Thursday, November 19, 2009

"What Capital When" An online conversation about social capital

My colleagues and I at Blueprint Research & Design are launching a new experiment (for us) - a blog hosted conversation about what types of philanthropic/social capital make sense and when. This is not new territory - there are lots of experts, lots of experience, lots of resources, and some great advice out there. We hope they and you will engage in this discussion. What else are we hoping to accomplish and why are we trying it this way? A few things:

First, much of the expertise around capital allocation is held by financial professionals at foundations and the financial intermediaries with whom they work. Blueprint works largely with general management and program executives at foundations. We'd like to help bring these two sets of expertise together.

Second, we've had some very informative discussions with other consulting firms and foundations about many elements of our work with MacArthur around field building, but those have been limited to people in the SF Bay Area who could join us for lunch or coffee at a local foundation. This way we can get more people involved. If real face-to-face conversations emerge from this online discussion, that would be great.

Third, people use information when they need it. They may not need it when it first becomes available, they may not know the network to tap into to find what they need, and what may be old news to some is brand new information to others. So this is also an attempt to have a discussion out in public, that will link to resources and the experts out there, and that may be "bookmarkable" so that it ultimately helps people find what they need when they need it.
So, the conversation is starting. Join us over at "What Capital When?" with your ideas, questions and resources on the many choices we have when it comes to financing social goods. If you're on twitter, we'll use the hashtag #wcwhen to link useful tweets and resources as well.



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