
first broad membership network of US businesses doing good,
spawned a host of other organizations, and led to early social
enterprises being funded.
8
SYSTEM ENTREPRENEURS
People Who Are Defining This Important Category
• Bryce Butler, of Access Ventures, – who coined the term
System Entrepreneur – exemplifies the work in Louisville. •
Andy Stoll, at the Kauffman Foundation, is validating this key
role in the local wealth creation ecosystem. • Cheryl Dahle, of
Flip Labs, used a system approach to transform the sustainable
fisheries supply chain, and is now teaching her method. • The
Federal Reserve’s David Erickson outlined how hard it is to get
this role funded, despite it being crucial for community wealth
creation. • Immy Kaur, from Impact Hub Birmingham, is deeply
engaged in listening to transform her city. • Indy Johar, at Dark
Matter Labs, is a deep thinker who puts the pieces together
for system venturing. • Jane Hatley, at Self-Help Credit Union,
creates new financial products and mobilizes her community.
• Impact Hub Oakland’s Konda Mason is significant for deep
engagement with the community, and for piloting friends &
family funding. • Rodney Foxworth, of Invested Impact, is the
consummate code switcher: able to talk to foundations, city,
entrepreneurs, and community in their own language. • Shaun
Paul, at Ejido Verde, is creating transformative wealth with and
for indigenous people in Mexico through regenerative forestry.
ENTREPRENEURS WHO PROVED THEIR POINT
Entrepreneurs Who Have Made Large Fundraises or
Successful Exits
• Adam Archer, of GamesThatGive, sold an online card game
linked to charitable giving. • Indiegogo, founded by Danae
Ringelmann, was an early crowdfunder that built a large and
thriving platform. • Jay Kimmelman, of Bridge International
Academies, systematized and replicated primary education
in Kenya. • Jeffrey Hollender’s Seventh Generation proved
that people will pay for green toilet paper and detergent. •
John Roulac scaled Nutiva, a non-GMO food company that is
also an activist mover and shaker. • Kim Jordan sold her $1b
beer company – New Belgium Brewing – to her employees,
and made it employee owned. • Lee Zimmerman’s Evergreen
Lodge transformed the lives of at-risk youth with 12.5% IRR to
investors. • Mathieu Senard led the organic, fair trade, carbon
negative chocolate and quinoa company – Alter Eco – to grow
20x and then sell. • Nicolas Hazard built one of the only $1b
revenue social enterprise in Groupe SOS. • Xavier Helgesen
sold his first startup, Better World Books, at $70m+ and is
now leading his second, an off-grid solar company in Tanzania
that’s growing.
 PLATFORMS
Online and Event Platforms that Gather Attention and
Investment, and Make Sense of the Field
• Amit Bouri leads the GIIN, the impact industry's trade
association. • B Lab, headed by Andrew Kassoy, is building
a global network of businesses that are measuring the
good they do and managing toward those goals. • Aparajita
Agrawal, of SanKalp Forum, leads a network of the largest
impact investing events in Asia and Africa. • Astrid Scholz, of
Sphaera, is building a platform to share and reuse solutions
for change makers. • Artha Platform, led by Audrey Selian, is
a collaborative due diligence community for angel investors in
use on two continents. • Change.org, started by Ben Rattray,
makes it easy to enlist in activist causes online. • Bill Drayton
created Ashoka, the earliest social entrepreneur network. •
Liquidnet for Good, headed by Brian Walsh, is a bridge builder
creating transparent data to share between often siloed non-
profits. • RSF Social Finance, with Don Shaffer, has guided a
flexible investment platform and community. • Kiva Zip, led by
Jonny Price, is bringing a global crowdfunding platform to the
United States.
VENTURE PHILANTHROPY & NON-PROFIT
Using Donor Money to Invest in For-profit Social
Enterprise
• Antony Bugg-Levine, of Nonprofit Finance Fund, led
Rockefeller's impact work and now finances non-profits in
new ways. • Carla Javits, of REDF, leads one of the earliest
non-profit social enterprise portfolio funders. • Echoing
Green’s Cheryl Dorsey guides a top fellowship program for
entrepreneurs. • Jacqueline Novogratz, of Acumen, told
the story of venture philanthropy to the world, and made it
happen. • Oliver Karius’ LGT Venture Philanthropy provides
multiple levels of support for African social enterprises. •
NewSchools Venture Fund, headed by Kim Smith, was an early
venture philanthropy funder fueling new ideas in education.
• Acumen’s Sasha Dichter fashioned metrics that don't hurt;
and created lean data for impact. • Self-Help Federal Credit
Union, led by Steve Zuckerman, is investing in housing and
credit enhancement for low-income people. • William Draper’s
Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation was an early foundation
with a solid approach. • Root Capital, headed by Willy Foote,
created fair trade coffee as an investable category.
ENTREPRENEUR TRAINING
Helping Entrepreneurs Gain the Skills to Become
Investable
• Alfa Demmellash, of Rising Tide, has years of experience
creating investable entrepreneurs, with an edge in her data.
• Emory University’s Brian Goebel researches what works
in accelerators and what doesn't. • Daniel Epstein, Teju
Ravilochan, and Tyler Hartung of the Unreasonable Institute
created a unique immersive experience for investors and
entrepreneurs. • Derrick Braziel, co-founder of MORTAR,
offers culturally appropriate technical assistance as a
key to stellar results. • Jamie Jones, at Kellogg School of
Management, is teaching business students to launch startups
and use innovative finance for good. • Echoing Green, led by
Cheryl Dorsey, is one of the most prestigious fellowships, in
non-profit training and now includes for-profit. • Luni Libes,
of Fledge, makes accelerating a cohort lightweight and low
cost in several cities. • Rani Langer-Croager founded Uptima
Business Bootcamp, where her cohorts become members of a
co-op, and hers was the first to use Runway Project funding.
• Data shows that entrepreneurs trained by Village Capital,
headed by Ross Baird, outperform on business metrics. •
Mentor Capital Network, led by Ian Fisk, works with earliest
stage startups and has one of the broadest networks.
GOOD GOVERNMENT
Public Sector Leaders Showing the Way to Invest in
Good
• USAID, with Alexis Bonnell, helps make sense of the
international challenges and competitions for investors. •
Ben Hecht guides Living Cities on civic engagement in cities
across the US. • OPIC’s Elizabeth Littlefield found a way to
make agency money fit the market's need, internationally.
• Jonathan Greenblatt led Obama's White House Social
Innovation platform. • Jose Corona went from a strong CDFI to
the public sector; working with the City of Oakland he knows
just which levers to pull. • Mitchell Strauss scouted the field
for OPIC to make it relevant. • Cincinnati City Council member
P.G. Sittenfeld found funding that enabled MORTAR to get both
a loan loss reserve and real estate. • Queen Máxima led the
Netherlands in responsible global investment principles. • Rob
Schneider, of USAID, made aid relevant in the impact space
early on. • From Google.org, to the White House, to academia,
economist Sonal Shah has a comprehensive view.
9
 NON-PROFIT SOCENT
Non-profits Building Businesses to Support Their
Mission
• Benetech’s Betsy Beaumon successfully guided the large
non-profit socent through her transition from visionary
founder to an operator. • Darell Hammond built the non-profit
KaBOOM! that – through earned income – became no longer
dependent on donations. • Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez, of
Goodwill Industries of San Francisco, built a multi-faceted
empire out of a local Goodwill thrift store. • Jim Fruchterman,
of Benetech, successfully transitioned from visionary non-
profit founder to ambassador status. • As head of Social
Investment Business, Jonathan Jenkins helped catalyze and
grow impact investing in the UK. • Kristin Peterson leads the
tech non-profit Inveneo, bringing online access to developing
world. • Leila Janah created the non-profit Samasource that
spun off a for-profit. • Through Kiva, Matt Flannery made online
investing in microfinance a reality. • Rebecca Masisak guides
the TechSoup platform that enables other non-profits around
the world. • Tess Reynolds, of New Door Ventures, shepherds
a portfolio of earned-income non-profit businesses.
KEEPING IT LOCAL
Investing to Create Thriving Local Economies for
Every Neighborhood
• Amy Pearl passed one of the best state level crowdfunding
laws in Oregon. • Eva-Lena Skalstad acted as the public voice
of a remarkable collaborative self-sufficient community. •
James Johnson-Piett was pivotal in the movement of bringing
good, healthy food to underserved populations in food deserts.
• Judy Wicks created the BALLE network, and is now creating
new forms of local funding. • Kat Taylor leads an innovative
bank that is investing locally. • Majora Carter is revitalizing
the Bronx and beyond. • Mary Berry is helping educate small
farmers to keep them viable. • Michelle Long built the BALLE
network of local living economies. • Robin Hacke led Living
Cities in funding real change in urban areas across the country.
• Vince Siciliano introduced a holistic approach for banks
investing in good local businesses.
10
AMAZING TALKS
Some Highlighted Presentations from SOCAP’s
Archives
• Thistle Farms’ Becca Stevens showed us that when we come
together in love we can hope. • Catherine Hoke, from Defy
Ventures, galvanized the crowd with stories about formerly
incarcerated entrepreneurs. • Craigslist’s Craig Newmark
explained the vision behind his online classifieds. • Devita
Davison, of FoodLab Detroit, called out cultural appropriation
of African American products. • Matthew Weatherley-White,
from CAPROCK Group, asked a simple question: if ESG
outperforms, why not make it opt-out? • CREDO Mobile’s
Michael Kieschnick explained how his platform is the core of
his life. • Belgian Prince Emmanuel De Merode brought people
to tears telling the story of saving Congolese animals from
murderous poachers. • Steve Wright, of Grameen Foundation,
explained that it's love that make us do this work. • The marine
biologist Sylvia Earle told the story of why it's so important to
save the oceans. • Tim o'Shea, CleanFish, showed us how if he
doesn't hold to his mission, he doesn't have a business.
INFRASTRUCTURE BUILDERS
Intermediaries Building Bridges and Filling Gaps to
Accelerate the Flow of Money to Good
• Brendan Martin, of The Working World, created a platform
to invest in co-ops. • CASE at Duke’s Cathy Clark built a lens
to help entrepreneurs understand investors. • Jenny Kassan,
a capital raising coach, built a direct public offering platform,
and now teaches women how to get investment. • The
Sorenson Impact Center, led by Jim Sorensen, created a think
and do tank using data to equip next generation leaders. • John
Goldstein, of Imprint Capital, helps guide impact investors to
put their money where their heart is. • Cutting Edge Capital,
led by John Katovich, builds platforms for local investing. •
John Kohler, of Miller Center, fashioned non-extractive exits
for entrepreneurs, like revenue rights to investors. • Karen
Doyle Grossman’s MicroMentor created an online mentorship
platform that spun out of Mercy Corps. • Laura Callanan is
building an art bank to invest in culture in new ways. • Patricia
Farrar-Rivas, of Veris Wealth Partners advises the Envestnet
Sustainability Platform.
 BOUNDARY BREAKERS
They Created Disruptive Innovation that’s Working
• Cynthia Muller, of Kellogg Foundation is a leader in working
on racial equity. • Darren Walker made the groundbreaking
$1b pledge to impact from the corpus of Ford Foundation. • Joy
Anderson, of Criterion Institute, leads important conversations
on church investing and gender lens. • Donna Morton’s
initial work was with First Nations in Canada and now, with
Change Finance, she’s tackling the issue of women on Wall
Street. • Jackie VanderBrug, of U.S. Trust, is making gender
lens investing make sense. • Black Girls Code’s Kimberly
Bryant turned down $150k from Uber and made black girls
coding cool. • Calvert Foundation – under the leadership of
the late Shari Berenbach and then Jenn Pryce – democratized
investing with community investment notes. • Through First
Nations Development Institute, Michael Roberts created Native
American CDFIs around the country. • The Cordes Foundation,
led by Ron Cordes, helped bridge the conversation from impact
to Wall Street. • Suzanne Biegel, catalyst-at-large, was an
early impact angel investing in women.
MOVING THE STORY FORWARD
They Changed Our Thinking, and Helped Change the
Paradigm
• Carol Sanford, through her eponymous Institute, gathers
regenerative businesses and tells their story. • David Bank
has made ImpactAlpha into a daily industry habit. • Eric Nee
leads Stanford Social Innovation Review. • Katherine Collins,
of Honeybee Capital, uses wisdom from natural systems and
spiritual traditions to connect investing with purpose. • Lara
Setrakian leads the next generation media platform News
Deeply that experts rely on for analysis of species level issue.
• Laura Flanders, of GRITtv, is telling hard and true stories on
television. • Matthew Bishop directs impact investing coverage
for The Economist. • Ann Wizer’s XSProject turns unrecyclable
vinyl from billboards into a money-making business for
Indonesian trash pickers; and also helped set the tone for
SOCAP09. • Oscar Abello’s Next City is the essential reporting
voice on where the market meets justice in the US. • Rob Katz
created the still thriving publication NextBillion, targeting
business for good in the developing world.
ANYALYSTS AND SYSTEMATIZERS
Creating Frameworks to Make Sense of the Space for
Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Stakeholders
• Ben Thornley, of Tideline, helped Rockefeller measure
its impact. • Connie Evans’ AEO explains the state of black
business to policy makers and investors. • Katherine Fulton,
of Monitor, wrote the report that made sense of the early days
of impact. • Equilibrium, led by David Chen, creates complex
ways to look at real assets, and teaches financial innovation.
• Doug Jutte’s Build Healthy Places Network linked health
and housing into a healthy places framework. • Through
ImpactAssets, Fran Seegull explained donor advised funds to
