community

Update: You can now download and listen to the call in its entirety:

Acumen Fund Summer Associate call - April 1, 2009

For the 10 summer internship positions Acumen Fund has open globally, we received 700 applications from an amazing group of candidates. We’re going to do our best to find the 10 people who are the best fit for our needs this summer, but the bigger, harder question is, “What about the other 690?”

Sasha posed this question a few weeks ago on his blog and on the Acumen Fund blog. There were some comments; there was also a discussion here at Acumen about how best to engage this “amazing group of candidates.” After a couple of e-mails and meetings, we decided to run an experiment: offer our 690 non-accepted candidates a private conference call briefing from senior Acumen staff. This was a way to say thanks, to welcome folks into our community, and to offer ways to stay engaged - not just with Acumen Fund, but with the social enterprise space as a whole.

The call was yesterday morning; about 10% of the invited candidates joined (67 total). I helped moderate; Brian Trelstad and Yasmina Zaidman talked about the latest Acumen happenings (describing some of the newer investments, our plans for 2009 and 2010, etc.) We actually recorded the whole call, and will release a .mp3 version of it as soon as we get a copy and have a chance to convert it. (For some reason, Global Crossing records conference calls in .wav format - not helpful.)

Acumen Fund Summer Associate call - April 1, 2009

After a short presentation, Brian and Yasmina took questions - and the floodgates opened up. I promised at the end of the call to post questions to our blog, so here they are. We - Brian, Yasmina, me and the rest of the team - will do our best to answer them over the next few weeks. In the meantime, take a look - and comment below if one question in particular is of interest!

————————————————————————————————–

1. How do social metrics figure into an ROI calculation? What are the typical returns on investment and investment timeframes you look for in assessing viability of projects?

2. One of the biggest challenges is identifying entrepreneurs in low-income communities. What is the methodology that Acumen follows to identify these entrepreneurs? Furthermore, how does Acumen Fund provide the technical assistance to ensure that these enterprises are indeed successful?

3. Has Acumen Fund encountered challenges in the more political unstable regions it operates in? If so, how has or is it working through them?

4. What is the evaluation process for the ventures you look at for investing? Do you use some kind of a Social Return On Investment metric? Or what metrics do you use?

5. What percent of your annual investments (in 2007?) were considered failures? Were they considered failures because of inability to repay or lack of social impact? How has this number changed since Acumen was founded?

6. Could you talk a little bit about the work of a Summer Associate an Acumen? In other words, what would a typical day at work look like?

7. What are the next steps if we are interested in working with Acumen Fund, and we are not considered for this year’s summer internship program?

8. Many of my peers are excited about careers in the social venture sector but struggle to see what the long term career path might be given the maturity of the sector. Could you help chart out the possibilities for a post-MBA graduate?

9. What is Acumen doing to increase awareness of their services to people in the developing countries?

10. How did Acumen Fund start, and does the opportunity exist (in your opinion) for an individual to start an analogous Fund working in other geographical locations? If so, what skills would you suggest an entrepreneur develop to follow this path?

11. How important is it for clients to have the potential to receive additional loans from Acumen in the future? Have any clients already received repeat loans? Do you think the potential has a strong influence on an entrepreneur’s motivation to repay?

12. Could you comment on non-profit/philanthropic and profit-driven/sustainable funding models?

13. I’m curious with regards to the diversification of investment strategies adopted. For example: if investment is being done in the housing sector of Pakistan do you invest in multiple arenas or are your investments confined to a specific focus area?

14. How does Acumen Fund take investment decisions or evaluate ROI in an environment where there is no financial data?

15. Could you elaborate on your thoughts with regard to involvement in social investing earlier in one’s career versus later in one’s career? Would getting involved later in one’s career have a greater impact and perhaps be more worthwhile?

16. Could you talk about your own professional paths and how you made the shift from more traditional careers to management roles in the BoP/ social entrepreneurship space?

17. Is something specific that Acumen looks for in a candidate profile?

18. Could you talk a little about entry level positions at Acumen Fund for recent MBA and policy graduates?

19. Could you comment more on how to get involved with Acumen Fund’s work outside the fellows and interns program — perhaps more detail on the “young professional” network?

20. What do you suggest an individual who has little experience in international work can do to participate with Acumen?

21. Where does Acumen Fund see itself in the future in its investments in ecomarkets? Is Acumen Fund aware of any viable engagements in payment for environmental services in the water sector, not only in water delivery but resource conservation (e.g., in watersheds/parks/reserve systems)?

