Tag Archives: corporate responsibility

What does Vancity do in the community anyway?

A major project I’ve been working on for the past few months is spearheading the re-architecting and rewriting of all the content in the community area of vancity.com. It’s been a massive project because, well, frankly we never expained the myriad ways we do good things in our community everyday. A little gap I think.

In other words, the very reason I wanted to work at Vancity, and the main thing that keeps me excited to come to work everyday was almost entirely absent from our website. It’s a long story.

So, I’m so extraordinarily pleased to share with you our new MyCommunity area.

vancity.com/MyCommunity

Inside you’ll find out about our four pillars of community leadership (Acting on Climate Change, Facing Poverty, Growing the Social Economy and Being Accountable), what we do in our communities, why we do what we do, what financial products we have that help create positive change, how we help the not-for-profit sector in our local economy, what grants we give out and whole lot more. This project has been absolutely amazing, and I’m really excited about sharing it with you.

I’d love to hear what you all think, especially other CU folks.

Muhammad Yunus and the concept of social finance.

Muhammad YunusAt Vancity, where I work, we recently created a division called Social Finance. This is where our Business Banking department now resides, as well as Commercial Mortgages and our amazing Community Business Banking team, where many of our most innovative and socially relevant products and services are generated.

Creating and naming this new division was an interesting risk, and as soon as I heard the name Social Finance, I thought to myself: Holy crap I can’t believe I get to work here.

What’s even more amazing is that our executives created this new name and division based on an understanding of what Social Finance could be, but without a nailed-down definition of what it means for us. That’s the work of whoever gets the gig of SVP Social Finance.

Last night we at Vancity brought Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus to town. He received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of British Columbia for his amazing work as Banker to the Poor at Grameen Bank, which he founded in his native Bangladesh specifically to help the poor. He spoke about the power of small amounts of money to transform people’s lives, and the role private businesses can play in creating change in the lives of our poorest citizens. In the past he has endorsed Vancity’s Microcredit Toolkit, and we recently announced that our own microfinance-driven term deposit would now be funding local initiatives.

He calls it Social Business, and it’s the subject of his new book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism. We call it Social Finance. It’s something that has to be framed for many people, because we have it ingrained in us that there are two options in life: charity and profit.

But there is room for a strong middle ground. Businesses can have as their focus socially responsible goals as their main driver and still sell their products and services in a business-savvy way, repay their investors, pay their employees well and thrive in the business context, and drive their profits back into the work they do. Their work can be of tremendous social value and significance, and yet be no less business-like.

As we deal with issues of climate change and social equity, these kinds of business are cropping up. They could be used to solve the health care crisis in America. To clean up the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, reduce our carbon emissions, provide inexpensive and nourishing food for poor families to feed their children, vaccinate the third world.

The money invested could be reinvested and continue to solve our most pressing problems, rather than giving money away which has no lifespan beyond the initial donation.

Last night was an amazing time. I was so fortunate to be invited to a small private reception to meet Professor Yunus, and then go to hear him speak to several hundred people about his work serving the poorest people on the planet. His work is actually reducing poverty in Bangladesh by significant amounts. He has opened specialized services focused on beggars, and creating Social Finance opportunities such as Grameen Danone and Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s largest mobile phone company owned in part by the 7.5 million co-operative owners of Grameen Bank.

A Vancity board member asked me at the reception why I had come down to hear Muhammad Yunus speak, and I replied that this kind of activity is the very reason I initially chose to do my banking at Vancity, and why I later decided to work there. Banking is really only marginally interesting to me, but using the platform of banking to solve social problems that we face in our communities is a powerful draw for me. Exploring that intersection where money and community come together is extremely powerful and much needed.

Last night Muhammad Yunus proved how true that is.

Thoughts on the social economy.

At Vancity we have been talking a lot about the social economy. There is some extremely interesting conversation going on about what this term means, and I wanted to take a minute to jot down my thoughts on the topic.

As a starting point, it’s good to know what Wikipedia says about the social economy:

Social economy refers to a third sector in economies between the private sector and business or, the public sector and government. It includes organisations such as cooperatives, non-governmental organisations and charities.

While I like this definition from a credit union/triple-bottom line perspective, I don’t feel like it’s as broad as the concept wants to be.

To me the social economy is the same as what others call the reputation or conversation economy. From the time humans started trading what they had for what they needed, we had a social economy. People’s knowledge of the others they were trading with was a crucial factor in those trades and dealings. The industrial age added a level of anonymity into our economy and set us up to pay fixed prices for goods and services from the money we earn from our labour. The information economy didn’t change this at all.

Now the emerging social tools we have at our disposal is merging these economies together in a way that brings a social component into our modern age. We have a global water cooler, allowing us to share information, connect and trade with each other and lend directly to each other in ways that weren’t possible ten years ago. Companies like eBay, Craigslist, CommunityLend and Wesabe allow for social transactions that bring a greater element of trust and reputation into our purchases and financial dealings. This makes it social, and models that leverage our innate desire to be social should be more successful in this new age.

I believe the definition of the social economy is broader than what is written in Wikipedia.

At Vancity we recently created a division called Social Finance. Lots of people have been asking what social finance is. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about social finance:

Social finance is an approach to managing money that delivers a social dividend and an economic return. Social finance includes community investing, microlending, and sustainable business and social enterprise lending.

I agree with this Wikipedia definition entirely. Social finance is an engine that drives the social economy, but is firmly rooted in creating positive social and environmental change from investing in companies and initiatives that generate a return on the money invested. It is all about the power of including what are often considered externalities in our financial transactions.

As I explore these issues, I’m hoping you’ll lend your voice and tell me what you think.