wealth managers, and she’s now helping Ford Foundation. •
Gar Alperovitz’s Next System Project outlines a path to the next
economic system. • Harvey Koh, of Monitor, wrote foundational
reports that are still cited. • John Fullerton, of Capital Institute,
is building a series of field guides to a regenerative economy.
• TriplePundit, led by Nick Aster, is a high readership online
daily.
ENTREPRENEURS ADVANCING
SOCAP Scholarshipped Entrepreneurs Whose
Projects Are Moving Forward
• Ajaita Shah’s Frontier Markets created a distribution network
to get solar powered lights into rural India. • Farmerline,
led by Alloysius Attah, enabled rural African farmers to get
productivity tips by voicemail in their own indigenous language.
• Debbie Sterling, of GoldieBlox, made it cool for girls to think
and act like engineers. • Erine Gray founded the website Aunt
Bertha to pick up where Uncle Sam leaves off, and help people
find social services in their area. • Through Embrace, Jane
Chen created a low-cost infant warmer for low birthweight and
premature babies in the developing world that has reached
more than 150k children. • Jason Rosado’s GivKwik built a
functioning online mobile giving platform. • Lisa Curtis, of Kuli
Kuli, is a food entrepreneur with a knack for good marketing.
• Driptech’s Peter Frykman made drip irrigation simple in the
developing world. • Sheikh Turay, of Liberation Cocoa, works
with former child soldiers in Liberia to create livelihoods and
reintegrate into society through growing and exporting cacao.
• Tala’s Shivani Siroya is using mobile data to support micro
businesses.
11
12
 WHY SOCAP WORKED
When three thoughtful, committed social
entrepreneurs came together to form SOCAP,
they changed the investment world. Kevin
Jones, Rosa Lee Harden, and Tim Freundlich
conspired to expose a blind-spot in traditional
investing, and never could have predicted what
their wild ideas and common vision would
become.
It was 2008, Lehman Brothers was on the
verge of failing, and yet conventional investors
remained deeply committed to doing what
they had always done, even in the face of
such dramatic market changes. Kevin calls
the traditional way of investing “two pocket
thinking” – you have one pocket for profit and
one pocket for philanthropy or aid. In this
paradigm, the money in those pockets should
never mingle: you invest and put the proceeds
in one pocket, then you put some of the excess
in another pocket for giving away.
Kevin, Rosa Lee, and Tim thought the money
in those pockets should not just mingle; they
thought there should be only one pocket. And
they set about to prove that social change
could – and indeed would – increase pocket
change. There is plenty of good data to prove
their point now. But a decade ago, big investors
could not be convinced. Billionaires sent them
away; loyal as they were, to their two pocket,
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
– V I CTO R H U G O
feel-good approach to philanthropy. At the
time, even people who were beginning to ask
whether they could do good while doing well
financially were still largely influenced by
traditional investment strategies.
“There were two small conferences about to
be held by groups trying to get this space really
moving. But they weren’t talking to each other,’
said Kevin. “I suggested I make a conversation
map, of the definitions one group was using
and the terms the other group was trying to
promote. At first the one group thought it was
a great idea, then they said they only had 10
minutes for the map, and finally they said they
had no time for it. ‘Don’t you want to know
what the people who are not in the room are
saying,’ I asked? They said ‘No, we think we
have the right people in the room.’”
Kevin realized at that moment why nothing
was moving and what needed to be done.
“Markets are built on conversations where
you get the Byzantine and the Barbarians in
the room; where you make connections with
people you would not meet in the normal
rooms you go to. We knew SOCAP would be
different; we would be the place between
the silos where you would meet the valuable
strangers who could become unlikely allies.
13
 And that approach has been the secret to our
success.”
At the time, Kevin and Rosa Lee already had
years of experience in hosting events. In fact,
they had such varied and bizarrely coincidental
experiences blending together and adding to
Tim’s background, that the idea of SOCAP – the
conference at the intersection of money and
meaning – now seems like a natural outgrowth of
that groundwork.
Kevin grew up mostly in California, and met Rosa
Lee at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary.
Rosa Lee was from small-town Mississippi,
and by 1986 the couple was back in Mississippi
running the print magazine, the Mississippi
Business Journal. Rosa Lee was also well on
her way to becoming an ordained priest in the
“People are beginning
to think more seriously
about this, so we should
create the space for that
thinking.”
- ROSA LEE HARDEN
14
Episcopal Church. Their years in Mississippi, with
its rich if complex culture and its deep racial and
class divides, certainly informed their sincere,
almost genetic commitment to social justice.
The couple returned to San Francisco in 1996.
Kevin and Tim began to bump into each other
at gatherings for impact investing or venture
philanthropy groups. Tim had been in San
Francisco since he moved there from Connecticut
for his MBA. As Tim and Kevin got to know one
another in other venues, they recognized a
common purpose and complementary skill sets.
At the time, Tim was already a thought-leader
and innovator of financial instruments in the still
emerging impact investment space. Well-versed
in the space of building pathways for impact in
investing, he was instrumental in building the
$225 million Calvert Community Investment
Note. And he was perfectly poised for something
new, that he could feel coming.
Already accomplished social entrepreneurs in
their own rights, in 2006, Kevin and Tim formed
Good Capital, LLC, and shortly thereafter began
hosting gatherings on Wednesday nights in the
Mission District just to get impact investors and
philanthropists together.
“There was no agenda. It was just a place to meet
together. Sometimes I would bring cheese and
crackers, and they would get some beer,” said
Rosa Lee, owning from the outset part of what
would become her trademark at the conferences:
that they would provide a large dose of hospitality
to help people feel welcome. “It was really just a
couple of small rooms in an office building, that
consistently filled past capacity. People were just
so excited to be there in those conversations,
there was no more space to squeeze anyone in.”
These Wednesday meetings proved that the
community was hungry for more conversation.
Rosa Lee and Kevin began to imagine what larger
gatherings might look like. They had hosted
conferences before, and they were friends with
Heidi Kleinmaus and Gary Bolles, of Charrette,
LLC, who hosted strategic events for a wide-
range of clients, most notably Google’s Zeitgeist.
“I remember Kevin and Rosa Lee telling me they
had this crazy idea that we needed a main stage
for all the great companies we were investing in,
and for the sector to come together,” said Tim.
“I wanted to say, ‘no.’ I didn’t understand what
convening was all about; but they did. So, my
contribution in the end was to not say, ‘no,’ and
rather to allow that to happen.”
So, Gary and Kevin began a walkabout, to see if
they could get traction with the idea with social
entrepreneurs, investors, and sponsors. “Not
many people were listening or thought it was a
good idea,” Kevin said. “We were turned down
a lot or told we were on the wrong track.” The
concept had not even become solid enough to
convert our original one page word document
into a pdf. In fact, the header still said “Social
Capital Markets, working title” when another
original founder, Mark Beam, found the sponsor
whose support would allow them to put on that
first conference; Harry Halloran of Halloran
Philanthropies.
Meanwhile, Heidi and Rosa Lee began their own
exploration of the where and how of hosting the
event. They knew that designing the hospitality
was important, so they wanted to emphasize
creating spaces and opportunities for attendees
to talk. Heidi’s genius found Fort Mason and Acre
Gourmet, both of which have been signatures
that made SOCAP special since the beginning.
Since then, SOCAP has grown from the first
year’s attendance of 625 registered attendees
to an expected 3500 for SOCAP17, the tenth
anniversary of the conference.
But, there’s more to the inaugural unfolding than
Tim just not saying, ‘no.’ In fact, six weeks before
the first conference, the group had to decide
whether to pull the plug and lose $40,000 or keep
moving forward.
“About six weeks out, we had sold less than 100
tickets,” Kevin recalled. We had a break-even
goal of around 300. I began to think maybe I
had too little social capital to convene. But then
Rob Katz wrote a blog for nextbillion.net calling
for another way in investing and addressing
specifically ‘why I’m going to SOCAP.’” Almost
immediately, SOCAP sold 90 more tickets.
Still under the break-even threshold, they had to
make a decision. “Rosa Lee told me to go for it, to
get to work. So I asked ten more people to write
about why they were going to SOCAP, and we
created a buzz. And, of course, Lehman Brothers
went under, so we began to represent a flight to
hope. To some extent, the crisis of 2008 created
our event,” Kevin continued.
“Everybody showed up shell-shocked,” recalled
15
 Tim. “It was like a bomb had gone off. People
were walking around New York looking at their
BlackBerries in disbelief. The market breaks
had kicked in as Lehman Brothers went under.
But, we had a great party anyway. We were onto
something, and it had tapped into a vein.”
And the party continued. Ultimately, the event
sold more than 600 tickets. And SOCAP has
grown roughly 20% every year of its ten years.
With this growth has come change. Roles have
been defined and redefined. The focus has
changed from year to year. Kevin, Rosa Lee, and
Tim continue to define and refine what the “it” is
of SOCAP, but the mission of bringing together
entrepreneurs and investors has resulted in
innumerable joint enterprises, strengthening the
position of social investing so much that now big
business is paying big attention.
The willingness to allow SOCAP to evolve as
social capital investing has evolved is the key to
its continued growth and success. This is likely
the result of both the will of Rosa Lee, Kevin, and
Tim to try to stay one step ahead of the markets
and the willingness to rethink, even restart when
necessary.
“We have just been trying to define as we go,” said
Rosa Lee. “There was never a ‘this is it’ moment
when we defined SOCAP. There was more of a
‘people are beginning to think more seriously
about this, so we should create the space for that
thinking.’”
In fact, the first year was mostly about getting
people together and giving them a chance
to think together. Rosa Lee was particularly
16
interested in seeing how people’s faith played
into their thinking, but, because of her frock, she
was unsure if it might scare people away.
“I was nervous about putting anything related
to faith up on that first program. I was afraid
that somebody wouldn’t like it or would
misunderstand what it meant for me. But then,
someone else threw that out as a topic to gather
around. So, we had faith as an optional theme,
and more than 30% of participants showed up
for that discussion. The meaning side of what we
were up to really drew people it. They wanted us
to say it explicitly so that it didn’t get lost. But it
still surprised me that people showed up for it,”
recalls Rosa Lee.
SOCAP has been explicit about influencing the
emerging conversation around other important
themes, as well. Always keying in entrepreneurs
as the focus of the event, SOCAP has worked hard
to broaden its connection to entrepreneurs from
various perspectives. From early sessions, they
were conscious to try to diversify discussions;
initially focusing on gender equity and inclusion,
then moving into serious attention to racial
equity and inclusion, paying particular attention
to African American and Latinx entrepreneurs.
SOCAP has always included international
participants as well, and some SOCAP events
have convened at international sites as an
experiment in both broadening perspectives and
being more internally inclusive.
Although each SOCAP conference has been
different thematically, there are a number
of things that remain consistent about the
gathering. One of the most important through
lines for all SOCAP conferences is the quality of
the experience for participants.
“SOCAP is very intentional about being inclusive,
about welcoming everyone. It operates very
differently from other conferences because,
rather than looking for and deferring to the
power, SOCAP says, ‘if you think you should be in
here, come in,’” says Lindsay Smalling, currently
serving as the curator for SOCAP. “Some of that
is just a big dose of Southern Hospitality and
good hosting that comes from Rosa Lee. At the
first conference I attended, I saw that there was
real attention to quality. It mattered. On stage
production. On copy editing. On food. It all feels
like quality. That’s a defining characteristic for
SOCAP.”
Another through line has been the awareness that
the people are the point, so SOCAP is designed
to bring the often-fringe hallway and parking
lot conversations to the table.
The conference is intentional
in creating open, unplanned
opportunities.
work you are doing,” explained Kevin.
The attention to both quality and quality time has
obviously worked. SOCAP is ten years old this
year, and by all measures it is still going strong.
So what should you expect in its next decade?
“Those of us on the inside think we’ve been seeing
the conversation about social capital investing
mature for a long time. But the truth is that it has
barely started,” said Tim. “What we measure in
hundreds and thousands is snowballing to tens
of thousands and millions. It is exponential.”
“In five years, I suspect that the movement will
mature enough that it becomes a lens rather
than an event, but we will always need to gather
the tribe” he went on. “That’s why the conference
will continue to grow. I suspect it will flourish
across regions and grow and grow. SOCAP is the
Vanguard of the future. It’s just the beginning.”

