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Carbon is just the tip of the iceberg. says Jeffrey Hittner, IBM

Carbon is just the tip of the iceberg” Jeffrey Hittner, corporate social responsibility leader for IBM Global Business Services, told VNN’s Laurance Allen as we discussed IBM’s new consulting offerings designed to improve their clients’ competitive position by being greener and more ethical. Clearly the ability of corporations to meet today’s higher expectations has [...]

ProxyDemocracy

ProxyDemocracy provides a set of tools to help investors use their voting power to produce positive changes in the companies they own.Checkout this brilliantly conceived website; it is a nonprofit, nonpartisan project supported by foundations that are themselves interested in being responsible investors…… the founder Andrew Eggers, is also a doctoral student in Harvard University’s [...]

Innovations Review released by the Environmental Defense Fund.

The Environmental Defense Fund has produced a new report highlighting processes, products, and technologies that are making the biz world more eco-friendly. The green group’s Innovations Review 2008 draws attention to developments good for both business and the environment. The report focuses specifically on innovations on the cusp: not yet widely implemented, but not still [...]

Special Fund to Provide Direct Relief to Victims of the Earthquake in China

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors Launches Initiative with The Bridge Fund to Support Work on the Ground in Sichuan Province.New York, NY, May 22, 2008 – In the face of unspeakable destruction and untold human tragedy caused by the recent earthquake in Sichuan Province of China, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors today announced that it is coordinating a donor [...]

Monsanto: A Harvest of Fear

Monsanto already dominates America’s food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation’s tactics–ruthless legal battles against small farmers–is its decades-long history of toxic contamination.So say Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele in the May issue of Vanity Fair where their report by details [...]

Capital For Good (Xigi.net)

Deal Review: Collaborent

Inspired by the Social Capital Index located here on xigi.net, two analysts are posting their take on the enterprises listed in Deals in Play monthly. These DEAL REVIEWS highlight some of the market opportunities and challenges, and are based on reviews of publicly available information. Our hope is that these reviews - and importantly the [...]

Value Networks Discussion Group

› How to be billionaire in the hyperconnected world

› RE: "It's the networks, stupid."

› The Need for New Value Networks

A Value Network is any web of relationships that generates tangible and intangible value through complex dynamic exchanges between two or more individuals, groups, or organizations.

VIDEO

Tim Wirth on Creating The UN Foundation with Ted Turner

The President of the United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund discusses how the organization got started and how the UN's governance is so important.

Off The Wires

Accenture Report Finds Data Centers Can Drop Energy Use by Half

OAKLAND, Calif. -- In partnership with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, the Department of Energy and others, the new report shows how adopting energy efficiency policies and hardware management practices can lead to significant cuts in power consumption for any data center.

The full Data Center Energy Forecast Report is available for download from GreenerComputing.com.  

Environmental risk still neglected – survey

-Environmental Finance, 10 July 2008 - Around two out of five senior executives admit to neglecting environmental risks, according to a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Out of 320 senior global executives, 43% said they managed environmental risks in an ‘ad hoc' manner, or not at all.

http://www.wbcsd.org/Plugins/DocSearch/details.asp?ObjectId=MzA2ODU

The Future of Social Enterprise

This working paper from HBS considers the confluence of forces that is shaping the field of social enterprise, changing the way that funders, practitioners, scholars, and organizations measure performance.

The authors, HBS professors V. Kasturi Rangan and Herman B. Leonard, and research associate Susan McDonald, trace a growing pool of potential funding sources to solve social problems, much of it stemming from an intergenerational transfer of wealth and new wealth from financial and high-tech entrepreneurs. They further examine how these organizations can best access the untapped resources by demonstrating mission performance, and then propose three potential scenarios for how this sector might evolve.  Download the working paper [PDF].

Patenting the “Climate Genes” in plants

The world’s largest seed and agrochemical corporations are stockpiling hundreds of monopoly patents on genes in plants that the companies will market as crops genetically engineered to withstand environmental stresses such as drought, heat, cold, floods, saline soils, and more.

BASF, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont and biotech partners have filed 532 patent documents (a total of 55 patent families) on so-called “climate ready” genes at patent offices around the world. In the face of climate chaos and a deepening world food crisis, the Gene Giants are gearing up for a PR offensive to re-brand themselves as climate saviours. The focus on so-called climate-ready genes is a golden opportunity to push genetically engineered crops as a silver bullet solution to climate change.

