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Socially Conscious Siblings: What CSR & Impact Investing Can Learn From Each Other

By Beth Busenhart, App-X


Impact investing and CSR have evolved on a parallel trajectory with many overlapping concepts and goals but little coordinated effort.
While CSR, has hit the mainstream, the field of impact investing is arguably less widely recognized and certainly not integrated with mainstream investing practices.


Since both disciplines seek to harness the power of business to effect positive social change, can best practices be integrated or shared to create a more unified model around growing a profitable business that has socially responsible practices at the core? Beth Busenhart dissects the two on CSRwire Talkback.

One Social Investment Market. Eight Questions.

By James Perry, Panahpur

As the summer holiday season draws to a close, our focus moves from how to occupy the children to the opportunities and challenges that lie before us in the emergent social investment industry. The truth, of course, is that setting goals doesn’t solve any issues – achieving them does. The really hard yards lie between the two.

And the most difficult time is now, when the rubber hits the road as we set about achieving the goals that we have set ourselves. As so many of us now crank through the gears, here are a few of the questions that will need to be tackled head-on in the coming year.

Unintended Consequences: New Regulations Threaten Over 2,000 Community Banks

By Marjorie Kelley, Tellus Institute

Did you ever have older siblings who acted out big time, and you ended up getting punished alongside them, for things you never did? That’s what’s happening today to the nation’s community banks.

Even as the big banks’ antics pushed the nation toward financial collapse, smaller banks rooted in community – credit unions, community banks, and state-owned banks – generally remained responsible lenders. Now for the discouraging postscript: in the wake of the crisis, regulators enacted rules to rein in the big banks that are threatening to crush the more responsible little guys who contributed little to the crisis in the first place. Continue reading on CSRwire Talkback.

Publish What You Fund: Liberating Investment Data

By David Bank [@DavidBank]


A movement is afoot to liberate global-development investment data to provide not only accountability, but opportunity maps, market research and effectiveness indicators, providing new visibility into possibilities for collaboration and innovation.


Though much of the current development data is public, from foreign-aid budgets, development agencies and public-sector sources, the effort provides something of a roadmap for “open data” in impact investing, including efforts to track the mostly private equity and debt deals to provide financing for social ventures.
David Bank explains on Impact IQ.

The Soul of a Startup: Creating Companies That Will Change the Game

By Danielle Lanyard, Green Breakfast Club

In the late 1960s, if you wanted to make a statement that you stood for something, something more than your government at war or a culture compounded by capitalism, you couldn’t just pick up your laptop and write a blog summing up your thoughts. Or write a call to action and then share it across the web through social media.

Today, while smaller protest movements are still alive and kicking, entrepreneurism has emerged as a potentially more effective approach to change. Working within the system is giving rise to many more startups – and many more social enterprises. But is the startup revolution sustainable? Lanyard examines on CSRwire Talkback.