Social Investment - Helmut K Anheier CSI Heidelberg and UCLA

Social Investment Social Investment Helmut K Anheier CSI Heidelberg and UCLA ICTR, Beer Sheva March 2010 Recall… • Blurring of the sectors • … has always been the case… • More a construction than reflection of reality • But: reality is changing… Initial Agenda (-1990s) • Organizational focus • Service delivery • Several major theories • Value base, multiple stakeholders, multiple revenue sources •. [...] Why? • the desire to have a positive definition rather than a negative one on the range of private institutions, organizations and actions that provide public benefits; despite their wide use and utility terms like nonprofit or nongovernmental nonetheless suggest what they are not rather than the core of their raison d’être; in the same vein, the term wants to signal its substantive meaning more c. [...] Agenda • Current work on social investment is still primarily about finance: the forms social investments can take, the instruments that can be used, by whom and for what purposes. [...] The rapid development of financial products and instruments in recent years, and leading up to the financial crisis of 2008-9, saw parallel activities in the fields of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, with a hitherto unknown emphasis on forms of capitalization, asset and risk management and types of community investments. [...] Agenda • Future work on social investment will most likely test the sustainability of these instruments, and thereby advance the distinction between social investments and conventional financial investments; the types of activities seen as investment rather than some other form of activity; the measurement of investment performance and yield, particularly around measure of return of social investm.