“SOCAP is a lot bigger than

us. People come to SOCAP
because they know that the
people they need to see are
there. And often it’s not even
the people they’re expecting,
it’s the valuable strangers
who become unlikely allies.
We design it so that they can
connect. We keep saying, let
us provide structure for the

17
 IMPACT INVESTING THROUGH THE YEARS
Catholic Nuns and the Mennonites are among the earliest to accelerate the flow of capital to good and to set the stage
for the Impact Investing movement
1976 Prudential creates a team dedicated to investments in community revitalization
Ben & Jerry’s launches with a great sense of humor, and brings national attention to a company that’s intentionally using
1978
quality products and doing good things
1980 Ashoka launches by Bill Drayton
1983 Monitor Institute is founded
1984 Ashoka receives a MacArthur Genius Award
1985 Ben & Jerry’s launches a foundation to invest 7.5% of their annual pre-tax profits in community oriented projects
Historical Divestment Campaign; persuading investors to divest from companies supporting any sort of harm, starting
1986
with companies investing in South Africa during apartheid
1987 Ashoka officially registers as an organization
1987 Echoing Green is launched by General Atlantic, and selects first fellow
1987 Wayne Silby and Josh Mailman launch Social Venture Network
1989 SRI (The Conference on Sustainable, Responsible, Impact Investing) hosts its first conference
1992 Investors’ Circle launches in Chicago
1995 Calvert Foundation launches the Community Investment Note
1995 Key Report; “Report on US Sustainable, Responsible, and Impact Investing Trends” is the first SRI trends report
1996 Moskowitz Prize honors first winner
Late 1990s Historical Divestment Campaign; from companies with ties to weapons being used in Sudan and Vietnam
2000 Exits that Matter; Ben & Jerry’s is bought by Unilever
2001 Jacqueline Novogratz launches Acumen, which helps define the Venture Philanthropy sector
2001 BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) launches
2003 BALLE hosts its first conference
2003 Jed Emerson produces Blended Value Map, funded by Hewlett Foundation
2003 Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford is created
2004 Omidyar Network is founded
2005 Skoll World Forum launches, along with first Skoll Awards
April 2006 UN Principles for Responsible Investment launches at NYSE
2006 B Lab – creator of B Corps – is founded
2007 B Lab issues its first certifications
2007 IPO for Compartamos, the largest microfinance bank in Latin America
2007 Accion gets $50m 10,000x return from Compartamos
2007 The term “Impact Investing” is coined by Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center
2007 Social Enterprise Expansion Fund is launched, and becomes an incubator for SOCAP and Impact Hub SF
September 2008 Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt as world markets meltdown
As markets meltdown, the first SOCAP conference launches and becomes a flight to hope for investors experiencing the
October 2008
systemic risk of traditional capital markets

18
 Rockefeller Foundation launches an impact investing initiative with $10m for three years, funding infrastructure and
2008
putting the terminology on the map
January 2009 Key Report; “Investing for Social and Environmental Impact” by Monitor Institute
2009 Obama administration creates the Office of Social Innovation & Civic Participation; Sonal Shah selected to lead initiative
2009 Creation of the GIIN, and launch of IRIS
2009 Corporation for National and Community Service launches their Social Innovation Fund
2009 The Gates Foundation launches a $400m PRI initiative
2009 The first Sankalp Forum is held in Mumbai
2010 ImpactAssets spins out of Calvert Foundation and quickly becomes largest Impact Investing Donor Advised Fund
2010 Toniic is founded, a network of angel investors interested in impact
2010 South Shore Bank goes under, but Impact Investing continues to grow
2010 Maryland is the first state to sign benefit corporation legislation into law
May 2010 SOCAP/Europe is produced in Amsterdam in collaboration with Pymwymic
Key Report; “Impact Investments: An Emerging Asset Class” by JPMorgan, Rockefeller Foundation, and the GIIN;
November 2010
includes first Impact Investor Survey, which becomes an annual series
2011 Heron Foundation rewrites investment policy statement to commit 100% of assets to impact
2011 Exits that Matter; Honest Tea sells to Coca-Cola
Historical Divestment Campaign; 350.org urges carbon divestment, and this time followed by an investment campaign to
2011
move money to companies and funds that have divested
April 2012 Key Report; “From Blueprint to Scale,” Acumen Fund and Monitor Group
August 2012 First US Social Impact Bond; Juvenile Justice, Rikers Island; funded by Goldman Sachs and Bloomberg Philanthropies
2013 Exits that Matter; Danone acquires Happy Family
2013 Monitor Institute is bought by Deloitte
June 2013 G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce is announced by UK Prime Minister David Cameron
September 2013 Key Report “From the Margins to the Mainstream,” by World Economic Forum and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Foundation
June 2014 The first Vatican Impact Investing Conference: Investing for the Poor
September 2014 The Rockefeller Brothers Fund commits to divest from fossil fuels
2015 Bain Double Impact Fund launches, and hires Deval Patrick, former Governor of Massachusetts
2015 BlackRock starts an Impact Investing practice, and hires Deborah Winshel, President of the Robin Hood Foundation
July 2015 Goldman Sachs acquires Imprint Capital
The Department of Labor issues new guidance: fiduciaries can proactively consider environmental, social, and
October 2015
governance (ESG) factors in investment analysis
2016 Exits that Matter; Unilever buys Seventh Generation
IRS issues new guidance on Program Related Investments to reassure foundations and provide examples that illustrate
April 2016
how a foundation can use PRIs to advance its charitable purpose
November 2016 Calvert Investments is bought by Eaton Vance mutual fund complex
December 2016 TPG launches $2B Rise Fund
February 2017 US Alliance on Impact Investing launches
April 2017 Ford commits $1B of endowment to Mission Related Investments
June 2017 Good Capital Project is launched to help catalyze the field and coordinate & connect between siloed initiatives
October 2017 10th Annual SOCAP conference is held in San Francisco with 3000+ in attendance from around the globe

19
 IT’S REAL, IT’S BIG
AND IT’S GROWING
20
 SOCAP08

“This is the first comprehensive, global gathering of

socially focused venture funds the world has ever
seen.” So began the first words of the first program
of what is now recognized as THE conference at the
intersection of money and meaning.

The 2008 conference was attended by social

investors from six continents; from South Africa,
Ethiopia, and Mali, from the UK, Denmark, the
Netherlands, from Brazil, and Nicaragua, from
Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, from Australia, and, of
course, from across the United States.

According to that initial program book, the “goal

with the conference [was] simple: we [wanted] to
show the watching world that the social capital
space is real, that it’s big, that it’s growing, and that,
despite, or perhaps even because of the meltdown
in the traditional capital market, this can be a safer
long-term place to put your money and your hopes
for the future.”

The participants at the conference were not

disappointed. In fact, the conference demonstrated
exactly what the program promised: that there was
another way.

21
“What I want to
do is talk about
the philanthropy
of all of us: the
democratization of
philanthropy. This is
a moment in history
when the average
person has more
power than at any
time.”
- K AT H E R I N E F U LTO N
22
“I was fascinated by how clear our speakers were about
why they did what they did, and why it was so important
toward their bottom line,” said Rosa Lee. “During the
first session that I attended, somebody asked if the
speaker focused more on doing good or making money.
The speaker said that if the business stopped doing
good it would stop making money. Finally, I started
really believing this idea that if you are doing it right, it
is good for your bottom line. I was a convert at my own
event.”
Another surprise about the first year was how hungry
people were for this conversation. “They were hungry
for community. They found out they weren’t alone. They
found their people, and so did we,” Rosa Lee added.
Although many of the first participants already knew one
another, it was important to be clear that the conference
was not going to be like all of the others.
“We just kept looking for who was not in the room,” said
Kevin. “We listened intently to figure out what people
were talking about and then to create a space for that
conversation. We really proved that that was our goal in
the first year.”
“We also managed to merge two groups of
people. Some people had said that they could not
gather around the word ‘Social,’ and other people
said that they couldn’t around the word ‘Market.’
With this first conference, even just that success
would have been enough,” Kevin added.
Perhaps the most significant surprise for
participants in the first SOCAP was simply the
structure. Presenters from other conferences
were invited to talk, and tracks and themes were
created to make it easy for participants to follow
conversations about what precisely they were
most interested in.
“We found track leaders from other conferences,
somebody who had a portfolio on a particular
area. So, sometimes it was somebody who was
trying to build her own topic. The first SOCAP
worked because the people who came needed
there to be a market to sell their own products.
Or they were experts and consultants who
wanted an area to grow in order to make their
expertise work, too,” Kevin explained.
“SOCAP grew up as a small village between all
of the tents. It was like a meeting of caravans.
We would go look for a particular sector that
we wanted to bring in. We kept staving off the
limited thinking that we wanted ‘the right people
in the room.’ We kept encouraging participants
to pay attention to the people that they didn’t
know so that new conversations could happen.
At the end of the first conference, we had earned
the reputation that this was more about the
people in the room than the people at the front of
the room. People realized that we were serious
about being different, that we were serious
about changing the paradigm, and changing
conversation.”
v

Even with these experts in the

room, though, there were
lots of reminders that
everybody had to have
a seat at the table, not
just friends, and not just
partners in investment.
They weren’t looking to
circulate the same ideas
amongst the people who
would all agree with
them. They were making
space for what wasn’t
being said.

23
 IT’S IN THE BAG
24
 SOCAP09

It may be hard to believe now, with SOCAP’s proud

history in the rearview mirror, but, after the first
conference, nobody was sure there should be a
second one.

“I’m not sure I thought we could or should do it any

better because I didn’t know there would be a next
time. The question was really, ‘can we pull this off
again and still do it as good?’” Kevin recalled.

Of course, they did pull it off again, and the second

SOCAP attracted even more participants than the first.

As the conference came together, the producers

recognized the need to help move the thinking from
the abstract to the concrete, and they landed upon
just the right way to do that.

Enter Ann Wizer. Here’s her story from the SOCAP09

Program:

Ann was an artist and activist living on a hill

overlooking a colony of trash pickers in Indonesia
– where more than a half million people make a
meager living picking through piles of garbage and
reselling what they can salvage.

25
“For too long,
we have drawn a
sharp line between
grant funding and
more traditional
investments. Why One day, Ann trudged down the hill, determined
to find out what kinds of trash couldn’t be
not use both, grants recycled, looking for refuse that had no value
even to a savvy trash picker.
and investments,
It turns out that the biggest rejects – the junk
as well as hybrid that nobody will buy – is the vinyl from billboards.
Looked at with an entrepreneur’s eye, Ann saw
models, to address an opportunity. The sheets of vinyl are a large,
readily available, and colorful source of material.
our most urgent They’re incredibly durable – that’s what makes
them hard to recycle.
challenges?”
She realized that the vinyl sheets would be
great for bags – shoulder bags, handbags,
clutch purses – that have to hold up under the
punishment of daily use.

Cut to SOCAP09, where all attendees were given

- SONAL SHAH the XSProject Bag, a shoulder bag with SOCAP
materials inside. Participants were given an
opportunity to learn more about Ann’s idea
and to give her suggestions for how to turn the

26
XSProject into a real business. The attendees
loved the bags, and they loved the way that the
bags and the conversation around them made
the whole point of SOCAP so tangible. “We were
working against the abstract, so we asked people
to help solve a problem,” said Kevin, describing
the significance of the bags.

The program reminded participants to think of it

just that way: “Let the bag that you carry around
stand for the kind of entrepreneurial spirit
you’ll see throughout the three session-and-
people-packed days of SOCAP09, culminating
on Thursday when we’ll all make the conference
come together. Let the bag be a useful, physical
reminder that it all starts with an idea – with
a moment when you look around and say that
something has to change. And you’re the one
who’s going to do something about it.”
For Ann, SOCAP was a catalyst in moving
the XSProject along as a business, recycling
consumer waste into useful objects and providing
employment. Ann later founded INVISIBLE in
Manila, a company that encourages the reuse of
waste through crocheting and other crafts.
The conference organizers also made the
conference content concrete for participants
in another way that put students to work as
“connection concierges” – people who helped
translate jargon and make connections. By year
two, Tim, Kevin, and Rosa Lee had also opened
year-round co-working spaces known as “Hubs.”
Each Hub had a host whose job it was to know
what everyone in the space was working on and
to facilitate connections among workers in the
room; like a reference librarian whose resources
are people. So the producers borrowed this idea
from the Hubs for a new strategy at SOCAP.
“We became much more intentional about helping
people connect in the second year,” said Kevin.
“There really was a need for folks to network.
There was a space there intentionally for people
to connect, and not just out in the parking lot. We
started having activities that connected folks. We
did little things like having a news board where
people could post conversations, and we had
color-coded tables for topics of interest as the
subjects came up in discussion.”
In the end, SOCAP09 succeeded in making the
theories behind social capital investing concrete
and tangible for the participants. Before the
producers had taken down the tables and put up
the chairs, participants were already asking for
SOCAP10.

27
 FINDING THE
RIGHT BALANCE

28
 SOCAP10

When the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and

Melinda Gates Foundation both show up for an
event, you might be onto something. You might just
be breaking through to new ground.

That was the feeling at the opening of SOCAP10.

These two foundations were joined by USAID, OPIC
and other development agencies, as well as impact
investors, individuals, and funds, from Mexico, the
UK, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Nigeria, South
Africa, Australia, India, Sweden, and more than 20
other countries.

Jacqueline Novogratz – Founder and CEO of

Acumen and the keynote speaker that year –
reminded participants that, “as impact investing
proceeds down the path of being validated as an
asset class, the one thing that should not be lost
is its true purpose. It is supposed to be catalytic;
to do the risky, experimental things that traditional
capital would not do, and traditional philanthropy or
public agencies could not conceive. And it needs to
partner with philanthropy and with government.”

The producers agreed about doing things the

catalytic way, and were on track to carry that out.

