Governments And Social Entrepreneurs: Partnership Versus Subcontracting

With social challenges facing all governments, how many are turning to innovative social entrepreneurs for new approaches and operating models? What opportunities does this present for social entrepreneurs working globally? From the White House’s newly established Social Innovation Fund to the emergence of Singapore as a regional hub for social entrepreneurship, this session will explore the perspective of senior government leaders on the public sector’s aspirations in relation to entrepreneurial social ventures.

Good morning. My name is Steve Goldsmith. I'm your moderator. We took a poll before the session started and there really are twice as many people present as we had expected. We figure that you are either asleep or fixated on how to get out of the country, so we appreciate your presence today. We're going to have a discussion about the government and it's role with social entrepreneurship.

And I'm going to ask each of the panelists to briefly introduce themselves and what their entity does. We have a mixture up here today between government and NGO types. The two of us on this side represent government. The two over there represent whatever the other sector is, and we're going to talk about the relationship between them.

My name's Steve Goldsmith. I run a center on innovation at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. I'm also chairman of the US agency that is the parent of the President's social innovation fund. It's called the Corporations of National Community Service Work. We call ourselves a corporation but we're essentially a government agency.

We're the US parent of, essentially, the domestic peace corps, Americorps and Vista and Senior Service, and now we're the proud owners of a fifty million dollar presidential social innovation fund and we're in the process of figuring out how to spend that. So we'll talk about that. This is a great opportunity for me because I can pretend to be the moderator as a Harvard Professor, but actually I can lobby as a US government official.

So I'm going to ask myself a lot of questions, and then compliment myself on the answers. So I'm going to ask each of the panelists to self-introduce themselves, but mostly about what their organizations do, just briefly, and then we'll have a conversation with lots of questions from the audience.

Let me start with a government official who is to my left, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, who is also a surgeon and minister for community development. Community sports in Singapore and then after that, after he introduces himself, I'll ask Alistair Wilson, chief executive of the school of social entrepreneurs in London to talk just for a few minutes about his organization and Ilse Treurnicht, whose name I've mispronounced I'm sure.

Tr-tr- There's too many r's in your name Ilse, who will pronounce her name and introduce her organization, who is a CEO of the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto. So with that, Dr. Vivian.

Thank you. I'm Vivian Balakrishnan from Singapore. This is a very tiny dot on the map, 30 kilometers from East to West on which five million people live. I am from the Ministry of Community Development, Youth and Sports. Youth and Sports is the fun part. Community Development is where all the political tension occurs.

It's the equivalent, I presume, of your department of social affairs. Which means the social security, gender equality, management of Race, Language and Religion, management of integration with immigration; and all the other unpopular stuff which normally no one else wants to do, I'm in charge of, which means I get on the firing line quite often.

So, I hope we'll have an equally fiery session today. All yours.

Thank you.


My name is Alistair Wilson. I am from the School For Social Entrepreneurs. School For Social Entrepreneurs started in London twelve years ago. It was founded by a chap called Michael Young who was a Senior Social Entrepreneur based in the UK. He invented, over his lifetime institutions like the Open University and language Line which magazines and the consumers association.

40 National and International Social Enterprises and charities of scaled. and Michael died about six years ago. One of the last organizations that he started was this school for social entrepreneurs. And he started this because he believed, weirdly, that you couldn't teach entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship Because he believed you could learn it by doing, which was what he felt he had done all his life.

So he set up an institution where people come with ideas for what they are passionate about, what they want to make happen, often from their neighborhoods or from their personal experience. And they spend a year on an action learning program with twenty of their peers, if you like, twenty people in the room with an idea.

They come together once a week. The rest of the time they spend working up their idea, and they hear from what we call witnesses, so people like yourselves: entrepreneurs who've been there, seen it and done it. And we ask the entrepreneurs, who come in as witnesses, to park their ego at the door and tell the real story, and the dreadful story of the sleepless nights and how awful it was, and how many battles they've had, and how difficult the whole was.

Because we believe by unpicking these stories, and sharing these stories, obviously the transference of a lot soft skills happens, as opposed to the kind of hard skills necessary to conceive of and create a social venture operation. What we're talking about by soft skills are things like, what gives you the right to do this idea of yours.

