Esterni - Bringing people to public spaces

As part of our search for ways of doing social entrepreneurship, last week we had a meeting at Cascina Cuccagna where Beniamino Saibene, founder associate of esterni received us to tell us about their project and its development.

esterni is a non-profit, cultural association born in Milan in 1995. It was the idea of Beniamino Saibene and Lorenzo Castellini which at the time felt they needed to give something back to the city in which they lived in. For this they thought about using the public space as a place for people to meet. Their main idea was to bring people out of their houses and use the street as a place to relate and make new connections. They, mostly, work on the idea of "public design", which is rethinking and redesigning public spaces and creating events where social aggregation is the key.

After sixteen years of work in Milan and Italy first, and in other countries after, esterni has a really positive case history in the field of self-sustainable socially oriented businesses. Now a days with approximately 30 workers within the organization and various freelances collaborating, esterni organizes a series of events.

Within the events they organize we can find:

- Milano Film Festival: This is one of the most important film festivals in Italy. It's a platform in which independent and young film makers can showcase their work. More info on: http://www.milanofilmfestival.it/

- Public Design Festival: As part of the events for Salone del Mobile, with this initiative they pretend to design and think for public spaces. They think about the public spaces at all levels, redesigning them to create new spaces and interventions within the city of Milan. More info on: http://www.publicdesignfestival.org/

- Cascina Cuccagna: With the idea of giving spaces back to the city, this 15th century abandoned urban farm is being refurbished and it will serve as a space in which various cultural events will be taking place. More info on: http://www.cuccagna.org/

Other initiatives worth mentioning are Audiovisiva, an event for contemporary music and video art. And the brand new Animation Film Festival still in it's first edition but aiming to grow at a good pace in the coming years.

As part of our learning experience, this meeting helped us to understand new ways of developing social enterprises, ways to find funding for them, and a series of initiatives that can be developed within the social entrepreneurship arena.

For more information on esterni visit http://www.esterni.org/

Thank you Beniamino!

Analyzing a Businass Plan - RUMA

On our lecture on business planning we had an assignment of analyzing a business plan, and for this post I'm going to analyze the Indonesian based Social Business RUMA.

Having won the first prize of the Harvard Social Enterprise “Pitch for Change” competition, the acronym that gives name to this social business literally to Your Micro Business Partner. Through their business model they pretend to empower poor women by supplying them with a kit that enables them to start their own micro franchises hence becoming micro-entrepreneurs.

Using the strucutre seen during the lecture I'll try to make the analysis:

What?

Most of the time when poor people ask for a loan, they fall into a vicious cycle of debt. This is often caused by the way the money is spent after the loan is granted. No money is generated back so, in order to repay another loan has to be made. The RUMA business addresses this problem through the lending of Microfranchises, in their own words, they lend businesses to generate money.

Literally called a Business in a Box this micro-franchises provide all the tools and training required for selling electronic airtime minutes through mobile phones.

Who?

Knowing that the mobile phone industry has a high penentration on Indonesia, RUMA partnered with the Grameen Foundation as well as with Qualcomm to put this business into work. The Grameen Foundation provided the initial investment funds through its Pioneer Fund, as well as technical assistance that helped RUMA to build its initial operational framework (which includes technology systems and human capital). Qualcomm supplied the technological expertise on mobile phones through its Wireless Reach initiative.

How?

In order for RUMA to be a successful business they stipulated that the revenues will come from selling franchise kits that will be leased to the borrower by the financial institution, as well as for a margin obtained for each airtime sale. In that sense, the borrower of the microfranchise will use the revenue obtained to repay their loans. The estimated profit for the borrower is approximately $1/day. This business defines the poor as people as those living with less $2,5 a day (World Bank poverty line), so a steady $1/day supposes a 50% overall increase.

For measuring their results, RUMA chose the Grameen Foundation's Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) since t's country specific and it's based on a ten-question survey of readily identifiable indicators.

As for their fanantial sustainability, RUMA plans to break even within its first 2.5 years. In order to reach that goal they need to empower 5,000 of the poor and poorest by August 2011, having as a target to reach a 70% of people below the poverty line.

RUMA in numbers (current situation).

At this point, Ruma has:

• Created more than 600 new micro-business.
• 100% profitability for the micro-business owners.
• 97% of owners are women.
• 68% of business owners are below the poverty line ($2,5/day)

They also pretend to develop and deploy new business kits that deal with medical products and services, education and training, trade and distribution, and agriculture and fisheries.

For more information I leave a link were you can download a through presentation

Ruma Business Model Presentation

Social Investment Bonds

A Social Impact Bond is a contract with the public sector in which a commitment is made to pay for improved social outcomes that result in public sector savings. The expected public sector savings are used as a basis for raising investment for prevention and early intervention services that improve social outcomes.
The US government is exploring the use of social impact bonds as a means of encouraging greater efficiency in the delivery of social services. It essentially involves foundations and non-profits putting up initial funding for a project with government reimbursement, and the possibility of a ‘return’ if the project meets certain goals.

The benefits of Social Impact Bonds could be:
- More funds are available for prevention and early intervention services;
- The public sector only has to pay for effective services; the third party investor bears all the risk of services being potentially ineffective.
- Investors and services have an incentive to be as effective as possible, because the larger impact they have on the outcome, the larger the repayment they will receive.

