Last week, I attended a session of the NYU Reynolds Program series “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century,” with speaker Paul Farmer (our own CEO, Jacqueline Novogratz, spoke in an earlier session). Farmer is a physician-anthropologist who co-founded Partners in Health, a non-profit providing health care service to poor in various parts of the world (including Haiti, Rwanda, Peru, Russia, Lesotho and Malawi). Partners in Health is also a leading public health research and advocacy organization.

Dr. Farmer coined his talk an ‘insider’s critique’ of social entrepreneurship, and started by wondering whether he was in fact a social entrepreneur. Does he, by his own definition, bring real innovation to solving big problems? What’s so innovative about what he does? Partners in Health basically says that poor people deserve basic health services and then makes it happen. Farmer thinks that access to those services should be a right enjoyed by all people. However, the fact is that most of the world’s poor don’t have access to basic health needs – even defined by mid-19th century standards: clean water, food, sanitation. (Amartya Sen might describe these deprivations as “unfreedoms.”)

According to Farmer, the efforts of most social entrepreneurs are falling short – despite the best of intentions. Their innovations are not reaching the people they are designed to help. Much hard work is being done, but it is scattershot. He asks the questions: are we innovating merely for the sake of innovating? Are we targeting the right problems? Answering himself, he argues that we must keep our innovations grounded in solving the problems of the poor.

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Last week, Jacqueline and I attended the Global Philanthropy Forum, a three day conference convening donors, social entrepreneurs, political leaders, academics and activists to discuss problems and solutions in the areas of global security, human rights, violent conflict, resource scarcity and health.

Bishop Desmond Tutu gave an inspiring and wide-ranging talk at the opening plenary, notwithstanding a bad case of the flu. He spoke of the recent violence in Kenya and the vulnerability of any country to a similar situation when colonial structures persist, leaving one group as top dog. He spoke of his hope that Zimbabwe will come through its current difficult period and that Robert Mugabe will step down or otherwise leave office. Even so, Tutu warned, there is a long road for recovery ahead and one key element of that recovery will be a framework or platform for people to “say what happened” (as happened in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission).

He also expressed a wish I heard several times throughout the Forum, a wish that more women should be at the table, as heads of government, the military and in major policymaking bodies. Tutu asserted that the “attributes of women” would bring more balance to the debate and to decisions like whether to go to war. As he put it, “I cannot imagine a woman who nurtures a child in her womb for nine months and then rears that child going on to let him be turned into cannon fodder.”

The Forum alternated between plenary sessions and smaller workshops and panels, some of which were very timely and relevant to Acumen’s work (Hunger, Agriculture and Inequality; Fragile Successes in Rwanda and Uganda; Predictable Surprises: Pakistan and Afghanistan; Maternal Health and Childcare). In the plenary session entitled “Entrepreneurship and Social Change,” we heard Fazle Abed (BRAC) and Larry Brilliant (Google.org) talked about the “missing middle” - the space between micro-finance and traditional investing - which is the next place (i.e., beyond microfinance) to move the needle on poverty alleviation through a business approach. Abed and Brilliant cited Acumen Fund as a good and established example of this approach. Mr. Abed hastened to add to that while the microfinance business model was mature, the need for more microfinance facilities was far from fully met. Both panelists said that women were often the “better bet” as entrepreneurs, social or otherwise.

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Thursday afternoon of the Skoll World Forum also offered so many interesting panels that the choice of which to attend was hard. Editor’s note: this was not the first time Ann had a hard choice of panels this week. I buzzed between a panel called “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, What’s the Impact of this All?” which tackled social impact and metrics to track it (Acumen’s Chief Investment Officer, Brian Trelstad, was a panelist) and another called “Addressing the Talent Gap,” on which Acumen’s Talent Manager, Deepti Doshi, was a panelist.

Marc Freedman, CEO of Civic Ventures, was also on the Talent panel and described his organization’s initiatives redirecting mid- to late-career executives in the private sector to work with social entrepreneurs and innovators addressing pressing issues. Civic Ventures has an innovative Senior Fellows program which selects high performing baby boomers and places them with NGOs or social entrepreneurs for a year. Half of the stipend is paid by the NGOs and half by the Fellow’s corporation. Freedman passionately described the Fellows as folks who feel “midlife is getting to the top of the ladder and finding it was leaning against the wrong wall.”

Through the first 2 days, the Forum’s highlight was definitely the evening speech by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He is 84; witty, erudite and humble all at the same time. He described responding to Jeff Skoll’s invitation with the question: what is a social entrepreneur? Jeff responded “you are one, Mr. President.”

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Thursday morning’s break-out panels were difficult to choose among. I had every intention of visiting several, but ended up staying the full two hours at the panel called “Hybrid and For-Profit Business Models,” moderated by David Brancaccio, host and senior editor of NOW on PBS.

The room was packed. Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures program talked about an international competition in which business school teams are given 5 days and one Post-It pad to come up with a project that “creates value” under any definition. 95% of the projects submitted were social enterprises.

We also heard from Tralance Addy, President and CEO of Waterhealth International (WHI), an Acumen investee. Tralance described a dam - built 40 years ago in his home country of Ghana - which displaced thousands of people during construction. Those people are still waiting for drinkable water today and the government is still debating what to do about it. This kind of paralysis inspired Tralance’s commitment to private-sector solutions.

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The January 19 edition of The Economist contains a special report on corporate social responsibility. Several long and interesting articles, some with conflicting perspectives, but a few points emerge. First, CSR is moving slowly but inexorably to the mainstream corporate agenda. There are many arguments about what it should be called (corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, building a sustainable business) but CSR is increasingly seen as just good business. That said, there is still a significant cadre of doubters whose core argument is that corporate executives should not be spending other people’s money on CSR—their job is to be making money for the shareholders. Period.

In one article, Nike’s VP of corporate responsibility, Hannah Jones, talks about CSR as a source of innovation for companies. Instead of spending her time at CSR conferences full of other corporate folks, she prefers to focus on interacting with the social entrepreneurs and in helping to reap both social and financial returns.

“Do it right,” the last article in the section, really resonates with us here at Acumen. It asks the question that, assuming this trend corporate “goodness” continues, where will it evolve? Some believe it is the social entrepreneur who has “cracked the code” with an approach which is for-profit and self-sustaining. The approach “brings financial rigour as well as an appreciation for risk…and can teach the big companies a thing or two about how to measure the success of social investments.”