You and whose army are going to start this up? So it's things like confidence, legitimacy, attitude, mindset, behavior. Now, Michael felt very strongly that these were the higher order skills that social entrepreneurs faced in their infancy when they were starting things off, particularly if you weren't from a privileged background, that actually you truly understood the heart of the problem because you lived it, your neighbors lived it, your community lives it, and you had a vested interest in doing something about it.

So the school conceived itself really to try and address soft skills and try and use social entrepreneurship as a tool to devolve power to people who understood the problem and therefore were in a great place to offer and lead solutions that would, therefore, stick in communities. I think it's been proven to do that.

We started in London, as I said, and now we've we've replicated through a social franchising mechanism throughout the UK. Also we've opened a couple of schools in internationally now, and maybe more in the pipeline.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Lisa and I am from the Mars Discovery District in Toronto. And our particular government context in this morning's discussion is most relevant to the Province of Ontario, Canada's most populace province. And, and one that like many jurisdictions around the world has been in the process of using both policy and investment levers to use innovations to transition its economy on from a perhaps too heavy reliance on manufacturing and that process has obviously been accelerated in the last year, discontinuously with the economic transitions, and particularly branch and transitions in certain communities and serious implications for spending in a public framework.

The mass discovery district is located in Toronto, and most importantly, located in the heart of Toronto's Discovery District, which is Canada's largest science enterprise, directly adjacent to the University of Toronto and its affiliated teaching hospitals. It is a social enterprise. It was started by a group of civic entrepreneurs with philanthropic investment and business leaders really working in partnership with academic leaders, as well as community leaders and ultimately three levels of government, to create an innovation hub that had really three jobs.

The first was to connect the communities of science, business, and money, foster collaboration between them, and really drive the process of accelerating innovation. Secondly, to re-engineer the process by which important discoveries from the surrounding and other academic institutions made their way, often unsuccessfully, to the marketplace or to patients.

So that, that function of, of transitioning discovery to, to commercialization and to work with entrepreneurs to grow and scale their businesses and that's really the Room of the work of Mars. Shortly after Mars opened in the fall of 2005, the provincial's government's innovation agenda specifically prickly highlighted social innovation and the innovation economy.And by supporting a program of We have now fully integrated social entrepreneurship to sit adjacent to our work with information technology, health care and green technology entrepreneurs.

That's really the unique feature of this model, is that A little bit like school almost. We've, we've mainstreamed social innovation by By first of all offering the resources that are typically available to technology entrepreneurs also to social entrepreneurs but more importantly perhaps to make it part of a more holistic and perhaps pervasive culture of innovation.

Thank you. We'll just have a discussion here for a few minutes and then ask your questions. Let me... We start as a member of the panel, and then revert to being the moderator here. So for the last three years with a grant from the U.S. foundation called the Knight Foundation, I've convened U.S. social entrepreneurs and federal city and state officials.

And look at the relationship between the sectors, and there are lots of, including many the room success for U.S. social front there are those who really don't reach the level of scale to impact Broadway Social Services. So, so they generally succeed by avoiding entanglement with government and even the large, successful ones--think Teach for America in the U.S.-- touch a very small percentage of the total Education system and you can do the same exercise with homelessness or whatever in the social sector.

So the question becomes, how can you broadly create transformative change in areas of things I pay attention to, condensed poverty, if you're only touching part of the problem. And that is--and we were talking a little bit as we came in--it depends a little bit about, what's your government like and what's your culture like, but in the U.S., the government is the dominant funder of virtually every social sector service.

Now that means that if you are a social entrepreneur and you get a foundation grant which serves as venture capital for yourself, or you are fortunate enough to come through Ilsa's center or whatever the case may be, generally your funding is for three years. And at the end of three years, then you're on your own and generally a foundation that provides the funding says at the end of three years, the definition of success is the government takes over the funding of your program.

Well now this means that government is the market.
There is no natural market place and so if I'm seriously in need of help, it's not like somebody has a good social program.
I can find my way there innovation producing scale because I can go buy my i Pad if I like it but I can't go buy my social services if I like it or in the.

School services. So we're trying to figure out how to create a market for change. Now, in this context, just a couple of quick observations and then I'll kind of give up For. One is that because government is such a significant finder, in many communities the philanthropic Begins to look a lot like government.