29

“This is the essence
of understanding
that our work stands
on the shoulders of
so many people who
have been trying,
failing, and trying
again for many
years. And now, the
solutions is in our
collective hands. It is
breathtaking.”
- J A C Q U E L I NE N OV OGR AT Z
30
SOCAP10 offered nearly 100 scholarships to
social entrepreneurs, keeping all of these
entrepreneurs and their needs in focus as
conversations developed. The scholarship
recipients were given their own space, The
Clubhouse, where they could meet with peers
to share strategies, even tricks of the trade, as
they shared a common spirit of new and exciting
enterprise.
This commitment to social entrepreneurs proved
to be important not only for the entrepreneurs
themselves, who benefitted from the financial
and human resources made available, but also
to all conference attendees.
The conference had to deal with the fact that
its key identity – as the conference at the
intersection of money and meaning – was
changing. Whereas in prior years this group
was practically preaching heresy in the financial
world, recent participation, even validation by the
establishment was new and a little confusing.
Kevin recalls what recognition by the
establishment was like. “We were being
acknowledged by the leaders. We had called
ourselves the largest group of people thinking
about these issues. But suddenly we were
endorsed by Rockefeller, Gates, etc. We were
being validated by the establishment. It was
like ‘oh, we are on the map and validated on
the map.’ There was a market demand, and we
filled it. We went from fringe and controversial to
where everybody needed us to exist. That made
our existence make sense and our content easy.”
But SOCAP had already built a reputation for

being edgy, thought-provoking, and creative.
Would this change with more formal acceptance?
The answer was simple. As Jacqueline had
foreseen, it could not. And thus, they decided, it
would not.
By foregrounding the role of entrepreneurs in
the conference, participants were reminded to
keep their focus on the meaning, and that focus
worked. Participants began to talk more about
the products that attendees were offering for
purchase by other attendees, and the organizers
realized that there were few things “pure”
enough for a SOCAP endorsement.
“I always thought it would become a marketplace,
but it didn’t,” Kevin explained. “It’s really hard
to find pure purchasing whose whole chain of
production holds the mission. We couldn’t find
a lot we could put a SOCAP sticker on. And
everybody has their own pet issue that want to
promote and support. So we left people to figure
it out for themselves.”
Although earlier SOCAP conferences had
specifically included a focus on production
transparency – such that participants could
understand the values at work in every aspect
of the conference – SOCAP10 brought this
transparency conversation to the forefront,
asking intentionally whether participants were
spending their money in ways consistent with
their values.
Answers to this question were mixed, but the
asking was important. As organizers more fully
recognized their own principles at work in pulling
the conference together, participants were
asked to examine their own, as well. To make
this exercise of actively supporting our personal
values even more explicit, one of the sponsors,
MicroPlace, gave every participant a $50.00 gift
certificate as an investment vehicle.
In the end, all of these aspects created the space
at SOCAP10 for new energy and excitement.
On the one hand, endorsement by mainstream
investing gave participants the assurance that the
conversations at SOCAP were increasingly valid.
On the other hand, SOCAP’s intentional focus
on entrepreneurs, its insistence on revisiting
values, and its refusal to veer away from its own
production values reminded participants that,
although this was potentially big business, it
certainly would not be business as usual.
31
 SOCAP GOES
GLOBAL
32
 SOCAP/EUROPE

“We come here, to the mother of markets, as a

reminder that the market is not a force of nature –
like a tsunami or a tornado. It’s a tool. Our tool. We
built it, right here, in this place, in an earlier version
of this very room. Markets are our creations. We
built them, we can rebuild them; use them as tools
to help us create a world where we can all survive
and even thrive.”

So began the Convener’s letter for SOCAP/Europe in

2010, held at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam;
on the site where the first stock market was formed
hundreds of years ago and where, in 1903, the
Merchants Exchange of Amsterdam conducted
business. The site today is an exquisite conference,
expo, and event center.

To make this happen, the SOCAP team lived in

Amsterdam off and on for about six months. They
had long discussed different perspectives on the
stock market with their friends and Dutch partners,
Frank van Beuningen and Margaret McGovern of
Pymwymic, one of the earliest and most experienced
impact investing firms in Europe.

33
 “We had talked with Frank and Margaret
often about the ways our respective cultures

“We are
influenced the way we thought about money,”
recalls Rosa Lee. “Kevin and I wondered how
so many things – like medicine, for example –
worked so profoundly differently in our cultures.

more
Especially when we also noted how similar basic
values were across our cultures.”

At the heart of the collaboration between the

San Francisco SOCAP team and Amsterdam’s

alike, my team with Frank and Margaret was the common

belief that Europe wanted to be a larger voice in
the largely North American conversation about
creating solutions; that European and North

friends, American cultures needed to learn from one

another and, in the end, to work together.

“Our shared goal is to make it clear why people

than are moving their minds and moving their money

in new ways in this market at the intersection of
money and meaning,” the Conveners explained.

we are To generate buzz for the conference, some of the

team traveled to Zurich, Paris, Oxford, London,
Brussels, and the Skåne region of Sweden, as
well as talked to people in Central, Southern,

unalike.” and Eastern Europe and more. All along the way,
they listened.

“Sometimes I would speak at a gathering of 20

or 30, a few times in front of a couple of hundred,
but the heart of the work was having coffee and
cookies in someone’s parlor or at a dinner of a
- M AYA A N G E LO U dozen or fewer, in cities where we’d managed to
get an invitation,” Kevin recalled.

34
Sure, they shared what they knew and what they
were learning, but they mostly listened to the
people from all over in order to understand what
was alike or what was unalike in social capital
investing in various settings. They were getting a
sense of the broader ecosystem.
What they discovered on their journey was
that the goal of understanding money as an
extension of one’s self, one’s values, translated
into any language they’d come across and found
a home in any culture. Thus, they resolved to
make SOCAP/Europe open and accessible to
traditional investors, to people just beginning
to think about investing, and also to the leading
thinkers in connecting money and meaning.
SOCAP/Europe made fifty work trade
scholarships available to individuals who would
volunteer in various ways, helping out where
needed throughout the conference, people who
could not otherwise attend.
And the Conveners were sincere in their intention
that key concepts and core values had to be
accessible to all participants. To ensure that all
participants, regardless of nation of origin, were
welcome at the table, they established clear,
welcoming ways of encouraging cross-cultural
dialogue.
“Whether you are struggling to understand
insider lingo or looking for help translating a
specific phrase to your language, Hub hosts
will be able to assist you or point you in the
right direction. Don’t be shy: ask a host to help
explain any terms that are unfamiliar to you,” the
program warmly explained.
The travel and the translations were worth it. By
the time SOCAP/Europe drew to a close, it was
clear that this new kind of market – the social
capital market – fit well within the walls of the
old market, even as it worked to redefine the way
that old market did business.
35
 TWO STEPS FORWARD

36
 SOCAP11
In some ways, SOCAP11 was the hardest conference
to pull-off. Two international SOCAPS took place
between SOCAP10 and SOCAP11, so there was the
simple fact that a great deal had been said and done
during the year. That meant that SOCAP11 needed to
appeal to people who were new to the conversation,
sustain people who were coming regularly but had
not been to the European SOCAPS, and it had to give
the producers a chance to consolidate and reflect.

“After we had held SOCAP in Sweden and in

Amsterdam, we had to implement what we had
learned. We had to make SOCAP make sense on
a broader scale,” Rosa Lee explained. “We were
trying to find our place. We were recovering from
Europe, from the intensity and from all we learned
in broadening our perspectives. “

This is not to say that SOCAP11 did not include its

own, distinct innovations. For example, scholarships
were intentionally curated for SOCAP11.

“We made the decision that we wanted to host at

least 100 entrepreneurs to help us really focus
on what brings us together,” Rosa Lee recalled.
“In some ways, SOCAP11 was the most fun. We
really focused on money and meaning. And we let
ourselves play. We even had a temporary tattoo we
handed out.”

37
 With the 100 entrepreneurs, there were more real
pitches, real innovation participants could learn from.

“We wanted to be much less investor-centric,” Kevin

added. “We didn’t want investors to dominate. We
worked hard to sell the entrepreneurs, to understand
“While we’re how entrepreneurs fit in and were critical to our work.”

witnessing the Entrepreneurs from all over – Bangladesh, Tanzania,

India, Australia, Brazil – more international than
potential of domestic, were funded and given open space to talk
about what they were trying to do.
massively scaled Kevin recalled the focus of this work: “We asked ourselves
connectivity – we over and over, ‘what will help these people, the real ones
solving the problems?’”
want to ensure that Many entrepreneurs had projects that were taking off,
connectivity leads that were really doing important work. Drop the Chalk, in
the United States, and Barefoot Power, in Australia, were
toward democratized two of the entrepreneurial efforts that were capturing
attention. For investors to be able to hear of this work, to
decision-making. understand its impact, and to see in real terms that their
investments could do well and do good, these elements
The best way to made SOCAP11 both vivid and personal.

insure that outcome In the end, this year provided an opportunity to return
to the core mission of SOCAP and to understand further
is to invite inquiry how impact investing could and would change the world.
Although it caught the producers in a flurry of activity
and dialogue.” after producing two European conferences, it also
required them to slow down, to regroup, and to figure out
where this work might go next.

- JEFF LEIFER

38
39
 CROSSING
BOUNDARIES:
INTERNATIONAL AND
I N T E R D I S C I P L I N A RY

40
SOCAP/DESIGNING THE FUTURE

“If it had not been for his vision and perseverance

this conference would never have happened.” This
is how the program from SOCAP: Designing the
Future described the work of Bert-Ola Bergstrand.

Bert-Ola had been working in Dynamic Growth

Capital, a social capital project in the western
portion of Sweden. The organization was working
on developing models for sustainable business for
the region. There was the will of strong institutional
actors in all of Nordic country, but his region was
the first to focus on social capital. There were a
number of ongoing projects in the region, but Bert-
Ola felt that it was time to host a conference in
order to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas.

“It was Autumn of 2008. I had been managing

Dynamic Growth Capital for three years, and I
really wanted to host a conference to move our
conversations along,” Bert-Ola recalled. “So I
googled it. It seems funny now, but I found SOCAP by
googling, ‘Who is working actively in social capital?’
Two organizations came up, one in Scotland and
one in the US, in San Francisco.

41

“I saw Kevin’s picture, and it happened to have
his email address. So I just wrote to him. I told
him that I wanted to have a conference that was
part academic and part practical. And I basically
asked, ‘What’s this? What is this SOCAP?’” Bert-
Ola was surprised that Kevin wrote him back
right away, and they started a conversation about
how social capital investing worked in the US and
how it worked in Sweden.
“We agreed that sometimes one plus one is
greater than two, that having a conversation
across cultures would be rewarding,” Bert-Ola
said.
Soon thereafter, folks in the southern region of
Sweden got interested in the same topic. The
next logical step, then, was for the SOCAP team
to visit; which they did in the summer of 2010.
Bert-Ola set up tours for them, and soon they
all agreed that holding SOCAP in Malmö made
sense.
42
“Sometimes one
+ one is greater
than two.”
“I had a transformative experience on the shores
of Lake Vänern, which is the largest lake in
the EU,” Kevin said. “Our guides told me that
20 years ago the lake was too dirty to swim in
due to industrial pollution. Now it was not only
drinkable, communities on the west and east
side of the lake were competing for the most
value added fishery products: a local caviar,
fish meal for animal food, etc. I asked what the
struggle was like to get the lake clean; how the
environmentalists had beat the industrialists.
They answered that there were no fights. That
they realized the problem and they solved it.
“It wasn’t sinking in, so, I asked what the factions
were, what the political fights were like. Again,
I got the same answer. They had realized the
problem and they solved it. Government, the
people, industry all worked to stop the pollution
and remediate the impact. I realized then that I
had a lot to learn from the Swedes.”

Another thing he learned from their time there
was that the Swedish people saw that their
assurance of a well-functioning government
to solve state problems meant that they felt a
responsibility towards entrepreneurial solutions,
solving problems the state hadn’t figured out.
Even now, years later – because immigrants
often don’t get hired by Swedish companies –
there is ongoing work in the area of helping to
start immigrant-owned businesses.
“SOCAP has served as a catalyst for so much
social capital innovation in Sweden,” Bert-
Ola explained. “Sweden was a little late to this
conversation compared to Europe. But after
SOCAP, that national conversation, the main
thinking about business in Sweden, changed.
SOCAP, and the SOCAP team, were definitely
here at the right time.”
His own interest in the space became focused
on knowledge transfer, about how to turn
“My biggest passion
is to try to build a
better future.”
- BERT-OLA
BERGSTRAND
information into knowledge across the cultural
differences. What everyone learned, was that,
even though the context was different, much of
the practical work and knowledge transferred
easily into a Swedish model.
Fast forward to now, and it is easy to see the
lasting connections that the conference has had
on social capital investing in Sweden. Most of the
important actors in the Nordic space for social
capital investing have now attended SOCAP in the
States 1 to 3 times each, to continue the share of
knowledge and inspiration. And Bert-Ola is one
of the leaders of the annual pilgrimage called
Nordic Innovation Week.
“It’s important to realize too, that for those of us
from the cold Nordic lands, starting this work in
San Francisco puts you halfway there already. It’s
easy to believe new things will work and it feels
harder to fail with San Francisco as a starting
point.”
43
 LETTING GO AND
LEANING IN
44
 SOCAP12

After SOCAP/Europe, 2012 was a year for SOCAP

to regroup. It would be the fifth conference in San
Francisco, so many of the logistics were time-
tested. But the conveners were still doing much of
the conference preparation themselves. They were
ready to let go of some of those logistics and lean
into the deeper meaning of their work.

