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: : investor
A market-leading institutional investor realized a need to consider environmental factors when pursuing its strategy of making outstanding financial returns over its thirty- to forty-year time horizon. To accomplish this, it established a private equity initiative to invest in environmental technologies. Wanting to ensure the initiative was not simply a hollow effort in terms of its environmental benefits, the fund manager, who lacked experienced in environmental investing, engaged an environmental advisor to manage the environmental due-diligence and monitor actual environmental benefits created by the investments. This was an industry first. The advisor then partnered with Sara Olsen to create a customized system for monitoring the creation of environmental benefits. Drawing from her knowledge of the practices of other pioneering funds in the arena of ‘blended value’ investment, Ms. Olsen helped design a new performance monitoring system tailored to the unique private equity context. The system respects and incorporates the insight and technical expertise of the portfolio companies and their venture capital partners, while not overburdening the portfolio companies with data collection and reporting that is not directly advancing its management priorities.
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: : non-profit/NGO
SVT was hired by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs to collaborate with five of its entrepreneurs to develop social return on investment analyses of their organizations. One of these was WITNESS, which provides training, equipment and promotional assistance to international human rights activists enabling them to create compelling video documentaries of their causes. WITNESS chose to focus on its partnership with the Ella Baker Center and its Books Not Bars (BNB) campaign to reform the Division of Juvenile Justice in California.
The social return on investment analysis had two layers: first, the analysis had to assess the potential impact that reform of the juvenile justice system might have; second, the analysis had to account for what role the documentary film, on which Ella Baker Center and WITNESS had collaborated, had played. The former included estimates of the impacts on community safety, incarcerated youths’ health, and public costs associated with reform, following the SROI analysis methodology, version 1.0. The latter included the much more difficult to pinpoint cause-and-effect relationship between the film and political momentum for policy action and implementation. For this portion of the analysis, SVT drew from 'wicked problem' theory to articulate a potential solution based on WITNESS’ existing self-evaluation survey processes.
WITNESS and Ella Baker Center are now determining the best way for them to internally make use of the human rights SROI analysis system prototyped in the project. Another benefit has been the way in which the analysis enables a new means of engaging key stakeholders. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office, whose role it is to ensure that the public’s money is spent efficiently and effectively, is now reviewing the work to determine whether it could become a useful complement to its existing prison system oversight tools. From the process, WITNESS Executive Director and Schwab Entrepreneur, Gillian Caldwell, found that the third party analysis added both credibility to her organization’s performance management and that it had strong potential as an advocacy tool: “That wasn’t something at the outset… that I had thought of as a primary use for the analysis, but I really am hopeful that it can serve that purpose and that would make an enormous difference.”
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: : business
Spryance is a market-leading medical transcription company that primarily serves US companies with a workforce based mainly in India. Spryance recognized early on that its employees working from home gave it a competitive advantage in the marketplace, but its founding CEO, Raj Malhotra, later recognized that this model had another interesting benefit: it enabled both educated women with families and people with disabilities, both of whom normally have barriers to work due to family responsibilities and the daunting 4-hour commute in India’s large cities, to work flexible hours from their homes. In this way, working from home preserves a valuable aspect of traditional Indian cultural and family life, while affording economic empowerment to workers who otherwise were cut off from such opportunities. In 2003, senior management at Spyrance enlisted SVT’s assistance to analyze the social returns of its model.
Again in 2006, Spryance engaged SVT to take its analysis of this aspect of its identity to the next level with an in-depth investigation of its home-based employee model. This analysis will include the employees’ perspectives on working from home and other aspects of their work for Spryance in order to help the company build a long-lasting culture that respects the full spectrum of values its employees create for the company and for society at large. This case will be updated as this work rolls out.
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