Like there is not a lot of of existing philanthropic resources that flow to.
New models and I was the mayor of a city of a little less than a million in the US and our giving to these program this was tentatively the same organizations each year and generally what happened was these organizations would say i've got a great idea, can i have some money?

they get some money. They come back the next year and say, "Well, we didn't succeed, but the reason we didn't succeed is because we didn't have enough money." And that urgent the right to keep doing the same thing year after year with a little bit more money and the result of that was it kind of, it took the oxygen that the opportunity in resources out of the, out of the environment for the, the rest of the folks.

Now, so what can be done, oh and by the way i don't know what it's like in the very countries here when US government also offen we [xx] the types of providers by credential pulling in other rules that make for a certain set of techniques that are licensed and available in these areas and that also restricts the vibrancy of the social innovators.

So what can we do about this? Well, one, it's just a little [xx] but the fifty million dollar fund that President Obama has set up basically says we're gonna fund innovation. We want you to have a model that appears to be working and so instead of the usual government process, which is we would issue a request for proposals and in the US sense, those requests for proposals are written in such detail that they prevent innovation and transformation, because they say, basically, the way you win it to think like us and then you win.

So the fifty million dollar fund says give us your ideas and particularly we'd like to fund intermediaries that would help with innovative responses. A second way to think about this, and I apologize but my frame here mostly is US, is that there is a substantial role for social entrepreneurs on the demand side of this problem right because we have a lot of suppliers of services and their services appear to be working.

But we don't have a huge demand for those services because there is not a marketplace for them [xx]. So the social entrepreneurs who use their resources to create a web 2.0 demand, to create an advocacy effort, to create a program that produces change on the part of government like the lobbyist government, a lobbyist philanthropy.

So we're trying to encourage social entrepreneurs to think about themselves as players on the demand side as well as the supply side. Think of yourself as virtually marching on City Hall with a 2.0s or government demanding change. And the other way for social entrepreneurs to play in this particular area is that... as we talk about scale, there's both an opportunity and a danger that social entrepreneurs define scale only as my program gets bigger.

And that's a natural thing to do right, I've got a program that's helping 5,000 people, I want it to help 10,000 people. That is a legitimate definition of scale, but in the systems that we're talking about and in many of these areas, individuals operate inside families, operate inside neighborhoods and they operate inside communities and schools and so they are operating inside a network.

And so one way for a social entrepreneur to create substantial change is by developing an intervention that makes better the rest of the pieces around that individual, that touches and creates a network of those resources that manages better just to take a very simple example s terms there's an organization called communities in schools and basically it took all of the services that were scattered around the neighborhood touching the family in different places, and integrated them into the schools.

It didn't just bring them into the schools and managed them in the schools, and made the resulting efforts that much better. So, another way to think about scale with respect to social innovation is a scale that comes from a model which makes the rest of the system better, not just displaces it. In the end, in the conclusion, the President Obama's social innovation fund maybe effective with 50 million dollars, but the only way it's really going to be effective, if it convinces government that it has to re-purpose the existing dollars that it's spending to dollars that demand performance and then we will see if the trans formative change that we need and thus far that we have it.

So with that i've asked the minister how to address him, because he's a surgeon and a minister so he suggested Vivian would be the right way to do this, so with all due respect back to Vivien [sp?]. Why don't you, the Singaporean is interesting, both for cultural issues and because what you've accomplished, so why don't you talk a little about the role of government in your sense, and then i'm going to ask our other panelists to comment about how they view government as either a support service or a problem when we are dealing with at the interface between government and social entrepreneur issue.

There are two key elements which i want to put on the table. The first is the central paradox that if there's government failure, there's actually a lot more scope for social entrepreneurship. Now we can all agree that we all need governments to provide security, justice, healthcare, education, growing economy, jobs.

Protect, empower women and all those things. And the paradox is, if government's do all there's still stuff for social entrepreneurs, but much less. The most fundamental changes in social entrepreneurship actually occur where there's government failure. So you need to understand particularly if you are going to new jurisdictions, the big elephant in the room is the government and what it's doing and what it's not doing.

And it's worth bearing that in mind because it also leads to potential. political problems because governments obviously, especially governments that need to win elections will have sometimes their own more short-term traditions. So that's the first point: there is a central paradox in the relationship between governments and social entrepreneurs.

The second point, however, And this is speaking from the same power perspective is that there is a very useful and functional partnership between governments.
And social activists, social entrepreneurs. Let me cite the single points on both. We are probably a government that knew.
Most of you in this room would classify as right of center, which means we believe that the individual is primarily responsible his or her own affairs.