But patented techno-fix seeds will not provide the adaptation strategies that small farmers need to cope with climate change. These proprietary technologies will ultimately concentrate corporate power, drive up costs, inhibit independent research, and further undermine the rights of farmers to save and exchange seeds.

Nonprofit ‘IPO’ raises $700,000
A California nonprofit used a staple fundraising technique from the for-profit sector to generate $700,000 to combat homelessness.

Investors managing hundreds of billions of dollars have warned that US politicians must radically overhaul the country’s climate change policies or risk losing the potential for business to find solutions to global warming.

A joint letter issued today by 52 of the world’s largest investors urges the Senate to reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by 60 to 90% below 1990 levels before 2050.

Africa’s farms reap rewards

…..as the prices of raw materials soar – from the barley used to make beer or the cocoa used to make chocolate – leading brewers and food manufacturers from Cadbury Schweppes to Diageo are increasingly recognising their businesses will benefit from investment in African agriculture.Mark Lundy, senior research fellow at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, which was created by the World Bank in the early 1970s to find ways of producing more food, claims food producers can no longer afford to ignore farmers.  “It used to be very much a buyers’ market ... now companies have to position themselves as good partners.”

By Jenny Wiggins in the FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4f6fe902-1bc4-11dd-9e58-0000779fd2ac.html

IBM's Answer to the Food Crisis

While the world food crisis demands both quick fixes and long-range solutions, time is of the essence. With food costs soaring, more than one billion people could find themselves at risk of starvation or severe malnutrition in the coming years. So a project announced May 15 by University of Washington researchers and IBM's (IBM) World Community Grid to speed development of better rice may be just what's needed. 

By Steve Hamm in Business Week

Corporate-volunteering programs go global

Some of the biggest corporate names are sending their employees around the globe on costly service trips in an effort to bolster company reputations, do "real good," and develop employee skill sets, The Boston Globe reported May 4. Companies like Ernst & Young, Pfizer, Timberland, and IBM have picked up on the trend.

Battle of legends: Milken vs. Lipton
 

Martin Lipton, the legendary lawyer, says the financial crisis stems from the invention of the junk bond so many years ago. As the New York Times notes, Michael Milken begs to differ. He tells the paper that junk bonds--as well as all the CDOs that invested in them--have precious little in common with subprime mortgages. And he has a point; one could argue that junk bonds in and of themselves are neither good, nor bad. It's what you do with them. Same goes for securitization. In both cases, there can be excesses. In general, Milken has a lot to say about the mess, including a bit about how more regulation will not help. I find it interesting that he has made himself a revered, somewhat nostalgic feature. Even Rudy Giuliani, the man who put him in jail, agrees.For more here's the Times article

Billionaire Texas oil man makes big bets on wind

Legendary Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens has gone green with a plan to spend $10 billion to build the world's biggest wind farm. But he's not doing it out of generosity - he expects to turn a buck.

The Southern octogenarian's plans are as big as the Texas prairie, where he lives on a ranch with his horses, and entail fundamentally reworking how Americans use energy.

Next month, Pickens' company, Mesa Power, will begin buying land and ordering 2,700 wind turbines that will eventually generate 4,000 megawatts of electricity - the equivalent of building two commercial scale nuclear power plants - enough power for about 1 million homes. Reuters, 17 April 2008 -

U.S. maintains highest market-share of the world's prisoners

International Herald Tribune Published: April 23, 2008 [filed under value destruction]

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.  Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Philanthropy on the commons

The future of philanthropy lies in joining the wave of open source peer-production that is enriching public assets, says Mark Surman on Open Democracy.

Who are the top funders of Wikipedia? Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla and Richard Branson's Virgin Unite. Who funds the creative commons? Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook as well as a number of foundations created with newly minted high-tech wealth. The commons is clearly on the philanthrocapitalist menu.  More importantly: collaborative, non-market peer-production was born from a world that lives on the fuzzy edge between public and private benefit.