“SOCAP12 was my favorite main-stage, and it was

the last year that I was completely hands-on with
the look and feel of it,” Rosa Lee recalled. “We
made a symbolic version of Buddhist prayer flags
of the logo. This was the last year that we decorated
it ourselves. The flags, we didn’t get them all up in
time. So we got one string of flags up the first night,
then the next, then the next.”

The prayer flags were a hit, and participants even

thought that adding a string each day was intentional
and somehow metaphorical. But the lesson in 2012
for the conveners was simple. SOCAP had reached
a point at which some of the logistics needed to be
handed over to other members of the team. The
founders had the privilege – but also the duty – to
release some creative control.

45
 This realization, just as SOCAP12 got underway,
relieved the conveners of planning for 2013
while 2012 was going on. Instead, the conveners
got to lean into the conference itself, into the
conversations and into the meaning.

“It is easy to say that “We wanted SOCAP to be a community and

not a slick event. We were intentional about
we hope government growing it slowly. And we began to take the time
to look around and see what really needed our
or philanthropy will attention,” Rosa Lee added. When they did look
around, they became aware of the need to focus
figure out a way to more intently on the role of women in SOCAP,
on making sure that women, and the feminine
help, but private perspective and voice, had a seat at the table.

capital can and “Before SOCAP12, we hadn’t really had a gender

lens,” said Kevin. “But we started to make
must play a role in sure that we always had women at the table in
every conversation. We started to understand
addressing these the difference that women could make in
an investment. We began to really see and
very large global
challenges.”

-AUDREY CHOI

46
understand that if women were on the board of a
venture, it would succeed. We saw the evidence.
We learned to see how many women were on a
board before we invested. This was one of the
main conversations of SOCAP12, in both the
sessions and in the hallways.”
Beyond the newness of the gender lens, there
was renewed commitment at SOCAP12 to
foregrounding the work of entrepreneurs.
To showcase ventures by participating
entrepreneurs, and to remind attendees to think
of their own money as extensions of themselves,
small tokens were given at the beginning of the
conference, tucked neatly into name badges.
The program included the following instructions:
You’ve been given a wooden token in your badge
holder. You can use this token to stand for your
values, your hopes for the future, your gift to
our world. This past weekend, at the Impact
Accelerator @ SOCAP, our global entrepreneur
community selected 5 projects that they believe
are ideas for a future worth investing in. Your
wooden token represents $5 that you can
choose to invest on the Indiegogo crowdfunding
platform toward one of these five projects by
dropping it one of five jars at the entrepreneur
table in the HUB@SOCAP. Likewise, we invite
you to think beyond the token about additional
resources (both financial and otherwise, tangible
or intangible) that might bring these ideas to life.
Last minute prayer flags, the emerging gender
lens, and the wooden tokens, were hallmarks of
SOCAP12: year five, the halfway point to where
we are today.
47
KEEPING MEANING AT THE CENTER
SOCAP: THE CONFERENCE AT THE
INTERSECTION OF MONEY + MEANING
It would be easy to keep the focus on what comes
before that colon – SOCAP, or Social Capital
Markets. But, it’s what comes after the colon –
the conference at the intersection of money and
meaning – that has and will continue to have a
way of focusing and clarifying the work at hand.
From the beginning, it has seemed that perhaps
Kevin was working on the money side and Rosa
Lee was working on the meaning side. And,
to some extent this is true. But the reality has
always been that the true work emerges at the
intersection. And that’s the place where so much
continues to evolve, as one focus informs the
other.
In the first years of SOCAP, most of the meaning
conversations happened on the last day –
when Jerry Michalski would convene an Open
Space session in Herbst Pavilion. This full day
session would provide a place for free-ranging
48
conversations, and somehow the topic of
spirituality and heart-based motivations would
always be close at hand.
Creating more formalized conversations
about meaning – about faith, or the church, or
spirituality, or values – was called for once more
than 30% of attendees were participating in these
discussions. Alongside these new established
conversations, the open space conversations still
happened in the Impact Hub.
Many participants have contributed to the
“meaning” content along the way. One such
contributor is Jeff Leifer, who brought the session
on how the deeply personal dream-life impacts
who you are. Likewise, Todd Johnson has been
present for these meaning conversations from
day one, and has openly advocated for bringing
one’s faith and spirituality into the room when you
make a deal. Todd has recently put his meaning
where his mouth is by leaving Jones Day – where
he was a senior partner and did great work
helping shape for-benefit legislation – to take on
the leadership of the startup iPAR Impact.
With these and other champions, meaning
conversations have enlivened SOCAP and kept
the values conversations open and accessible.
The sessions on meaning have included a wide
range of speakers and subjects. Some of the
most memorable have been with Sal Giambanco,
a former Jesuit who now leads the human capital
and operations functions of the Omidyar Network;
and with Ashwini Narayanan, a manager at
MicroPlace who left to become a Buddhist monk.
Jarrod Shappell, and later Tim Soerens, have
curated Meaning sessions; hosting warm,
thought-provoking conversations to bring
participants back to an understanding of
their motivations as central to their impact
work. Tim has also been the leader of the
Neighborhood Economics track, and – with
Kevin, Rosa Lee, and Derrick Braziel – has
continued that work in a spin-off conference.
One year, Kathleen Paylor led a session on how
love is the reason impact investing exists. Many
people reported that it was the best session
that year. Another year, Ashara Ekundayo
powerfully evoked her African spirituality on
the main stage. And, with Jarrod, she helped
focus the first of two events called SOCAP Soul
– that brought more than 500 people to the
San Francisco Impact Hub, and then Boston,
to focus specifically on meaning. And Sr.
Lillian Murphy – former CEO of Mercy Housing
– has told her story on the SOCAP stage of how
and why nuns recognized early on that impact
investing was a powerful way to do the works
of mercy they are called to do.
Never was the conversation on meaning as
central to the entire conference as it was
when, on the mainstage, musician Chuck
Cannon played his halting lyrics to “Money
Don’t Matter” that poignantly
capture the heart of the SOCAP
message. “We’re all gonna
end up where the money don’t
matter no more.”
Alongside less traditional
vehicles for discussing
meaning, more mainstream
religious traditions have
also more recently been
welcomed. Participants from
many faith traditions have made connections
between the work of investing and the work
of the church. Romal Tune, for example, has
brought attendees from faith communities,
evangelizing about SOCAP and the importance
within those faith communities of challenging
status quo attitudes towards money. At this
point, hundreds of pastors, priests, and rabbis
have attended through a curated experience in
order to learn more about connecting money
and meaning back home. Scholarships for
faith leaders have made attendance accessible
to those in broadening traditions and contexts.
Even as successful as all of the meaning
work has been, it is still surprising to look
around and see big movers in the space –
like Penelope Douglas and Jed Emerson –
taking a break from their focus on measuring
impact or return on investment just to breathe
into the moment. In truth, that breath is the
whole point of SOCAP. As much as SOCAP has
challenged the two-pocket theory of money,
urging investors to think of their money as one
undivided pocket capable of doing both well and
good, it has further challenged conventional
wisdom that neither money nor meaning are
fit conversations for polite company. Indeed, at
SOCAP, the two cannot be separated and are
always the topic of conversation.
49
 B E Y O N D
R AT I O N A L
50
 SOCAP13

Sometimes you just have to mix it up. Throw people

a curve. Even within this inherently counter-
cultural space, habitual patterns were emerging.
And it was time to shake up and disrupt even
that traditional thinking. SOCAP13 intentionally
moved beyond the rational. In new ways, it urged
participants to listen deeply, to dream big, to take
chances.

“If we had stayed in our heads, SOCAP would never

have existed,” Kevin recalled. “SOCAP13 was a way
of getting you out of your head.” Mystic Jesters
walked the halls. The program included dream
work sessions.

Participants were invited to the Mystic Midway:

Come to the Mystic Midway where Professor

Mirabilis invites you to step into a world of mythic
attractions and curious amusements! Find new
ways to connect with what gives meaning to your
life and work!

Embark on a whimsical journey with the fantastic

carnival characters Lady Fortuna, the Queen of
The Fae, and the Royal Order of Mystic Jesters.

51
 Checkered Man, the Hobo King, Mr. Nobody and many
others will be coming along as well!

Look behind the red velvet curtains at the rear of Impact

Hub and you will find that SOCAP’s Mystical Midway is an
alchemical gem inviting you to look deeper; bravely peer
“Now is the into the heart of your story, call on your inner vision, give
name to your true gold, or share tales of triumph and
struggle, vision, and innovation. Invite your colleagues to
time to open join you in sharing moments of meaning and mirth, depth
and hilarity.

our arms, Join us as The Midway asks: If the world is made of stories,
then what meaningful chapters are we adding? The Mystic
Midway invites everyone to be heard.
expand our It was one of the riskier steps in the history of SOCAP,
besides, of course, that whole bit about taking on established

horizons, and investment mindsets and changing the world for the better.
But the Midway was a rousing success. Participants loved
it. The surprise. The excitement. The spectacle. They loved

dream big. it all.

But there was a more serious side to the Mystic Midway.

Big problems For the first time in SOCAP’s history, the conference
addressed head-on the unspoken motivation for many
impact investors: “there’s a little-mentioned fact that

require big impact investors frequently have deeply spiritual reasons –

solutions.”

- VA N J O N E S

52
most often linked to their faith tradition – for having
the courage to go against the grain and start putting
their real money where their heart is,” admitted the
program for 2013.
“As we endeavor to make a world that is good for all,
we notice what works and what doesn’t. Faith seems
to work here,” they proclaimed.
SOCAP13, therefore, made a concerted effort to
include faith leaders in the dialogue. Preachers,
priests, rabbis – clerics of every stripe – were invited
and given scholarships to attend. The many faith
leaders who participated met with other participants,
and also as a group themselves – experiencing their
own, curated SOCAP experience, to discuss the
overlaps of money and meaning. The goal was to
allow faith leaders to take the concepts and design
approaches of SOCAP back to churches, mosques,
and synagogues. To demonstrate in those faith
communities the need to align the use of money with
other – often better defined – values.
SOCAP13 also saw the addition of three tracks with
a particularly deep focus in distinct verticals: one
on communities, one on oceans, and one on health.
Communities evolved first into place-based investing,
and then became Neighborhood Economics. Health
– which was led by Doug Jutte and David Erickson
– evolved into its own conference on the social
determinants of health (like the fact that your
zip code is a greater predictor of your health and
mortality than your DNA code). Oceans – sponsored
by the Packard Foundation and designed by Jeff
Leifer – began SOCAP’s focus on the environment
and its link to poverty alleviation.
SOCAP13 THINK BIG. THINK LONG TERM. DON’T BE EXTRACTIVE.
mHealth meets
ObamaCare
Social
Investing in
Supply
Chain
PURPOSE HEALTH Determinants
Improving Lives Innovation People & Planet Valuing of Health
Co-Investing Ecosystem
Services
COMPASSION
OCEANS
Coastal Food
Communities
Technology
ACTIVISM
COMMUNITIES
LEADERSHIP
COLLABORATION
CASE STUDIES
Tech By and A More Learning Food Systems
For Africans Holistic World & Sharing of the Future
After becoming a software engineer, David Leventhal and Verde Ventures teamed At SOCAP 13, Vineet Rai, one of India's Often local organic food-to-market
Alloysius Attah returned to the farming up to restore a mangrove swamp that acts most successful impact investors, will join campaigners are not in the same
community where he was raised. There he as the spawning grounds of an important SOCAP Founder Kevin Jones, to connect conversations as the people working on
DESIGNED BY
used IDEO’s user centric design principles turtle species. This cooperative venture led Sankalp, the largest and most influential food deserts. SOCAP provides a chance to
to build a mobile app that helps the mostly to unique opportunities that helped farmers entrepreneurship gathering in India, and break out of the siloed communities within
women tilapia farmers manage finances, return to indigenous techniques, and SOCAP together in a learning partnership. the larger food system; to explore where
while giving funders important metrics. spawned new local commodities. valuable new partnerships can form.
53
 GROWING BUT ALSO
M AT U R I N G
54
 SOCAP14

Before the doors opened for SOCAP14, the

conveners took a good, hard look in the mirror.
Konda Mason – the Co-Director and CEO at Impact
Hub Oakland – had said something startling and
eye-opening to them.

She said, “notice that there are more African

than African American entrepreneurs here on
scholarship.” It was worse than that; there were
more startups led by Kenyans and Ugandans on
scholarship with a path to funding than those by
African Americans.

Rosa Lee, Kevin, and Tim rolled this thought around.

“We needed to wake up to the fact that we had a
blind spot,” Kevin said. “So we started becoming
aware of, and dealing with, our own prejudices.”

The bar continued to be raised in the commitment

to inclusion. For example, the program committed
in print for the first time that no male-only panel
would be included in the conference.