22. Given the culture of intellectual property protection in the market and the simultaneous high purchasing value of knowledge (such as journal subscriptions), which can be an access barrier for “the base of the pyramid,” how does Acumen Fund address such issues head on to promote and extend its knowledge sharing impact? Particularly, how does Acumen Fund convince its partners (if they are entrepreneurs in a highly competitive marketplace) to be more open in sharing their knowledge?

23. What is the Acumen Fund’s position on the role of public-private partnerships both in the areas of environmental markets and knowledge sharing?

(Editor’s note: this post first appeared on Sasha Dichter’s blog.)

Last week when speaking on the “Creating Private Capital Markets” Panel at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference, I noted that one of the big opportunities for Acumen Fund and other organizations in our sector is to capitalize on a huge influx of talent.  Demand to work in our sector is at an all-time high, the result of the rising profile of social enterprise; the blowup in the financial sector (a lot of people with financial skills are rethinking their path); and, hopefully, because society as a whole (or at least the younger generation) is taking a momentary pause to reconsider our definitions of success.

Acumen Fund and other organizations in our sector are currently experiencing overwhelming levels of interest.  One data point that I mentioned on the panel: for the 10 summer internship positions Acumen Fund has open globally, we received 700 applications from an amazing group of candidates.  We’re going to do our best to find the 10 people who are the best fit for our needs this summer, but the bigger, harder question is, “What about the other 690?”

This question was salient enough that Jonathan Greenblatt, co-founder of Ethos Water, saw fit to repeat it in the lunchtime plenary panel where he spoke together with Bill Drayton, CEO of Ashoka; Clara Miller, CEO of the NonProfit Finance Fund; and lecturer and political analyst David Gergen.  This helped me realize that “the other 690″ isn’t just a question for Acumen Fund, it’s a question for our sector.  With all of the creative destruction underway in the global economy, there’s a fundamental shift in how talent will be deployed.  For burgeoning sectors like ours, this creates a demand/supply imbalance for talent, and a collective opportunity if we want to take it.

A couple of ideas to chew on:

What if some of the economic stimulus money were used to create a new Global Peace Corps, one that takes some of the best and brightest people of all ages from around the world and gives them opportunities to work on projects (private and public) that are creating positive social change?

What if all of the 690 people who applied to Acumen Fund’s summer internship - plus their colleagues who are interested in working at Endeavor and Root Capital and the World Resources Institute and the International Aids Vaccine Initiative and the Gates Foundation and the Clinton Foundation and a hundred other fascinating places to work - created vibrant, online communities on Ning or Facebook or Twitter or through NetImpact to share their own entrepreneurial business ideas, and what if the best of these ideas were made available to early-stage investors and grantmakers and social venture competitions run by business schools around the world?

What else should we be doing?

As Chair of Acumen Fund’s board, I couldn’t be more proud to announce that Jacqueline’s book launches TODAY! This book has been a genuine labor of love, and her clear, distinct voice can be heard on every page. Jacqueline started writing it in 1996 after the Rwandan genocide. The colorful, funny and painful stories mark her personal journey from arriving in Africa in 1986 and continue through the founding of Acumen Fund. Through the stories, we learn important lessons about building entrepreneurial solutions to poverty, about listening, and about creating a life of meaning. For anyone interested in the work and approach of Acumen Fund, or in how we might shape our collective future, this truly is a must-read. I also believe that this book could be very beneficial to Acumen Fund.

Many have already asked how they can help. Just to name a few ways, you can:

• Write a short review on Amazon and/or comment on the reviews already there
• Send this message to all of your friends
• Become a fan of The Blue Sweater on Facebook (and stay up to date on media, events, etc.)
• Email the website address (www.thebluesweater.com) to friends and colleagues 
• Blog about it
• Mention it on Twitter
• Buy copies for your friends!

You can purchase books at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or at your local bookseller.

The world has never needed all of us working for the common good more than it does today. Thanks for being part of our community of friends - and thanks for helping us spread the word!

Sincerely,

Margo Alexander

P.S. A good friend has generously committed to give Acumen Fund $15 for each of the first 5,000 books sold! We are grateful for this pledge and hope you will help us by buying early!

With all the changes that are going on in the world – a financial meltdown on one hand, a new U.S. President brought to power on a wave of change from below on the other – we see tremendous opportunity. The time is ripe to create a step change in terms of awareness, excitement, and membership in Acumen Fund’s community of supporters and advocates – from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands…and someday millions of people who believe that markets and entrepreneurship have a central role to play in the global fight on poverty.