Compensation Consultants and Conflicts of Interest
Companies that use compensation consultants end up paying more to their CEOs, leading to allegations that these consultants push for excessively high CEO packages because many of them profit from doing other work for the company. A recent Congressional committee report supported the idea that such conflicts drive up CEO pay. But a new Wharton study by accounting professor Mary Ellen Carter and two colleagues suggests that conflicts of interest between the consultant and the firm aren't to blame.  Source: Knowledge@Wharton

Global Volunteering Gets Started in Boston

Last weekend in Boston, several hundred people arrived at the Harvard School of Public Health to learn more about doing good around the globe, from the international service opportunities offered by over twenty volunteer-sending organizations to workshops on topics like the basics of global volunteering, linking service and study abroad, volunteering across borders independently, and translating international service experience into a dynamic career.

Participants at the first ever Idealist Global Volunteering Fair This event, hosted by the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Graduate School of Education, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Harvard Divinity School, was Idealist's first ever Global Volunteering Fair!

If you weren't able to make it to the Boston fair, click here for information about the national and international nonprofit organizations who participated. Also, watch for a new resource center on Idealist.org specifically focused on global volunteerism to launch later this year.

Zurich-based SAM -Sustainable Asset Management- can look back on an exceptional year in 2007. The milestones included a doubling of assets under management, successful growth initiatives in Asia, and successful expansion into the US and Canada. In the past financial year, SAM’s assets under management (AuM) increased by CHF 4.7bn or 125% to CHF 8.5bn. Including the assets managed indirectly (e.g. through mandates and licences), SAM’s total AuM now amount to CHF 15.1bn.

[Full disclosure: SAM powers the daily stock indexes featured on this site; for which we are most grateful.]  Read media release

For Art, For Charity, For Fun

CowParade is the world's largest public art event in which life-sized cows are designed by artists and put on display throughout select cities around the world.

Check out their new website: http://www.cowparade.com/

USA 2008: The Great Depression

Food stamps are the symbol of poverty in the US. In the era of the credit crunch, a record 28 million Americans are now relying on them to survive – a sure sign the world's richest country faces economic crisisWe knew things were bad on Wall Street, but on Main Street it may be worse. Startling official statistics show that as a new economic recession stalks the United States, a record number of Americans will shortly be depending on food stamps just to feed themselves and their families.

By David Usborne in New York for the UK’s Independent newspaper Tuesday, 1 April 2008

Full story:  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/usa-2008-the-great-depression-803095.html

British online fundraiser generates over $500M

At a time when most British nonprofits face falling donations, online fundraiser justgiving.com has channeled more than 250 million British pounds, over $500 million, into the sector since its 2001 launch, The Guardian reported March 25. The website has spread the appeal of charitable giving to younger generations with viral marketing techniques and sophisticated technology.

Dow Jones launches Dharma Indexes

Dow Jones Indexes in conjunction with Dharma Investments^TM has created a family of faith-based equity market indexes that screen companies for compliance with Dharmic religious traditions.The first of its kind, the Dow Jones Dharma Indexes^SM are designed to integrate the value system of these religious traditions — especially Hinduism and Buddhism — into the component selection process. Thus, the Indexes restrict companies whose operations are viewed as unacceptable according to the principles of Dharma.

See: http://www.djindexes.com/mdsidx/?event=showDharmaOverView

Toyota Joins Audubon in Latest Corporate-NGO Partnership
In another high-profile partnership announced recently, Toyota gave the Audubon Society its largest grant ever -- $20 million -- to fund conservation projects, train environmental leaders and boost volunteerism, the company said Wednesday.

The Chronicle on Philanthropy blog reports on formation of the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists, an international effort to help Muslim donors and organizations make the public more aware of their work and to increase organizational capacity.  After years of nonprofit work, including assisting victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, Mr. Cheema said he saw the need to bring together the world's Islamic donors....part of its work, the congress plans to create a Web site, SecureGiving, to rank charities in Muslim countries based on an as-yet-undecided criteria of governance and management standards. Mr. Cheema said the effort will help donors make sure their money is not supporting terrorists posing as Islamic charities, a concern that has grown since the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Pumas, Planets and Pens: How Cues in the Environment Influence Consumer Choice
In a new research paper titled, "Dogs on the Street, Pumas on Your Feet: How Cues in the Environment Influence Product Evaluation and Choice," Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger suggests that what you see in your everyday world can influence what you buy. "Marketers ... think they have to come up with a catchy slogan or slick advertisement to create a buzz," Berger says. Instead, companies can get a payoff by creating a link between their product and a cue in the environment.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1927.cfm