“We made it a rule – just the new normal – that

no session with three or more people could be all
guys,” Kevin said. “Some people balked at first and

55
 said they didn’t have women with the experience,
but with a gender balance as the new rule, they
were forced to realize that there were women in
their organizations fully ready to be on stage. A
new advocacy group arose that year called Gender
Avenger to get more women’s participation on
stage at events, and we were their first Gender
“You can’t sprinkle Avenger hero.”

in women and color But these commitments were not only a social
statement. They were about the financial impact,
later... We’re talking as well. Identifying the impact of gender on
investing, the conveners noted, “Female-run
about partnership early stage social enterprises are out performing
male-run enterprises by 15%, but are 40% less
with people who likely to get funding. The conference was able to
demonstrate that prejudice along gender, race,
are different and or class lines was not just bad for people, it was
bad for business. SOCAP14 became the year in
doing that at the which the gender lens gave way to the racial lens,
to the class lens. It focused on financial inclusion.
beginning: having
all voices at the
table.”

- KO N DA M A S O N

56
Identifying the impact of race and ethnicity on selecting entrepreneurs, and their blind spots.
investing, the conveners noted, “If you are able to We built the platform to include the outsider, and
sell the matriarch of the first-generation Filipino we are finding there is always a new outsider we
immigrants who come to the Sixth and Mission neglected to see, another valuable stranger who
neighborhood in San Francisco, you’ve probably could become an unlikely ally.”
sold everybody in her apartment building. If
you try to sell your financial inclusion solution
without realizing that, you have no idea why they
are not buying. … If you want to make a positive
impact on the lives of people whose lives you
don’t yet understand, you first have to learn to
listen respectfully.”

As the conveners reflected on their own growth

and on the growth of SOCAP, they summarized
the position of SOCAP14 this way, “This space,
this market that’s halfway between giving and
traditional return-focused investing, is – as we’ve
always said – real, big, and growing. But now it’s
also maturing. We know what to do, and how
to do it more than ever have before. Investors
need to deal with their unconscious biases in

57
 GLOBAL GOES
L O C A L
58
 SOCAP15
Notable announcements in early 2015 – that Bain
Capital was launching a Double Impact Fund led
by former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick,
BlackRock was also launching an impact strategy,
and Goldman Sachs had acquired the early impact
advisory firm Imprint Capital – set the stage for an
interesting conversation at SOCAP15. Mainstage
conversations prioritized celebrating high impact
entrepreneurs and long-committed field builders
from BALLE, Echoing Green, and Ashoka, while
also creating space for new institutional players
to share their vision for impact at scale with the
SOCAP community.

Now a cornerstone of SOCAP, Neighborhood

Economics was a prioritized focus of SOCAP15.
Spurred on by Konda Mason’s poignant
observation from the previous year – and noting
that it seemed nobody’s politics got in the way of
making investments in Africa, but that investments
in African American businesses were more
culturally loaded with stories, more complex –
this track provided increased emphasis on slow
money returns and investing in our own local
neighborhoods here in the United States. What
does it mean for an impact investor to act globally,
but ignore the needs and opportunities in their own
backyard? The goal of the track was to accelerate
the flow of capital into “all of the neighborhoods
in your city or town. . . the ones you live in and
frequent, and also the ones you might be afraid to
wander into.”
59
“Social entrepreneurs are not content just to
give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not
rest until they have revolutionized the fishing
industry.”
- B I L L D R AY TO N

The team described the impact of the

Neighborhood Economics movement:

“We are emphasizing the funding side of the slow

money and localism movement that is exploding
in communities across the country. We’re looking
deeply at food systems, and at investing in small
businesses run by minority and immigrant
entrepreneurs, who are not going to move to
Silicon Valley, but who can create wealth in poor
neighborhoods here at home. Cooperatively-
owned solar power and wireless and buying
locally are all part of that. And the innovation
around how to use varieties of deeply local,
relational crowdfunding is making something
new happen that we’re keeping an eye on. People
are taking their economies from Wall Street back
to Main Street and it’s a great sign of hope. The
Neighborhood Economics movement can create
resilient communities that are better able to deal
with the transition through climate change. And
because this movement is increasingly inclusive,
it is also protection against the massive systemic
risk of wealth disparity.”

60
Part of the inspiration for Rosa Lee and Kevin’s
commitment to the values of Neighborhood
Economics actually came one night as they
walked their own neighborhood. They walked
past a live music venue and heard these lyrics:
“We’re all underpaid and we’re all overwhelmed
Oh how I wish love was the coin of the realm
Where everyone’s rich and nobody’s poor
Do you ever wish money don’t matter no more …”
They explained that the words stopped them in
their tracks, so they sat down and listened more.
They decided then and there that they wanted the
musician, Chuck Cannon, to come to SOCAP.
His attendance at SOCAP15 fit beautifully with the
Neighborhood Economics thinking. He sang in
the plenary session – from his solo project, “Love
and Money” – about everyday people struggling to
make ends meet, and the challenges of ‘running
out of money before running out of month’
that were put on folks in too many American
neighborhoods. This careful, intentional
connection between lyrics in the plenary session
and the focus on the localist movement provides a
clear example of the intentionality that continued
through SOCAP15 as it had every SOCAP prior.
SOCAP15 also marked a changing of the guard
organizationally, as Lindsay Smalling took
the helm as Producer and Curator, Jamie
McGonnigal joined the team as Director of
Business Development, Liz Maxwell launched
year-round SOCAP 365 events, and JB Media
took over the marketing efforts for SOCAP. This
team continues to work on SOCAP year-round,
as operating like a “pop-up Halloween store” is
replaced by dedicated stewards of the SOCAP
community.
61
 BALANCING THE WHY
AND HOW OF IMPACT

62
 SOCAP16

As impact investing was gaining ever more

mainstream attention, the field was navigating a new
normal. Many conversations focused on the “how”
of impact, and SOCAP16 hosted sophisticated and
tactical conversations on investment structuring,
product design, and social impact measurement
and evaluation.

Deserving equal attention was the “why” of taking

a market-based approach to impact, and headline
programming emphasized the importance of
maintaining a clear and rigorous focus on systemic,
sustainable change for the world’s most vulnerable
populations. Attendees were encouraged to reflect
on their own level of attention to both the intention
and implementation of their work.

For the founders, turning their attention locally

continued to reveal new insights and injustices. A
serious question was nagging Kevin: What do you
do if you have a great idea but you don’t have any
“friends and family” money to get it off the ground?

The problem, as pointed out by Jessica Norwood

of the Runway Project – named as such because it
is a runway problem, not a pilot problem – is that

63
 wealth in the US cleanly falls along racial lines.
“Under current On average, African American families have
$11,000 in net worth, while white families have
economic $141,900. As a result, the great ideas of many
African American entrepreneurs never leave
the napkin, because their networks simply can’t
conditions, it provide the $20,000 to $30,000 that the SBA says
is needed to launch a business.
would take 228 A new investment tool – “The Runway Project
Friends and Family CD” – was introduced at
years for the SOCAP16 as an innovative approach to funding
for entrepreneurs without family money.

average African This collaboration is between the Runway

Project, Neighborhood Economics, Impact
Hub Oakland, Self-Help Federal Credit Union
American family (one of the nation’s largest credit unions), and
Uptima Business Bootcamp (an Oakland-based

to accumulate member-owned business accelerator).

The plan raised more than $450,000 in an hour’s

the wealth of an worth of meetings, and before SOCAP was over,

average white
family today.”

- J E S S I CA N O R WO O D

64
the plan had five million dollars in inbound
demand – money investors wanted to put toward
African American led neighborhood scale
startups. There was more money coming in than
there were opportunities to invest. This was a
win for entrepreneurs and, more importantly, for
the neighborhoods and people their businesses
would reach.

“Learning about the friends and family gap taught

us that there was a blind spot in investing,” Kevin
explained, “a place where good ideas could not
come to fruition because there was no rich aunt
or network for getting it started. So, we created
a financial tool, a way of investing, that has
begun to challenge the way business has always
worked ... that people with money (or access
to it) make more money while people without
those get nowhere; even with the best ideas and
a clear understanding of a need that should be
addressed.”

65
 LOUDER VOLUME,
LARGER ENGINE
66
 SOCAP17

This is the tenth annual SOCAP conference, and the

twelfth conference counting the two in Europe. So,
how can there possibly be more to say, more to do?

SOCAP continues to evolve as this field grows,

responding to and reflecting the current needs
and conversations in the impact community. More
people are attending, and want more options, more
answers, more opportunities to align their work
and assets with their values. Clearly, there still is
more to do.

This year, SOCAP speaks with a louder voice and a

larger engine; but the team is still as mindful as
ever of its place at the intersection of money and
meaning.

“This space that so many doubted could exist

has become a most attractive place,” said Kevin,
explaining the significance of SOCAP’s 10th
anniversary. “The secret is consciously bridging
two worlds and calling that bridge a place.”

“We have barely scratched the surface of the

opportunities to be discovered by convening with this
cross-sector, big tent approach,” explained Lindsay
Smalling, SOCAP Curator. The idea that prosperity
requires a more holistic approach than managing
to a bottom line is attracting people in their roles

67
“If we’re
going to be
part of the
solution,
we’ve got to
engage the
problems.”

- M A J O R A CA R T E R

68
as consumers, employees, investors, creators, and
leaders. Lindsay added, “the Spotlight series at
SOCAP17 was inspired by our commitment to invite
voices from aligned but often separate communities
– people who may not consider themselves impact
investors or social entrepreneurs but who are
actively pursuing real impact with the tools that they
have, on the issues they care about.”

As in previous years, SOCAP17 will push further into

conversations that are sometimes uncomfortable
but urgently necessary in the space and the world.
Starting in 2016, gender diversity and racial or ethnic
diversity has been required on all SOCAP panels.
Going beyond this tactical approach to inclusion,
SOCAP17 will dedicate a full track of sessions to
racial equity. Calling this out – talking specifically
about race and equity rather than putting it under the
larger umbrella of inclusion or diversity – is intended
to expose systemic racial injustice that thwarts the
flow of capital to black and brown populations, so
that this SOCAP community can more intentionally
address these harmful biases.

In short, SOCAP17 will be doing more of what it does

well, guiding the movement by calling attention to
the issues that need real and sustained attention,
and creating an intentional space for people from
every corner of the social capital markets to convene
as valuable strangers and move forward as unlikely
allies.

“The work of SOCAP – to bridge the gap between

giving and investing to accelerate the flow of capital
to good – is more important than ever. That’s why
more people from more countries are here this year
than ever before,” Kevin said. “Serious times and
government inaction mean it’s up to us to build the
world our grandchildren need.”

69
 A YEAR IN THE
LIFE OF SOCAP
In 2012, Lindsay Smalling began working for SOCAP. She
had finished business school at Columbia and was working
for Tim Freundlich at ImpactAssets.

She had attended SOCAP in 2010, working as a pre-

conference volunteer, so she knew what she was getting
into when she was first put in charge of the one-day program
for scholarship recipients, the first Impact Accelerator @
SOCAP12.

Of her first experience attending SOCAP10, Lindsay said,

“I remember just being blown away by how many people
were there – how many smart, thoughtful people were
there. I had heard of impact investing, but you couldn’t find
much about it in mainstream media. Then I went to SOCAP.
I thought, ‘Wow, this is a real industry.’ It was a memorable
moment for me. I realized that there was so much going on
in this field. And so much to do.”

By 2013, Lindsay was in charge of one of the conference

tracks. The Packard Foundation had proposed a large
chunk of programming on investing in oceans, which
Lindsay co-designed and produced.

By 2014, she was in charge of all of the break-out sessions,

usually 140 or so across the three-day conference.

Since 2015, Lindsay has largely been running the conference.

She oversees marketing, production, sponsorships, and
curates all of the mainstage and break-out content.

“SOCAP really has its own momentum. I feel like an air

traffic controller, with so many things coming at me. This
whole field moves constantly and we try to capture that
each year,” Lindsay explained.

70
Even with the surprises that each year brings, there is
still a relatively predictable cycle for the work of SOCAP:
STEP ONE: SURVIVE THE CONFERENCE
STEP TWO: PASS OUT FOR A MONTH
STEP THREE: LISTEN
Lindsay explained Step Three: “I take advantage of the
down time from November through March to be out
there in the field: listening, digesting, thinking through,
going to other conferences, taking meetings, etc. We get
feedback on both content and format, so I begin to listen
and to think about what’s emerging, what’s next.”
STEP FOUR: BIG PICTURE PLANNING
“In the second quarter, it is a steady build. We focus
on getting the big production pieces in place. We start
putting out applications, entrepreneur scholarship
applications, open proposals start being accepted, etc.”
STEP FIVE: REFINING
in the conference world. But, because the field changes
so quickly, if we decide more than a month out, we would
get it wrong. It’s nerve-wracking. I’ve really had to get
used to the chaos of it. But I’ve seen why it works this
way, and how it is right. We just have to wait. We know
there are going to be announcements, news headlines
that will affect our work. So we hold space for some of
those big emerging elements.”
STEP SEVEN: REPEAT
Even with the chaos, the last-minute planning, and the
need for month-long recovery afterwards, Lindsay said
the meaning behind the work continues to draw her
back. “The genius insight that Tim, Rosa Lee, and Kevin
had in 2008 was that there was this space in between
that nobody was filling and how powerful that was. They
just created that space.”
She continued, “That founding story is sort of my North
Star in everything I’ve done here. How can we create the
space in between, and facilitate the connections that
aren’t happening elsewhere?”

“Around June and July, we start to really refine things. We Because of commitment like Lindsay’s, those
select the entrepreneurs, we read all the open proposals, connections keep happening at SOCAP.
send out notifications, synthesize, make
decisions about what this year’s conference
will look like.”