We believe that you are also responsible for looking after your family. And the next layer, if you and your family can cope.
The local community and only after that does the government provide the basic fundamental social security. Now, in that model exactly in my, my jurisdiction. Almost all our social services at the human interface is not delivered by government.

But delivered by voluntary welfare organizations, delivered by social organizations, clanel [sp?]organizations, faith based groups etc., etc. The funding, however, as Stephen [sp?] has alluded to, comes mostly from government and private philanthropy. Now the reason reason we do this is not an accounting entry, but because of our belief that when you're to fix lives or transformed lives.

You're much better off doing that with people on the ground, with passion with values and the main knowledge of what people need, what people want and how to change people and that's much better than the people like rather than a mere civil servants. So I'm not necessarily convinced that we are saving money you know [xx] concerned the government can save money by outsourcing services to social organisation i am not i am not sure that is the case and in any [xx] that should not be the key imparitive.

The question is who does it better? and i would suggest that the many in social ventions that are delivered much better by activists on the ground who really do want to make a change. And then the key thing is to manage that relation internship and again the [xx] to not getting bogged down filling up forms and submitting complicated into requests for information and proposals, which look like just another government paper.

And then the difficulty then is measuring the fonts because do you give more to an organization that says it's got more clients or do you actually measure success by the fact that you have run out of clients because people don't need you anymore. So it's a very complicated partnership and one which is imperfect.

other point i wanted to make and this is with specific reference to Asia. So understand it historically in Asians community activities. Governments had not been very activous on the social side of it. Asians have had to depend for melania on [xx] family and the communities and the clan associations and, more recently, on trade unions and in the case Singapore.

The key social enterprises of our trade unions are the cooperatives. You know the cooperatives that those people don't know of since they're business organizations, but they are owned by the beneficiaries. So the only shareholders are the people who consume this services. And any benefits arising from the business are confined to the customers.

In the case of Singapore, that has actually been around for the 90 years. It started off with shortage of money on the now you call it micro financing but then all this is just where can i find some place to leave money if i've got extra money to get some interest and where can i borrow money if i need to?

And [x x] societies have grown there are not banks but they play an crucial role in providing finance on the ground. Another area was in insurance, and i've got the CEO of the largest insurer in Singapore, which paradoxically is a cooperative [xx] back there. So he doesn't have share holders who collected But he's got to make sure he gives the best deal possible to to purchase this off his insurance but we don't give him any benefits it's a level playing field.

He's got fight with Prudential with AIA and all the other insurance companies, but it started off because there was a group of workers, low income, high-jobs, who commercial insurers were not interested in servicing. So again from a need and by organizing it you can get a viable and crucial service delivered example, in Asia rice is the staple, and price of rice is a key political issue.

In the 1976 when the oil embargo started and significant inflation swept through Asia, a key concern was the price of rice. We've got the trade unions to start another cooperative, which we call Fair Price. Their key role was to an efficient x end purchaser of rise and sell that to Singaporeans at a fair price and it's need again we get to do it in a way which would not give it an unfair advantage against commercial providers.

So it still competes with the supermarkets. And paradoxically, again in Singapore, it is probably the number one position as fair as market share is concerned. So these are just some examples, but the point I wanted there's a paradox, but there are opportunities for partnership, sometimes difficult.

And that in the case of Asia, there are often non traditional forms of social enterprises, which don't necessarily fit the new models which are being invented. But we, in Asia, are looking upon all these developments. The reason we're here, is to see what new ideas and new models may possibly, be applicable in Asia.

So, I'll stop there, and hand it over to the real guys.

So Alser, this all sounds too good to be true. So we'll make you the villain here. And I was over at the Young Foundation earlier in the week. Most of us in the US, in this movement, follow either Young or Jeff Morgan or somebody. So you have this office of third sector and you teach these social entrepreneurs.

When do your social parameters get too close to the fire? When is government the problem? I give you view it as a problem, and when do you view it as an asset and opportunity?

Well, it is intriguing, because these people, who have these ideas, and they're passionate about these ideas, and, you know, and they make some headway with an idea, and all of a sudden, they come into the view of government and government thinks, that's a sexy idea, they're doing an amazing job, we want to hook our truck to them, and they begin to kind of pull them in a bit, and they become the poster boys and girls of, you know, innovation and this, that, or the other social issue.

