We've all heard the cliché 'money makes the world go around' at some point in our lives. This is true. Not always for the better... as we have seen recently with the breakdown in our global banking system and the economic outcomes that have flowed from this.
The purpose of this month's SCP team blog follows our earlier philosophical one about why we do what we do. This one focuses on how we do what we do. That's easy: we engage people to think differently about money and about how money makes the world go round.
SCP is in the advantageous position to have access to money that was specifically set aside to 'do good.' Our objective is to use these funds to influence the people running businesses that need money to grow. What I have found really exciting working at SCP for the last several years is that money can profit everyone if access to it is structured in innovative ways. Lenders and investors can and are broadening the criteria outlining who can access their capital.
SCP for example has specific criterion that we demand of our portfolio organizations relating to the number of social hires a company makes. (they have to pay the money back too!) In our loan agreements, we document the borrower's commitments for both financial and social hiring reporting. As an incentive, we have structured a social hiring interest rate adjustment that decreases based on hitting certain social hiring targets. With each portfolio company, we work out realistic social hiring targets for the type of business and stage of growth over realistic timelines. One thing we have learned over the years is that social hiring must to link to the needs of the business.
Another thing that SCP does is take risks. By this I mean we try things, knowing we may fail but do so because we won't know if we don't try. Our modus operandus as a 'do tank' as Bill likes to call it, is one where we operationalize a strategy with the goal to figure out how to scale that strategy and have more social impact. Looking back on our eight year history, we can distinguish three distinct strategic phases; all of which have grown out of the previous phase.
As an organization, our goal is to distill the learnings from our work with social enterprises, franchises and other Canadian businesses to then feed into our vision to further scale the practice of social hiring across Canada.
Posted by Joanne Norris on Thursday, February 11th, 2010