3 Days to Go! Get Your Impact-Driven Startup/Social Enterprise Off the Ground

• Pat Ryan CEO of Dismantle Inc (and Renew Property Maintenance)
• Liz Moss (Impact Seed, and Loop Upcycling)
• Nikkola Palmer (Impact Seed, and formerly Gogo Events Co Founder)

1. A better understanding of the rapidly growing impact-driven startup ecosystem
2. The pitfalls to avoid on the social enterprise startup journey
3. Articulating your mission and impact to the stakeholders that matter
4. A clear picture of the right business structure to go forward with
5. A picture of the potential collaborators, funders and investors as they apply to social startups

Join us for the B Corp Boot-camp in Perth Thursday 8th September

Join the WA Contingent at The Social Enterprise World Forum: Brisbane 28-29 September

Myer Fellowship Applications Closing Soon

Thoughts & Reflections

1. Australian Ethical Super is granting $20,000 - $100,000 targeting projects addressing climate change. Applications close Tuesday 13 September 2022 (5pm AEST).
    
2. Applications for the $100,000 (USD) Kirby Prize are open until September 5.  This annual global prize in unrestricted funds targets grantees that amplify and accelerates the work of enterprises working to scale their impact on social or environmental problems around the world.
    
3. The obstacles to Australia becoming a green superpower (John Hewson - former Liberal leader in The Saturday Paper - paywall) - "Even if all 195 signatory countries met their Paris commitments to emissions reductions, the world would still warm by 3.7C. Climate change has become an existential risk. Recent research suggests that the economic losses from climate change in just a few decades could be like a Covid-sized economic shock every year. The media’s role in the climate debate has been appalling, especially when we recognise the significance of the issue at the recent election. Those deniers on Sky News and their peers are now pretending that they are not really deniers, but simply asking the “difficult questions” in a “search for the truth”
   
   "Australia is uniquely placed to show true global leadership in the transition to renewables and clean energy, transport and agriculture.  However, the Coalition under Morrison and Angus Taylor adopted a bizarre attitude to climate once they finally accepted the challenge as real, claiming to focus on “technology not taxes”. Against this background, Albanese is to be congratulated for committing to a more realistic 2030 target – though it probably falls short of what will be required – and for recognising the need for climate responses to be “front-end loaded".
   
   "Australia has a sizeable responsibility as a major exporter and subsidiser of fossil fuels. It would be instructive for the media meddlers and Coalition climate deniers to read a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA, iniitially formed as a mouthpiece for the fossil-fuel industries). It warns that some existing gas and coal infrastructure will become redundant – “stranded assets”, in financial terms. It’s a significant road-to-Damascus conversion for the IEA, though apparently the report was passed across some of the big polluters. The plan proposes specific quantitative actions across multiple sectors that are dramatically different from current actions, including a recommendation of no new oil, gas or coalmines from this year."
    
4. Catalytic finance intends to provide more flexible, patient, and risk-tolerant funding than conventional investment..it's often trying something new or untested in multiple dimensions – a new product, a new team, a new asset class, a new geography – where there isn't the track record to reassure investors that they have a holistic grasp of risks involved.  This article argues that trust relationships are the key to catalytic funding, not over-engineering structures to mitigate risk.
    
5. Investors Are Embracing ESG But Avoiding Impact. What They’re Missing (Barrons) - "Cognitive bias through the belief that achieving positive social impact automatically means sacrificing attractive return on investment—drives many investors to avoid “impact” but embrace “ESG". The degree to which ESG and impact investing have filled the airwaves in recent years belies their relatively recent emergence as discrete investment products. Despite the warmer acceptance of ESG, there is little consensus around how it differs from “impact” investments. Plus, loose definitions have allowed for “greenwashing”—falsely portraying an investment as ESG for opportunistic marketing purposes while ignoring the investment’s long-term financial risk and economic or social costs to society.
   
   The challenges facing the mass adoption of impact investing strategies are formidable but not insurmountable over time. It’s impossible to predict the future as an asset owner, but fear of the unknown or the novel, compounded by short-termism and poor data, can halt progress. Screening an investment for financially material ESG risks is not the same as building a portfolio that uplifts people and the planet, and such a paradigm shift will require the market to reconsider tested strategies, near-term expectations, and long-term objectives. And as our fledgling impact investment movement matures, the investment community will be more attuned to the nuanced differences between them."
    
6. Eight ways the $369B US Inflation Reduction Act is resetting the climate table globally (ImpactAlpha) -
   (Comment by Gillian Marcelle) - "This landmark legislation means the impact investment community can get back to focusing on fundamentals. Public policy sends signals to investment decision makers in corporations, public bodies and in finance firms. This Act is de-risking and public investment at its best. It’s also about technology upgrade, capability building, skills development - my innovation scholar’s heart is grateful. Innovation scholars who have been calling for mission focused investment ought now to be engaged in fine tuning the design and monitoring outcomes."
7. The Economist argues that ESG should be ditched, by boiling it down to carbon (article).  No!  (comment by Alison Taylor) "Here the Economist argues that we should ditch ESG because it is too confusing and promises too much, and just focus on one measure: carbon emissions. Meanwhile, there are many ways to hit a quantitative target that miss the point. You can reduce your carbon emissions by closing a factory and laying off thousands of people. You may have heard of Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure – that is, it will become corrupted, because the process is now worth gaming."
    
8. Would the world be better off without philanthropy? (Opinion, The New Yorker) - "Organized philanthropy, like most things, looks different on the inside than it does from the outside. In real life, the interaction between big-money philanthropy and philanthropy-reliant institutions is more like a business negotiation than a morality play. Philanthropists rarely make the large, unrestricted gifts that the grantees really want, and so the two parties bargain: over the purpose and the control of a gift, over the form of credit, over how much the institution has to raise from other sources as a condition of the gift’s being made. In the fallen world we inhabit, philanthropy is available to address needs that should not exist. Skeptics of philanthropy, tend to have an incomplete sense of the world’s imperfections. Surely most recipients of philanthropy are aware of the circumstances of relational inequality that are practically universal inside and outside philanthropy. Still, concerns about political equity—bearing in mind that philanthropy is only one of the ways in which capital can be converted into power—deserve systematic and rigorous investigation"
9. This Civilisation is Finished (resilience.org) - “Don’t be put off by the title – the subject s navigated with defiant positivity.. if people are feeling paralysed right now, I think it is probably because they are stuck between false hopes. On the one hand, there is the delusive lure of optimism, the hope that there will be a techno-fix that will defuse the climate emergency while life more or less goes on as usual. This is, I believe, in a desperately-dangerous way keeping us from facing up to climate reality. On the other hand, there are dark fears that people mostly don’t voice and don’t confront."
10. I stopped reading the news. Is the problem me? — or the product? (Opinion, Washington Post) - "I’ve been a journalist for two decades, and I used to spend hours consuming the news and calling it “work.” Every morning, I read The Washington Post, the New York Times and sometimes the Wall Street Journal. In my office at Time magazine, I had a TV playing CNN on mute. I listened to NPR in the shower. On weekends, I devoured the New Yorker. It felt like my duty to be informed, as a citizen and as a journalist — and also, I kind of loved it! Usually, it made me feel more curious, not less. But half a dozen years ago, something changed.."