2011 CIDG Conference
Munich
September 12-14, 2011
In September 2011 members of the Community Impact Development Group, launched by the Siemens Stiftung and Ashoka, met for a second time in Munich. The network has grown to include 16 social entrepreneurs from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Each of the CIDG-members has developed a social business model which meets a basic need in a community while creating job opportunities and income for its population.
A wide-ranging workshop program was set up addressing the conference topic “Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Impact”:
Day one was dedicated to the definition and assessment of community impact: Can we find a common definition of community impact? How can we and why should we assess and measure the community impact? How can a social entrepreneur involve communities?
Day two was all about financing community impact: The participants got some external input on the question “How does my business model and community impact strategy connect to my financing needs?” and in the afternoon every social entrepreneur had some coaching sessions on their community impact/business plans, to be prepared for the next day.
On the last day every social entrepreneur had three pitch-presentations with social investors and technology experts. The objective was to foster cooperations between these potential partners: This could mean investments but also collaboration on the project level or a technology partnership.
The conference was concluded with a public panel discussion. The CIDG-members Albina Ruiz and Dr. Moses Musaazi joined other experts to discuss “The Future of Social Entrepreneurship in Times of Global Economic Transformation”.
More information on the panel discussion
After the three days the CIDG-members returned to their home countries with new ideas on the community impact model. Some might also have found potential investors for their social enterprises, and multinational collaborations were set up among the social entrepreneurs.
Renaming the network: SBDG became CIDG
When the network met in 2010, it was called “Social Business Development Group”. During the first day, the group members came up with the following definition of social business:
“Social business is a tool to create social and/or environmental value, while achieving financial self-sustainability. Social impact comes before profits and ideally, social business empowers communities.”
We realized during last year’s meeting, that this “impact first” definition is not always on the minds of investors and that social entrepreneurs lack a powerful lobby to educate potential investors accordingly. Social investment is not the same as conventional market-based investment with slightly better conditions and a feeling of doing good. Rather social investment implies an absolute prioritization of community impact before purely monetary return on investment.
And this is what the Siemens Stiftung and Ashoka are so keen on: to create a lobby group for community impact first – thus the name change into “Community Impact Development Group”.