Activists pressure Fidelity to drop Chinese stocks

Author: Ross Kerber, Boston Globe

That quietest of financial rituals, the mutual fund shareholder meeting, is becoming a forum for social activism. At a gathering that fund giant Fidelity Investments held Wednesday in Boston, shareholder proposals that would bar it from holding assets in...Sinopec and PetroChina [over their presence in Sudan]...were defeated...But while the vote went in Fidelity's favor, activists said their measures received an unusually high number of votes... Read full item here

B Corporations: Verified Sustainability

B Labs takes the guesswork out of which companies are actually working for the future.

Companies that pride themselves on being sustainable have a new badge they can present to show their commitment to the environment, society, and corporate governance. B Labs, a non-profit based in Berwyn, PA, has created a third-party certification for "B Corporations." More than just supplying a sustainable product or service, B Corporations "create a public benefit" as an integral core of their business plan.

Corporations dedicated to the good of the people aren't a new idea. In fact, in the country's first decades, the newly created United States granted corporations charters to operate only if the corporations were considered for the public good; for example, helping create infrastructure such as bridges and roads. Corporations are still granted charters by state governments, giving them special rights and privileges. However, the modern consolidation of corporate wealth and power has overshadowed the public role for corporations originally envisioned by the U.S. founding fathers.

Started in June 2007, B Labs has already certified more than 80 corporations spanning over 20 different industries from coffee to clothing to media marketing. The "B" stands for the public benefit that B Corporations create through their products, practices, and profits. According to B Labs, over 700 companies have been through the B Ratings System.

Full story by Anne Moore Odell of SocialFunds.com

http://www.socialfunds.com/news/article.cgi/2482.html

Merrill Lynch, Carbon Disclosure Project Form Partnership to Expand Project's Reach
Merrill Lynch & Co. and the Carbon Disclosure Project have created a three-year partnership to expand and improve the Project throughout the world.

Wal-Mart Pushing Chinese Suppliers To Go Green

Global Leadership Network

 Top entrepreneurship papers named

Over the past two years, 4,300 papers on entrepreneurship have been added to an online database, which has logged over 500,000 downloads.

http://www.philanthropyjournal.org/

Can Online Investing End Poverty?

Live Webcast at 4pm EDT on March 19.

WHAT: A Panel Presentation featuring eBay company MicroPlace is presented by The Global Assets Project of the New America Foundation, along with Calvert Foundation and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), with the support of the International Gateway at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, cordially invite you and your colleagues for a special event discussing one of the newest innovations in asset building and poverty reduction.

WHY: "Invest Wisely. End Poverty." This is the goal of eBay's new online microfinance investment marketplace, MicroPlace. While online microlending has been growing more popular with peer-to-peer offerings such as the nonprofit Kiva.org, MicroPlace is charting a whole new course in the microfinance industry, offering socially-minded Americans a new way to offer microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing world. As the only broker-dealer in the microfinance arena, MicroPlace is the first and only online service offering a way for investors to invest in the working poor, and earn both a social and financial return on the investment.

WHEN:  The event will be webcast live; to view and participate remotely, click here at 4pm EDT on March 19.

Firms buying "illegal" ore are financing rebel arms purchases in DR Congo

A UN panel of experts investigating breaches of a weapons embargo aimed at armed groups in DR Congo has told the UN Security Council that a number of corporations were complicit in violating arms embargoes by allowing illegal armed groups to buy arms with funds raised through levies and unofficial taxes on mining.

Many of the mines are either under the direct control of illegal armed groups or are illegally taxed by them. The two provinces produce the bulk of the country's cassiterite, the primary tin ore used by the electronics and computer industries. The report cited General Laurent Nkunda's Tutsi insurgency and the rebel Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) as two groups using mineral revenues to buy arms used in violence that has resulted in 450,000 civilians fleeing their homes. According to the Financial Times, leading brands, including Hitachi, Microsoft, Pioneer and Samsung are reportedly investigating whether tin originating from Bisie could have entered their supply chain.

For further analysis of this event, see Maplecroft's Global Risks Forecast at http://www.global-risks.com/.

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