We need someone to help us make this happen, so we’re hiring for a Business Development Manager – Marketing. What does that mean? It means we’re looking for a storyteller, a translator, and a listener, who at the same time is ready to roll up their sleeves with data and numbers and analytics. You might be a great blogger or an old-school marketer with lots of new tricks up your sleeves. But either way you bring off-the-charts passion, energy, commitment, and humility to this role.

Put another way, you’re probably either a super-duper marketer who knows how to use online tools, or you’re world-class with online tools and also have got some great marketing ideas. If you’re neither of these things, this job (PDF) probably isn’t for you.

We’d like to see what you can do – details on how to apply are on this Squidoo lens.

UPDATE: The Acumen Fund web site is back up! Thanks again for all your e-mails and, most of all, for your patience. (January 30, 2009)

To: Acumen Fund friends, Partners, community members and website visitors

From: Acumen Fund staff

Re: Unscheduled, unplanned website maintenance

Memo: Thank you! Our website went down this morning (New York time) for some “unscheduled, unplanned maintenance,” as we’re calling it. Basically, our server had a big hiccup and we’re in the process of restoring our data, backing everything up, and re-starting the whole shebang. Almost as soon as it happened, we started getting e-mails from you - our friends, colleagues, partners, Partners, community members, fans - to let us know what was up. As much as we don’t like to get caught with our servers down, it is totally refreshing and reassuring to know that there are so many of you out there who care enough to write. So seriously, thanks.

We’re working as hard as we can to get this fixed. In the meantime, might we suggest a visit to our YouTube channel? How about our Fellows blog? Or NextBillion.net, which Acumen Fund co-owns? There’s also the Facebook cause, the LinkedIn group - you get the idea.

We hope you’ll bear with us as we make these fixes. Thanks again to everyone who wrote - we’ll post again here on the blog when life is back to normal.

Gratefully,

Acumen Fund

We at Acumen Fund are so proud that Niko Canner, a key advisor to our work, was named in Fortune.com as among “the next generation of management experts who are changing the way business gets done”. As one of the “10 gurus you should know“, Niko stands alongside Nouriel Roubini, the NYU economist famed for predicting the recent economic turmoil, and Don Sull, the professor of management practice at LSE, among others. Niko has been a champion of our talent work and I personally feel incredibly grateful to him for all he and his firm Katzenbach Partners has done to strengthen and expand Acumen’s work.

Congratulations, Niko!

I like to cook, and I was recently browsing through the 101cookbooks.com site, looking for something do make with some extra zucchini, when I came across this unexpected post: an invitation to join the 101cookbooks.com Kiva lending team.

Suffice to say, I was not expecting to find microfinance shout-outs on a cooking blog. But when I saw this post, I was really struck (again) by the power and reach of Kiva’s model. Kiva just makes it so easy for people to participate in the micro-lending “movement” – anyone can become a lender and forge personal connections to individual loan recipients in the developing world. Not only is it easy to participate, but now it’s apparently getting easier to enlist others, too. The virality is really impressive.

Acumen Fund’s model is obviously different from that of Kiva (small & medium enterprise finance vs. micro-lending to individuals), but we have similar ambitions around engaging large numbers of individuals in our work. How do we give any interested, eager individual a way to participate? How do we create personal connections between the customers of our portfolio companies in India, Pakistan, East Africa and people who live thousands of miles away? How do we build a “movement” around the development-through-enterprise sector in the way that the microfinance movement has sprung up in recent years? How do we translate that “movement” into changes in the way people approach philanthropy and development?

We don’t yet have answers to these questions, but Kiva has at least shown us that there are plenty of people out there who want to try to help solve poverty if you can just give them a way to get involved. Our challenge in creating a “movement” will be to supply easy ways for people to participate so that maybe one day someone else’s search for a simple recipe will change the way she looks at the world.

P.S. If you ever find yourself with an “extra zucchini” problem, I recommend this recipe.

It has been a busy summer here at the Acumen Fund New York office, where we’ve been working hard to implement website and blog changes that make it easier for our community to access data on and insights from our work.

On the website, it’s now possible to view metrics reported by many of our investees. These investment metrics are fed directly from our Portfolio Data Management System. We are not able to share all the available data, and some of our new investments are still in the process of collecting data, but we are committed to sharing as much information as we can, as often as we can – and this is a step in that direction.