And, because of the nature of social entrepreneurship, because of the fact that you initially, when you are sparking something off your beavering away, just with you and your community make something happen, the flattery and the legitimacy of the "big boys", the government with their might and the dangling of mainstreaming, you know, somewhere a million miles over there, is incredibly tempting to social entrepreneurs to jump in a bed with that lot.

so inevitably, loads of our students and practitioners are intrigued by that, and they think well here maybe as a source of on going revenues maybe we can use the data to kind of mainstream our lessons and scale the thing in some way. So they do, they have flattered by that and they do go down that route.

I was a student of the school for social entrepreneurs 12 years ago and i at a project, and i remember being, kind of, picked up by government at the time and just thinking, oh well, it'll all be sorted. That the loads of money and a long main stream and this will go all over Britain very quickly and of course it didn't.

And, and it was it was a waste of time. It was a huge waste of time for me and my project and i ended up having to give talks and speeches for governments to civil servants end lessly, and there was nothing coming out of it. And i kept thinking, i kept blaming myself, and thinking, well i'm doing something wrong here.

There's something in the disconnect. But then, if you think about it, if you think what a bureaucrat is as a person, and we need policy, we need politicians, we need bureaucrats. But they're very different in social entrepreneurs and it's extremely difficult for them to understand us and for us to understand them.

And I think, certainly, if you look back over the kind of twelve, thirteen years that British civil service and bureaucracy has been very intrigued with social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. If you look back at their, kind of, policy journey that they've gone on, it's quite intriguing, because in the first instance, I remember when the first Social Enterprise Action Plan was published and it was put, they were put as a department into the department of trade and industry, so they saw us as a new form of doing business.

And we were very excited to get a department and to get a kind of action plan, and so we all, when it was hot off the press, read through this action plan. No mention of social entrepreneurship, or the doing word, or about individuals leading and working with their communities to lead, it was all about structures and it was all about, you know, which was all very valid and all good in wales, so it was about things like the idea of what we now have here, which is community interest companies.

It was around taxes, laws, structures, ways of doing business Now, that's great and that creates an environment where we can use these tools to make things happen. But the one thing that the British Government. So, so they kind of went down that route and that the whole of the purpose is in terms of innovation and public services sources to new structures.

But who hopefully invest with benefit of ideas. And of course the thing they missed was that this is all about people. And the other thing they missed which they were desperately keeping to get. Because this also about which, it is also about reaching into poor communities and as we all know because we're in the business of social change.

Social change happens when you get power to people who understand the problem and therefore to structure your entire policy debate and discussion around structures. Surprise surprise, it was a bunch of men in suits, white men in suits, who were around the table speaking about these structures and systems.

So the whole policy objective of the empowerment or liberating people to work in their communities and with their communities to create new solutions. They had completely missed off the agenda, so it literally didn't feature in the first iteration. So then of course they regrouped. They were placed in a different department.

They were shoved over in the cabinet office. and they kind of had a second iteration and a second go in it. And this time it was much less arranged, structures and social enterprise, if you will, and other shading for a social impact, which is the kind of broad definition here and it was much more about social entrepreneurship and it wasn't about, and I think this is uniquely a British thing Well, it wasn't about social a entrepreneurship as in the kind of hero, international scaling idea to change the world.

It was, it was a very British thing, which was about a kind of democratization of social entrepreneurship, which was about this being a long-tale sport They issued in any community in Britain and you have an idea and you have got a bunch of neighbors and you have got an innovative idea to create some community and get things going.

Let's see if we can get a policy environment and support that's going to help you do that, So they went tilted very much to that angle and and just I presume a few of you might have seen the debate last night that the manifestos for both sides is, we can't believe this because Torre and Labour in their manifesto It's all our stuff.

The British election is being fought on social enterprise and social entrepreneurship. It's a battleground, and I'm telling you, in terms of you know way back then, when I was plucked by them and parade as a kind of, here's an interesting idea. Waste of time, red herring. I should have stuck to the netting and go on with my project.

But actually, I now see why government is usually important, because if you can't get into center ground and you can't influence, even although they don't understand social entrepreneurs and by the very nature of these people, who've done very well at school, very well at university, you know, they understand didactic training and learning.

The idea for a social entrepreneur might need, by way of support, is over their head, I mean, you can't get it. So I think it's about, we need to respect the difference and we need to understand the big prizes there in terms of social innovation and mainstreaming, but we need to also help them understand that there are many positive objectives that they can get to, using these tools.