STEP SIX: FINAL PREPARATIONS

“During the last two months before the

conference, we know what it will look like,
so we can make final preparations. We
work on all of the final details with vendors,
rentals, the program book. Even though all
of the breakout content is set, we still do not
set the plenary content. That’s relatively late

71
 FREQUENT
FLYERS
JEFF TULLER,
TODD JOHNSON, &
PENELOPE DOUGLAS
Over the last ten years, SOCAP has provided
support, direction, and inspiration to scads of
participants and followers, and for some it’s
an annually recurring engagement on their
calendar.
This year, three SOCAP super users – Todd
Johnson, Jeff Tuller, and Penelope Douglas – will
have attended all ten conferences. Although they
have done so for different reasons, they all agree
annual attendance has reshaped their own work
and formed lasting relationships that keep them
coming back year after year.
Todd Johnson holds the distinction of always
buying the very first ticket to SOCAP.
Although he won’t reveal his strategy for
always snatching up the first one, he excitedly
explains what keep him coming back. “I’m a
procrastinator, by birth. If I don’t do something
as soon as I see it, it might take days, weeks, or
even years before I get it done. Just ask my wife,”
Todd explained.
72
“But as a sponsor the first couple of years,
and as a scholarship sponsor for several years
thereafter, I’ve believed in the mission of SOCAP
for bringing together varied voices in a big
tent, with an alignment simply to create and
encourage human flourishing. SOCAP seemed to
me like an event where I want my ticket purchase
to be right at the front of the line.”
In truth, Todd was in the conversation even
before SOCAP officially began. When serving
on the Board of Advisors for Good Capital, he
was having lunch with Tim and Kevin one day.
During the lunch, they talked about the need for
a “big tent” gathering of those in the emerging
space – social entrepreneurs, impact investors,
high net worth individuals, funds, foundations,
government representatives, philanthropies,
service providers, and others – to share best
practices on how to scale doing business for
good. That idea morphed into SOCAP08.
Fast forward, and it’s easy to see the impact of
the SOCAP space on Todd’s life. Last year, he
left a 29-year career at Jones Day, one of the top SOCAP changes lives.
law firms in the world, to found iPar, an impact
data and transparency platform facilitating “In the early years, I came to find the fuel I needed
capital deployed to create and encourage human to keep my vision alive for my work in community
flourishing. development investment. In the middle period, I was
engaged to help grow the space. We used to commit
For Jeff Tuller, it’s clear that – after attending all over and over to set the table for the broadest, perhaps
ten years – he wouldn’t miss it for the world. even unexpected participant to feel welcome at SOCAP,”
Penelope recalls.
Jeff also has experience in both the for-profit and
the non-profit sectors. It happens that the first During that time, Penelope encountered so many
SOCAP came about as he was trying to decide on people who talked about how SOCAP had changed their
his next step. He heard about the conference and work, changed their minds about impact investing and
decided to attend, especially when he learned social capital ideals. And now, Penelope has changed
that it meant a trip to San Francisco. And he her work as well and is doing big, new things because
knew almost immediately that he had made the of the knowledge she gained at SOCAP.
right decision. “You know how you have those
moments when you know you are in the right “I am acting, collaborating, and birthing a new idea,” she
place, you know you are where you need to be?” says. “The total of all these years at SOCAP gives me the
knowledge, yes, but more importantly the confidence in
Although Jeff can’t quite explain how SOCAP values I hold dearly, so I can take new risks and create
does what it does, he’s a firm believer in its new work.”
importance. “I don’t even know
if it is by design or by accident. It
is art and science. There is some
kind of unicorn magic going on.
Somehow Rosa Lee and Kevin can
get big business like JPMorgan or
the Gates Foundation talking to the
crunchy people, the tree-huggers,
and to partner in order to make
something different. I have no idea
how they pull that off.”

Penelope Douglas has come back

again and again because of the
magic, as well. Magic in the values
of SOCAP and magic in the way

73
 MY PATH
TO SOCAP
FOUR EPIPHANIES THAT LED ME TO SEE THE NEED
FOR SOCAP, TO CREATE IT, AND HELP IT EVOLVE.
BY KEVIN D. JONES

EPIPHANY NUMBER ONE:

BUSINESS CAN BE A FORCE FOR
GOOD.
My wife Rosa Lee and I had started or turned six
media, events, and online information businesses
successfully – the only one failure was the business she
wasn’t involved in – when, in 2001, I attended a panel
where I first heard the words “social enterprise.” I had
thought that social and environmental problems were
the purview of non-profits or the church to solve, not
businesses. I had to hear more.

I went up and talked to the presenter, and he told me

that the national convening of the Social Enterprise
Alliance was the next day in Seattle. I flew up to Seattle
and – trying to wrap my head around this new idea – I
asked so many questions that the conference leaders
said that I either needed to leave them alone or join
their board. I joined.

