My partner, Tim Freundlich along with two of the other thought leaders in the blended value space, Jim Fruchterman and Jed Emerson, have written a major article on the need for expansion capital for social enterprises. They have a phenomenal group of folks signed up as readers and we plan to gather the comments.

Rather than […]

The assets earmarked for donation continue to be invested in Mr. Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway. Each year 5% of the total earmark will go to the Gates Foundation and it must be given away that same year. With this structure, Mr. Buffett must be getting the same tax benefits investors in Legacy Venture get…

Joel Makower writes on Worldchanging.com about how the trend lines on risk are making insurance companies take global warming increasingly seriously.

“Probably no sector is more conservative than the insurance industry, and I’m not referring to its political posturing. Insurance is, at its essence, a numbers game — about risk management, probability theory, and certainty. And […]

Well, as we held the first of what will be a weekly series of conference calls with our beta users, some things are clear. People get it. They see the value of having an online, searchable repository of the entities and people who are driving the blended value market. And they like the fact that […]

Welcome to the beta test of xigi (pronounced ziggy). It’s a collaborative effort to enable a process of discovery in the growing, but still nascent market that invests private debt and equity in social enterprise, fair trade, microfinance, independent media, affordable housing, cooperatives, cleantech and many other sectors. xigi has been drafted as a community […]

More groups are doing market formation activities, explaining to their constituencies what is out there, who is doing what, providing timely updates, etc. One of the newest, that I think is really cool is PRI Makers Network which works in the fast growing area of program related investments; investments by foundations that can earn money […]

One of the things we will try to do at xigi is to keep track of factors in other markets that indicate maturity in an investment class. Right now in Clean Tech there are a number of things occurring that tell us Clean Tech is making leaps in this regard, not the least of which […]

On April 26, 2006 Congressman Manzullo (republican from Illinois) and Congressman Pomeroy (democrat from North Dakota) introduced  H.R. 5198, titled “Access to Capital for Entrepreneurs Act of 2006”

The bill is still under review by the House Committee on Ways and Means.  As we all know, the majority of bills never make it past committee, so […]

These are some interesting snippets up on Google video now from a day down at Google late March a bunch of us attended. Gil Crawford from Microvest, Roger Frank from Developing World Markets and Sam Moss from Grey Ghost share a panel. Also a seperate piece of video from Mario Otero, the CEO of Accion […]

Or, as Turner put it: “let’s stop doing dumb things, and start doing smart things.”