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An article in this month's Inc magazine features the explosion (slight exaggeration) of funding vehicles to support the growing number of for-profit companies with an explicit social mission. Among the recipients of this boom is 1993 Echoing Green Fellow Priya Haji, who started World of Good, a marketplace for fair-trade crafts. Although Priya won awards from business plan competitions, she was flatly rejected from receiving a line of credit from a bank. Luckily, she was able to turn to three of the fifteen new companies that lend to "for benefit" companies (RSF Social Finance, Root Capital, and Shared Interest) to support World of Good, which has doubled its revenue in the past few years.
I wonder if this trend is going to result in increasingly normalizing the social enterprise field. With an uncertain economy, which way will we bend? More toward the social? Or retract the opposite way?
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Comments
Social venture capital
Thanks for pointing out this article - I found it via Ryan Gundersen's blog and have now subscribed to your Echoing Green posts.
In any case, I think that social venture capital is mainstreaming. There's so much pressure on the non-profit sector to work and act more like a business, and this is a leading edge of that change. When financing good deeds can actually generate a return (even if that return is below market rate) there will be more momentum for 'giving' than ever before.
Of course, it takes experimentation and support for these first-mover venture funds (Good Capital, Root Capital, RSF, Acumen Fund, etc.) to prove that the model works before it will really hit the mainstream. It will be interesting to see its progression...