5TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE, 17TH/18TH NOVEMBER 2009

17 November

Members-Only Meeting

Evening Reception at Nieuwe Kerk

18 November

Opening Plenary

Social Enterprise: a new frontier for creating sustainable social change?

Breakout Sessions, 18 November

1. The Bottom Line: measuring and marketing social impact

2. European Social Enterprise: killer application or passing fad?

3. Scaling Up: bringing social enterprises to scale

VP Workshop

Everything you wanted to know about starting a VP fund, but were afraid to ask

Roundtables

1. The Long-Distance Relationship: managing international investments

2. Rising to the Climate Challenge

3. The Double Helix: the relationship between social entrepreneurs and venture philanthropists

4. The Financial Asset: fundraising for VPs in challenging times

5. Arts and Culture: VP’s Cinderella

6. Beyond Grants

7. Supporting Early-Stage Entrepreneurs

Closing Plenary

The One Foundation Story

Reflections and Wrap-up

Plenary Session 1

Caroline Casey (Kanchi) and Rod Schwartz (ClearlySo)

‘Dreamers with their eyes wide open’

There are one billion people in the world with disabilities, said Caroline Casey in a stirring opening presentation. ‘They don’t have leadership, they don’t get educated and they don’t get funded,’ not because people were bad but because they felt it was nothing to do with them. At one time, she would have said the same, but 10 years ago, a rare eye defect had led to her becoming legally blind. She realised that disability had ‘everything to do with me. It’s who I am.’ Since then, the organisation she led, Kanchi, has helped to put disability on the agenda. It had launched the televised O2 ability awards in Ireland. Telefonica had seen it, bought it and was about to launch a Spanish equivalent. Kanchi was now working towards the development of Ability Awards International. ‘We want to be the “Inconvenient Truth” of disability,’ she said. There were four things Kanchi and social enterprises in general needed from venture philanthropy:

• ‘we need you to believe in us’
• ‘we need you to help us become financially sustainable’
• ‘we need you most in the scale-up phase’. Social enterprise couldn’t show investors a profit because it was about people
• ‘we need you to allow us risk.’

‘There are dreamers who dream with their eyes wide open,’ she finished. ‘They’re the dangerous ones; they make things happen. It’s you.’

For Rodney Schwartz, CEO of ClearlySo, defining a social enterprise was simple – ‘it does good.’ He thought of current world leaders as like ‘bad parents of a very dysfunctional family’. They won’t make the necessary changes, people like Caroline Casey will, he argued. ClearlySo, a social business marketplace based in the UK, was a ‘social business ecosystem’ which gave social enterprises access to capital, to information, to discounted professional services and to visibility. From its launch in March this year, it now had 500 organisations on its website, with ClearlySo Canada about to launch and Brazilian and Indian counterparts soon to follow.

Slideshows

Download slideshows here: Rod Schwartz

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