Bec's highlights from the Investing in Impact forum

There were times I sat in Thursday’s Investing for Impact Forum thinking that one day we’d all look back on the forum as a pivotal point in the development of Australia’s social investment sector. There were enough people in the room with the skills, experience and passion to collectively bring about the changes we need. There was also a strong desire for action. And as Cheryl Kernot pointed out, the Centre for Social Impact --who hosted the event-- is an organisation of pracademics.

Here’s a few other highlight’s of yesterday’s Investing for Impact Forum:

• I particularly loved hearing  the details about how the collapse of the ABC Learning Centres has catalysed a bunch of non-profits (Mission Australia, Brotherhood of St Laurence, Social Ventures Australia, the Benevolent Society), philanthropic investors (like the Trawalla Foundation), and financial institutions (like the NAB) to form the GoodStart consortia and take over the centres. In addition to running profitable centres, what is exciting is the central social focus ‘to provide high quality care, assist disadvantaged children, provide quality early learning education, support local communities, increase parent participation in childcare, and positively change Australia’s early learning and childcare policies.’ As Matthew Turner, Director of Corporate Finance for NAB pointed out, these were decisions the bank would never usually take into consideration when making investment decisions. He made it clear that although the social outcomes didn’t impact the rigour and due diligence the bank performed when structuring GoodStart’s finance, they did change how determined they were to find the right financial solutions. As pointed out, Australia is far behind the OECD rankings in early childhood development and the collapse of ABC provided a ‘once in a generation opportunity’ to bring about real social changes in this area. I wonder how Eddy Groves is feeling about his former 678 centres (his cashcows actually) becoming Australia’s largest social enterprise!

• I also loved hearing the international guest speaker Glen Saunders who is a Board member and Treasurer of United Nations PRI (Principles of Responsible Investment), Executive Chair of Prometheus Finance and Senior Advisor to the Triodos Bank. Glen’s view is that Australia has all the necessary ingredients for social investment, we just haven’t kick-started it. In his words ‘You’re all standing around the pool wondering what it will be like in the water. It will be wet. Just get on with it!’
  
  In defining social enterprise he spoke of the social outcome of the enterprise being fundamental to their operations, not just an add-on. And sometimes they’re profit seeking, but NEVER profit maximising. He said his test to see if an organisation is a social enterprise is to gauge the reaction of charities and businesses. To businesses, social enterprises look like charities, but to charities they look like businesses. I like this test.

Glen was surprised how little social investment Australia has, particularly because we’ve been one of the biggest signatories of the UN’s Principles of Responsible Investment. And when pondering why Australia’s social investment is so limited he sees Australia paralleling where the UK was 20 years ago: No one was asking for it, so no one provided it. No one provided it, so no one asked for it. Both sides just need to start building!

Glen’s view was also that if Australia developed a social bank it would probably get 15% of the market. Bring it on!

Other inspiring projects and organisations you should check out are:

• Barefoot Power. Their mission is to help poor families to stop spending their scarce cash by giving them a better and cheaper option. They are declaring war on kerosene! And they’re on track to introduce 1 million households to solar powered lighting and provide access to people living in poverty. They’re a very inspiring social enterprise with a very audacious goal.
• Hepburn Wind, who are Australia’s first community wind farm.
• Foresters Community Finance – a social investment company who specifically help finance Third and Fourth Sector organisations.
• (Yesterday I also spoke at the Forum about STREAT’s joys and challenges sourcing investment for STREAT over a number of years. But I’ll share this at some later time.)