According to the New York Times, President Obama is to launch in 2011 seven pilot schemes, which would issue a total of $100 million in bonds to support programs in the areas of job training, education, juvenile justice and children’s disabilities.

The Rockefeller Foundation has announced a $400,000 grant to the Nonprofit Finance Fund for a number of projects that will help bring the social impact bond concept to the US. The Fund, a community-development financial institution, recently launched an online platform for funders, non-profits and educators to share ideas about the bonds. After gathering research and opinions, they will conduct a feasibility study of the bonds in the US and identify opportunities where the financing structure could work.

Working Wikily - Social Change with a Network Mindset

While browsing the web trying to find some business plans to analyze for the class, I stumbled upon this blog. Working Wikily.

The blog was created by the Monitor Insitute, which is an entity that aims (as they would say in their own words) "to help innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental problems". They do this by giving consultancy, serving as a think tank of new trends, and being an incubator of new approaches and ideas.

The Working Wikily blog has the purpose "of providing practitioners in the social sector with a filter for the events that are pushing the field towards a more networked form of work and a perspective on how and why those events are unfolding".

In our case, this becomes relevant since we are doing a Master in Design For Social Business. We work inside the social sector, and the first part of this module was about setting a collaborative environment in order to approach any project in general (in this case our own experience of learning what is social business).

Networking is working in collaboration with others, building channels in which relationships are established and new ideas and ways of working are bred. This blog contains a lot of relevant articles, resources, and links that we may find useful in this new adventure we are taking part of...

For starters I leave you with a link where you can download their paper Working Wikily 2.0 in which they create the whole frame set for this approach to social innovation.

Enjoy!

The emergent world we live in

When the telephone was rolled out as a commercial product, AT&T spent a few decades trying to persuade its customers not to use it to call their friends and families. Edison thought the phonograph would be used to record last wills. Gutenberg thought he was gong to print Bibles and indulgences to add to the splendour of the Church, and could not have seen the printing-press enabled Protestant Reformation coming. Innovation is not just about new gizmos. It is about what people decide gizmos are.

In this lecture, I offer a complexity perspective on innovation. I argue innovation is emergent; it happens in cascades; it is inherently unpredictable; it is sparked in the context of relationships, not in the mind of lone inventor. Furthermore, I argue that social innovation has just the same characteristics as vanilla technical innovation. Enjoy.

Social business in Europe: the big picture

Social business in Europe: the big picture

Keeping in the background the structure of a business plan – covered in last week's lecture, the fourth of my module — we now begin to build a strong case for great social business ideas. In lecture number five I argued that rising costs of welfare are forcing every country in the world to rethink their welfare systems. Europe, where the welfare state is most advanced, has the most redesign to do. This is a change of historical proportion, and European decision makers feel it is urgent to take action. Everywhere social entrepreneurs are expected to come up with solutions to re-engineer the welfare state (but also other areas of heavy government intervention, like sustainability, mobility and energy issues).
Consistently with expectations, Europe is bracing to make serious investments in these solutions, and this presents a major opportunity to social business. The assignments in my last slide are going to be carried over to next week, as this week students are going to be working on an entry to the competition for social business ideas proposed by Tiago and agreed upon by everyone.

BoP Protocol & Design related concepts

D4SB Concepts to BoP Protocol

View more presentations from Oscar Pozuelos.

As you all might already know, we had this assignment due for last week.

In brief we discussed what we had read the 2nd BoP Protocol (Simani, E. & S. Hart) as well as the article on Theory Construction on design research: approaches, and methods (K. Friedman).

We tried to create some common ground for both Design and Social Business in order to find what we thought were the difference and similarities between the two. Once we had this common ground we tried to apply concepts given in class (concepts like future, opportunity, resorces, solution, etc.) to the 2nd BoP Protocol process overview (pyramid).

We still it might need a revision, so I post it here in order for you to have it so we can discuss it later and create a more complete and rich presentation.

Cheers!

Maya Goded

Social business it's not only about poverty's issues, but it deals with a lot of other social problems, some of them an effect of poverty and some not directly related to it. I wanted to share with you the work of Maya Goded, a photographer that deals with prostitution in Mexico City, a social problem that causes one of the most high death rate in Mexico.

These photographs were taken in the heart of downtown Mexico City behind the National Palace in a neighborhood called La Merced where women of all ages congregate and learn to survive by selling their bodies. It is there in its tenements and small hotels that the prostitutes share their daily life with street vendors and thieves.

For more than four centuries, La Merced has been a privileged space for sexual commerce, were women have gathered from all over Mexico, from distinct cultures, with different beliefs and indigenous languages.

Economic conditions in Mexico, as in the majority of developing countries, drive these women into the streets where their only option is prostitution. This activity is tolerated by society but the discrimination, to which prostitutes are subjected, provokes exploitation and extortion, violence and murder which usually go unpunished and ignored.

Design For Social Business Mind Map

Hi everyone,

How cool is this? We can even have our mind maps embedded on our blog!

Ok so here is the plan: I think we should refer to this map every time we have doubts or even get lost. It is a very complex world and this will not only help us keep track but also if we continuously update it with our latest discoveries, by the end of the master it'll be pretty complete.

What do you think?

Chulha Stove: a really interesting design project

Nice link in www.designboom.com about this project made by Unmesh Kulkarni and Praveeen Mareguddi for Philips Design