But still, at that point, these were mostly non-profit

social enterprises, who used “earned income” from the
sale of products or services to fund the capacity that
foundations did not want to fund. Program grants from
foundations often don’t actually provide the money that
the non-profit needs to run the operations required to
fulfill the grants. They’ll fund the soup at a soup kitchen,
but not the servers, the pots or the stoves, or even the
bowls and spoons.
74
I had seen this dynamic in a faith-based non-profit
working with HIV/AIDS orphans in Africa, when I helped
the executive director pitch a foundation program office
a year earlier. What they needed was a van to let them
expand their feeding program to other villages in sub-
Saharan African countries they were working in. The
program officer saw the need, but she said “I want
my money to go to the children.” She turned us down.
Foundations and donors like to fund what they call direct
impact rather than the infrastructure, capacity, and staff
resources to accomplish their goals. Earned income
from social enterprise was the way non-profits were
getting around that problem.
To learn more about social enterprise, I started
volunteering with Juma Ventures, a non-profit founded
in 1993 that ran several Ben & Jerry’s ice cream shops.
Ben Cohen – the ice cream tycoon who still owned the
business at the time – had drastically reduced Juma’s
franchise fee. The benefits for the Juma employees
were huge.
With employment opportunities serving as the platform,
the program provided “at-risk” youth with the support
they needed to move on to a four-year college. Jobs with
the Juma Ben & Jerry’s gave participants the ability to
save money for their higher education while scooping ice
cream. Earned income accounted for about 80 percent
of their budget, but they still needed grants to make up
the rest. And that’s where I began to see the limitations
of non-profit social enterprise.
I was in on a pitch session with a foundation that had
supported Juma for four years. The program officer said
we were not going to get any money the next year. I was
flabbergasted. I had studied their theory of change, what
they wanted to do with their grant dollars and knew it by
heart. I recited their four goals: to empower youth, to
help “at-risk” youth learn job skills, receive education,
and learn to save.
I asked her, “Don’t we do that?” She said “Yes.” “Well,
does any grantee you fund do it better?” “No,” she said,
we were her top performer. That’s why she’d extended
her normal grant cycle from three to four years. “Then
why are you firing us if we are doing the best job of
anybody you fund?”
She explained that foundations were not about giving
long-term support or growth capital; they had grant
cycles. And she had to stop funding us because that’s
what they did. It was time to find some other worthy
organization to help get to our level.
I’ve been in business for 30 plus years, and I’ve never
been fired by a customer when I was doing a good job,
even the best job.
Obviously, depending on foundations for change had a
systemic flaw, even for non-profits earning 80% of their
income from their own efforts. I was ready to find what
could work even better for enduring loyalty to positive
impact.
EPIPHANY NUMBER TWO:
SOMETIMES INVESTING FOR GOOD
CAN BE A BETTER WAY TO GO.
At the same time, I was helping another Juma Ventures
spin out called Evergreen Lodge, which was a for-profit
social enterprise working with a similar population.
At Evergreen, the slightly older and more mature
employees would learn how to work in a restaurant or
a hotel. We had lined up the Joie de Vivre boutique hotel
chain to hire our graduates.
Evergreen was raising money for a bed and breakfast
near Yosemite that – if investors bought in – had the
rights to expand from 18 to 80 vacationers. If the
program went bust and it just became a real estate deal,
investors would still get 16%. The business couldn’t help
but succeed if it was done well.
I invested, Calvert Foundation invested, and Social
Venture Partners San Francisco (a non-profit giving
75
 circle network) did its first investment. But I was
turned down by some business associates who
couldn’t yet buy into the idea that they would give
up some financial return to invest in doing good.
Evergreen outperformed; it returned 12.5% IRR
every year except one ... when it returned 14%
IRR. I felt great when the annual checks came in,
along with the kind of here’s-a-few-of-the-lives-
we-changed letters you get from a traditional
non-profit. I kept both on my desk and showed
them to friends who were successful investors. I
was onto something that was making sense. And
I wanted to spread the word, and do more of it.
Then Tim Freundlich came to me with a new idea
for investing in good. I’d met him while we were
both members of SVP and it was Tim who worked
at the Calvert Foundation and led them to invest
in the Evergreen deal. Tim’s idea was that there
needed to be a fund to help ready-to-scale social
entrepreneurs take their next steps.
As it was, he explained, social entrepreneurs
76
– when they had done all the dirty work and
advanced to where they had proven their idea
worked and was making a difference – often had
to spend another two to three to even four years
wrangling individual angel investors to fund
their expansion. That meant the CEO was often
distracted from the mission, finding, and then
managing each angel, while the venture itself
drifted. Joined by Joy Anderson, we decided
to launch the Good Capital Social Enterprise
Expansion Fund (SEEF).
Our first sales call was to an early-stage venture
capitalist. At the restaurant where he wanted to
meet us, we told him, “We have something that’s
right in the sweet spot between the things you
love.”
Turns out, he didn’t want anything in the space
between giving and investing; in fact he didn’t
want to hear that there even could be a space
there. At 16 minutes into our pitch, he got up
and said “I think your idea is wrong, your plan
is flawed, and the chances for failure are high.
I don’t want my name associated with you.” And
he left us to pick up the tab for his breakfast.
We got the same response from three different
billionaires, who similarly seemed to be saying
our idea hurt them physically. One extremely
high net worth man in the Pacific Northwest,
once we explained what we were up to, asked us
to immediately leave the room.
Now, I’d been in business for 30+ years by then,
and previously, when customers didn’t like my
product, I changed it. This time, we knew that
their thinking had to change; we believed in
the product. And we wanted the participation of
others who got the vision.
Our criteria was stringent: to invest proactively
in businesses that were created to solve a big
social problem. We asked investors to sign a
waiver counter to the traditional Prudent Man
Rule. We wanted it clear that highest return was
not our only consideration.
We’re happy to report three successes: $7
million on $2 million invested in the literacy
focused online bookseller Better World Books;
$3.1 million on $1.1 invested in Alter Eco that we
are exiting now, which grew from $1.5 million to
more than $20 million in profitable revenue on
fair trade, organic, carbon-neutral chocolate
and quinoa with biodegradable packaging; and
15% return on an investment in Root Capital, the
non-profit that created the category of fair trade
coffee.
A couple of years ago when it became clear we
were going to succeed, I suggested to Tim that
we scale the concept. Microvest – which was the
first fund doing equity in microfinance – had a
first fund of our size, about $6 million; and they’d
gone on to do funds of $30 million, $60 million,
and more than $100 million.
Tim, who knows me so well, explained that scaling
means repetition. “Okay,” I said. “Kevin,” he said,
“that’s doing the same thing again.” “Oh,” I said.
“I hate that.” Thanks for the reminder, Tim.
Yeah, we do boutique, artisanal, and new. We can
be part of things that scale eventually. But our
expertise is in questioning the way things are
done when they’re no longer working, reliably
creating new stuff that hasn’t been done before,
working relentlessly, and simply refusing to fail.
To solve the larger problem of funds like ours
– and a lot more were cropping up – we had to
change investor mindset. As we witnessed in
others, sometimes change can be frightening.
And sometimes it can free us up to discover the
next level of service we can offer. In this case, we
knew we didn’t need to change our product; we
needed to change the mindset of the customer.
That awareness led to -
EPIPHANY NUMBER THREE:
WE NEEDED TO CREATE A
MARKET AT THE INTERSECTION
OF MONEY AND MEANING.
This insight, surprisingly, came from experience
in the farm-raised catfish industry.
In the ‘80s, Rosa Lee launched a trade publication
in Mississippi called the Catfish Journal. When
catfish live wild in the river, they’re bottom
feeders. Farm-raised, they feed on a nutritious
77
 grain pellet that floats in an aerated pond. Eating
those two types of catfish are very different
experiences. River fish is associated with the
traditional country-style recipe of breaded and
fried. Farm-raised fish could be substituted in
white tablecloth restaurants for a dover sole.
Those farms had the potential to be a big new
market for poor Mississippi farmers, if people
could get over the idea that catfish was a low-
class fish. The technology had changed the
product, but the image was stuck in the past.
To change the perception of the consumer, we
hired Willard Scott – the weatherman on the
Today Show – to do a series of tours in the nation’s
heartland; New Orleans to Chicago and Detroit.
He would go to a small or medium-sized town
with an NBC affiliate that had a morning show;
and we’d recruit a local chef who would come on
with a recipe we’d prepared, amaze the morning
show hosts, and explain to people that catfish was
not what they’d thought; it was a fine fish that the
best places were serving. People’s perception of
the fish changed, one trusted morning show at a
time; and sales grew to $300 million.
I knew from the Catfish Journal that if you
incarnate a new idea, and let people see and
experience the possibilities for themselves, they
are more inclined to be swayed. In the face of
these “two pocket” thinkers, I knew we had to
do the same thing with impact investing. We had
to show them. The new, liminal space between
giving and investing had to arise to show what
was possible.
And that leads me to -
78
EPIPHANY NUMBER FOUR:
EVOLVING THE MODEL; ADJUST
FOR BLIND SPOTS ALONG THE
WAY.
Fast forward a few years. SOCAP was doing well
and growing: enabling startups to get funded,
and funds to raise investment; broadening its
reach and partnership to include international
development agencies and big foundations;
and expanding internationally. The number of
countries represented at the conferences had
grown to more than 50.
And then, Konda Mason pointed out a way
that the SOCAP paradigm was still only half-
baked; it only worked for some people. College
graduates, mostly white or Asian, were getting
funded. African startups were getting funded:
like Farmerline in Ghana, and an education tablet
company from Kenya that we’d highlighted had
gone on to become dominant in its market. But
it was not working for African Americans. Konda,
the founder of Impact Hub Oakland – which
Good Capital had invested in – pointed out to me
that there were more scholarshipped African
entrepreneurs on a path to funding at SOCAP
than there were African Americans. She made us
aware of that blind spot.
So, for a couple of years, we hosted panel
sessions led by experienced African American
investors – like Ben Jealous, Ed Dugger, Kesha
Cash, Stephen DeBerry, and others – who pointed
us to companies led by African Americans they
had invested in. But nothing was really changing.
I thought about it, a lot. SOCAP was built on
including the outsider, and finding a way they
could become unlikely allies, and yet we still
had outsiders.
I was learning – from Connie Evans of AEO – that
marginalized communities often don’t get hired
because they don’t look like the people doing
the hiring. So, Connie said, entrepreneurship
would be the path to wealth. But, how do we get
these startups noticed, respected, and funded?
What was the path to change this systemic blind
spot, leftover ripples from generations of racial
injustice?
And then I met Jessica Norwood; a Cummings
Foundation fellow, BALLE fellow, activist,
and experienced social entrepreneur from
Mobile, Alabama. At our second Neighborhood
Economics conference, she explained the
critical inflection point to intervene in the
system. It was the lack of friends and family
funding for African Americans, due to the racial
wealth gap.
In affluent communities that first funding is
usually a social thing; you
reach out to family, people
you went to college with,
do business with, and they
support the idea with an on
ramp (or runway) of initial
seed fund capital. In this
case, Jessica and I wanted
to create a virtual rich aunt
to financially support the
ideas of those whose friends
and family weren’t able to. In
order to address systemic injustice, it’s clear we
need to go far beyond the current models.
We, the Runway team – working with several
experienced collaborators from Cincinnati to
Oakland to Seattle – have come up with some
meaningful and actionable solutions, that are
both locally and culturally appropriate, and also
scalable past the pilot stage. We’re working
together to hopefully create a network that
spreads the model. Our big dream, and my
current passion, is seeing that model spread
– to be something well-known, accepted, and
powerful like Habitat for Humanity – across the
country, from city to city. (See the section on
SOCAP16 for more on the Runway Project.)
As we continue into the future, to work towards
greater positive impact for people in every
neighborhood, my instinctive focus will continue
to look for the people that our solutions don’t
uplift. Scouting for the valuable strangers on
the edge, outside the big tent, who can become
unlikely allies, while acknowledging that a lot of
times other people will need to point them out
to me.
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TOWARD THE FUTURE
OF IMPACT INVESTING
SOCAP GOING FORWARD
You may have noticed a few changes for this year’s event.
Then again, maybe you haven’t. “We are in the midst of
exciting transitions for SOCAP, and we also have been
careful to remain true to the mission and values that we
began with,” Rosa Lee explained.
What you may not know is that – since SOCAP16 –
the conference has been acquired by a group of new
investors. Most of the group have been regular SOCAP
attendees, and all of them want to see the impact
investing space continue to grow and evolve, and make
an even bigger difference in how people invest and
spend their money.
WHAT ISN’T CHANGING?
Rosa Lee and Kevin are at the center of SOCAP, the
vision keepers. As the space shifts and SOCAP continues
to mature you will still see and hear from them as you
have at prior SOCAP events.
Bob Caruso – Chair of the new SOCAP Group – explained,
“Rosa Lee and Kevin have three key ingredients that are
essential to SOCAP. 1) Their authenticity to the space is
undeniable. They are in this because it is the right thing
to do, and that rings true at every level. 2) Their desire
to make sure that every voice and every background
is participating is so unlike many other events in this
larger conversation. They’re not afraid to put the difficult
conversations on the stage, and that matters. And 3)
they can get almost anyone to show up and participate.”
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Bob went on, “It’s really a remarkable brand that they’ve
built.”
In the midst of transitions, much of the feel of SOCAP will
remain the same because the most visible and central
team members are still actively involved and will still
be doing the work you’ve come to know them for. Kevin
will remain out on the edge, looking for what is new in
the field, and scouting to bring that work back to SOCAP.
Rosa Lee’s keen eye for what participants want, and for
how the event needs to feel will continue to define the
SOCAP standard. And Lindsay, SOCAP’s brilliant curator,
will continue to weave all of the content together and
present it in ways that make it accessible for people with
different interests and backgrounds.
WHAT IS CHANGING, THEN?
“The primary change is that SOCAP is now made up of a
much larger team,” Bob said. “We have restructured it
in a way that has allowed us to bring more people to the
table as we move forward.”
Some of you may have noticed – in reading the
introduction to this book – that Jed Emerson is now
an official part of SOCAP: serving as Vice-Chair of the
SOCAP Group. “New resources for SOCAP have allowed
us to have a much broader group of people who are all
working for the same purpose,” said Rosa Lee. “We
believe that impact investing is genuinely ready for the
amazing entrepreneurs – who have been working in
their own lanes – to pull together, to work bigger and
faster, to have more impact. We expect to invite even
more future collaborations as we move forward. These
changes allow SOCAP to have a bigger voice, a bigger
engine, but the heart of the work will remain the same.”
There is increasing demand and competition on every
single continent as people are trying to figure out how to
align their wallets with their values. How does this apply
in all different parts of the world?
“To address that need, going forward you may see
that SOCAP is turning up the volume on media and
storytelling, making our content available in many
different venues and platforms, getting our message out
everywhere possible,” Bob said.
“The goal moving forward is to make Main Street aware
that the market can be used as a tool for positive social
impact,” he continued. “It really is about taking this
industry to Main Street. We may use traditional finance
because that’s where the money is. But how does this
entire idea become much more ubiquitous? We must
create a common, shared understanding so everyone is
aware of the opportunity to align their capital with their
values and has the tools to take action. Then, we have
to be sure that there are enough opportunities so that
people can invest in ways consistent with their values.
That is the work ahead of us.”
WHY CHANGE?
“We are doing this because it’s what the world needs,” Bob
explained. “We want to keep leveraging and maximizing
all the amazing efforts happening in the field today. As
a community, we have to ask ourselves: how do we best
collaborate and execute these ideas to drive more capital
to impactful and sustainable investments? This is an
ambition that only collaboration can help realize. We will
continue to promote and incorporate all the great work
being done by the many amazing organizations in the
field. This is about our collective potential to change the
world for the better.
“As the world catches on to the significant role that capital
can play in changing the world for good, our hope is that
SOCAP will not only be known as one of the places where
this movement got started, but will also continue to play
a pivotal role in creating the world where we all want to
live.”
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THE POWER OF 1000S
When we first started working on the idea of a 10th
anniversary book, it was daunting to imagine presenting
a story about SOCAP that was inclusive of all, without
leaving out someone important. And as we’re wrapping
this up to go to print, it’s astonishing looking at how much
is said and yet thinking about all of the people who have
played a part who we failed to mention! What a collective
labor of love this all is!
So, when it came to say thank you to the team that has
moved SOCAP forward, no ‘Power of 10’ would suffice.
All of this really is about the power of thousands. And
there is no doubt that’s the magnitude of people to be
acknowledged and grateful toward.
Over the 10 years of SOCAP, more than 20,000 people
have registered for SOCAP events. There have been
the ten main SOCAP events, plus 2 in Europe, 1 edition
of SOCAP Health, and 1 of SOCAP Share, 2 SOCAP Soul
events, plus 4 Neighborhood Economics events and
dozens of SOCAP365s.
With all those events, my guess is that we have had close
to 2,000 people volunteer and pitch in. SOCAP would not
exist without them; and as a gesture of thanks to them
all, I want to highlight Anne Peskoe who, almost every
year, has volunteered many hours ahead of conference
registration. Anne is now so regular that she doesn’t
even register, she just shows up for work a week before
SOCAP. Many of our volunteers have approached working
at SOCAP as seriously as Anne and for that we are very
grateful. One has even flown from Europe to help out,
and while we did find some paying work for him to justify
his trip, Bert Meijers is another volunteer who can stand
in as an example of what folks have done to help us out,
and to get to attend SOCAP.
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Of course the founding team was so essential, and made
the work easy. Gary Bolles and Heidi Kleinmaus were
not only amazing partners but also became good friends
in the early years while we worked together on SOCAP.
And Mark Beam was a huge encourager who brought
the first major sponsor, Halloran Philanthropies, to the
table. Thank you to Mark, Tony Carr and Harry Halloran
for your tremendous support.
The early team of Jon Axtell and Amy Benziger, along with
dozens of other part-time staffers and interns brought
SOCAP to life out of what seemed like nothing for years.
Jon’s best friend, Casey Terrazas, showed up to help
out with technical details in the third year and has been
a mainstay ever since! A year later Megan McFadden
turned from volunteer into our media and marketing
guru and helped the conference continue to grow to the
point that we outgrew an all-volunteer registration team.
After Fabienne Blanc started managing registration we
couldn’t imagine how we had managed without her.
Bert-Ola Bergstrand has been a consistent advocate
from ‘sunny Sweden,’ and Frank van Beuningen and
Margaret McGovern believed in SOCAP so much that they
wanted to bring it to their hometown of Amsterdam, and
we are deeply grateful for that. Our two European events
were formative for the impact investing space and for
our work.
A few years back, Diana Connolly and her team at
Groundswell Marketing – in particular Nicolette Oliaro
– brought tremendous order to all things to do with the
facility and operations. But one thing they didn’t change,
because attendees would have rebelled if they had, is
the consistently amazing, sustainable, organic food from
Britt Galler and her team at Acre Gourmet.
Both Liz Krueger and Ben Metz helped in the transitional
years by managing content for a couple of critical years.
Liz also produced both the SOCAP Share and SOCAP
Health mini-events.
For the first six or seven years SOCAP had to be
reinvented every time, many times with new people
filling critical spots. Most of them have gone unnamed
here but without them we could not have done this.
But, the last three years have brought together a solid
team of professionals who are committed to this project
year round. That team, led by the amazing Lindsay
Smalling, includes Jamie McGonnigal who works with
our sponsors and partners to make sure they have the
very best experience, Liz Maxwell who keeps SOCAP
alive year round by curating dozens of SOCAP365 events
around the country, and Justin Belleme and his team at
JB Media in Asheville keep growing the online SOCAP
community.
Tim Soerens is another one of those amazing people who
deserves major kudos, not only for holding the “Meaning”
side of the equation at SOCAP but also helping launch
our sister mini-conference, Neighborhood Economics,
that is a big part of what we’re up to.
From the beginning, Fred Fassett of Minuteman Press
has been one of our top cheerleaders. His work and
support with our program book, and his encouragement
as a friend has been deeply appreciated.
And a big thank you to Paula Garrett for this major piece
of work, interviewing, chronicling these ten years, and
putting pen to paper for almost every word in this book.
Of course, we would never have made this happen
without the deep support of our partner, Tim Freundlich,
and all of the people at the Impact Hub in San Francisco,
and the Mission Hub organization that incubated SOCAP.
Finally, a personal note of thanks to our family. Kevin and
I would not have been able to do this without their love
and support back home. For taking care of the farm and
the family, and on occasion coming out to serve as my
personal gofer during SOCAP, our son Bradley and our
grandson Logan. And thanks to our daughter BJ, who
has read and edited every single word written in every
single SOCAP program book. A labor of love to be sure.
BJ’s son Asher was on stage as a baby at SOCAP08 and
helped close the show in SOCAP13.
With us from the beginning, and to this day, has been
our son-in-law, designer extraordinaire, (and Asher’s
father), Aaron Maret, who has held the design vision for
the look and feel of every single event we have done.
Kevin insists that I not end this litany of thank you’s
without a special call out to Lehman Brothers. Their
bankruptcy just weeks before the first SOCAP was a
real marker to the world, showing that something in
our system of capitalism was deeply flawed. I think that
systemic failure allowed people not to be passive any
longer, and take action to form this community that longs
for a better way to understand, and be in relationship
with their money. As Kevin says, SOCAP08 presented a
flight to hope in that crisis.
And thank YOU ALL for showing up! SOCAP is a great
community of folks all around the world. We are so glad
to have been midwives giving birth to this community and
are looking forward to witness how it continues to grow!
Much love,
Rosa Lee
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