Social Impact Investment at a Global Scale

This week's readings focused on the government's role in implementing policies to support social entrepeuneurs and social innovations. The Obama admnistration created the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation in 2009 to combine nonprofits, the business community and investors to develop successful programs by getting the "best bang for taxpayers' bucks", by tapping "new resources", expanding what "works and  "developing market-based models". (1)  In order to do so, the admnistration developed the Social Innovation Fund that "makes grants to social sector intermediaries like foundations, nonprofits and social enterprises on a competitive basis". (1)

 While exploring social impact investmnent, I read a report on a G8 Meeting in 2013 and found that the countries in the G8 Forum discussed how to make social impact investment more global and sustainable. (2) Three important goals were highlighted:  "To build a global social impact investment community" thus create the Social Impact Investment Taskforce to focus on that topic. Secondly, "to create common frameworks to understand the potential of the market and move towards standardisation in impact measurement" supported by experts and reports. Finally,  "to develop and share best practice" through the Global Learning Exchange and by setting some principles for policy makers. (2)

From what I concluded reading the articles, social impact investment relies on relationships, between the goverment, the intermediaries, the nonprofits, the business community and the list goes on. President Obama attempted to build relationships between these different entities by creating the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The G8 is reproducing this idea at a larger scale by building new ties between the different "entities" or countries in this case. Indeed, more that 150 leaders were present to discuss social impact investment ranging from politicians to philantropists, to academics to social entrepreneurs. I believe that every country has its strenghts and that combining knowledge and skills to come up with innovative ideas will have a larger and more sustainable impact on social issues.

(1) http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/equal-opportunity-and-social-innovation-obamas-policy-agenda/
(2 )https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/225547/G8_Social_Impact_Investment_Forum_-_Outputs_and_Agreed_Actions.pdf