One is innovation in public services and kind of outsourcing and kind of new and interesting ways, and great if they're opening that market to social enterprises, great. We will choose whether we want to take them up on that challenge and whether that we want to deliver. We don't need to, we can ignore the calls to tender.

But also, fantastic if they are beginning to see social entrepreneurship as a tool for devolving power and mobilizing communities, and I think that certainly is where both labor and tools are. And that's the very exciting agenda in Britain, and that has tilted completely away from structure towards people.

And I have got to say, really, because I know them all now, in this office. They're good people, and they're trying to author good policy, but it has taken them a long time to get their hedge under and to get it into some sort of shape that we're beginning to read the documents and thinking, "Actually, that makes sense."

Lisa, so Alister started by insulting Vivien and me, calling us hopeless bureaucrats. Now he ended up complimenting us because we had accepted his policies, that's, kind of, what I have learnt. So along the way there was an issue of structuring and you might provide an interesting option here. Because it looks like you're an intermediary between government and some of the folks you're nurturing.

Tell us about that structure and whether that helps kind of broker against these elements that Alister mentioned.

Well, I think just following up on Alister's comment, I think many people around the world, look with some envy to the mainstreaming of social entrepreneurship as part of an election platform, because I do think government sets an important tone in saying that, and just as President Obama has as well.

Social innovation is important and we want to create a public policy environment in which social entrepreneurs can flourish. There's lots of details that follow that may or may not hit the right spots at the right time. I think the model we have is a little bit of an intermediate space where after government took that first step of identifying this as important, it said, "We'd really want to encourage social entrepreneurs, but we're going to partner with an arms-length entity that is totally and entirely dedicated to working with entrepreneurs but we want to have that relationship in a way that is very tethered, in the context of, as hot spots of innovation or promising enterprises are identified, they can be brought back to government to either be levered into the government programs or be supported as external enterprises in a way that is both efficient, but more importantly, is also evidence based.

Because I think the one recognition we've had is that there's a real challenge inside government--and perhaps the Minister could echo this--to really understand the efficiency of social programs across a whole range of metrics, for all the historic reasons of how they get set up initially. So perhaps I have a slightly more optimistic view than Alistair about the partnership between social entrepreneurs and government, but it is a precarious relationship that needs to be managed very, very carefully, because of that paradox that you heard about.

There is no question, though, that important social enterprises can and need to leverage the system changing effects of partnership with government if they really want to matter, and sometimes that happens in the context of how they morph. So the.
To just give you an illustrated example of that: the social entrepreneurship node of Mars is a slightly peculiar partnership across Canada.


And Canada has the exact opposite challenge of Singapore: it is a vast country with not very many people in it. so, we have to set up, often, peculiar networks of collaboration to get shared expertise and critical so our node is bolted onto a family foundation node, the McConnell? Family Foundation in Montreal, which has long history of funding leading Canadian social entrepreneurs, and a very strong social enterprise called Plan in Vancouver player that is also very deeply embedded in the very vibrant social finance and social enterprise community in Vancouver, but the story of plan is it started 20 years ago by two remarkable social entrepreneurs Elliot Manski and Vicky Kamack focus really on family based and community based caregiving solutions for families with disabilities, children with disabilities, because they had a disabled child themselves.

So, it was very much that organic enterprise up around local need. As they obviously progressed with that enterprise, and it was very successful in the context of building informal caregiving networks, and making sure that those get connected to the more structured formal care giving networks, they realized that one of the profound challenges, two profound challenges for people with disabilities.

The first is financial security, because this generation of disabled children will outlive their parents. And the second was that the most profound challenge of disabled individuals is there profound sense of isolation. And so they started to focus their own work to develop more available solutions to <FONT style"BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffc0cb">address</FONT> those two challenges.

And the first was very innovative process which again they started to draw on this wonky network across the country, because into actually develop a social finance instrument that will allow you to develop financial assets for children was disabilities and this is a the firsttax -exempt instrument, they needed to get, not only those individuals and their families on board, but provincial governments as well as the federal government and, the financial institutions, who would ultimately need to sell that instrument.

Now, this was a you know tortuous road, but, about a year ago, Canada launched launch the first in the world registered disability savings plan, which is now available to over 500,000 eligible families and individuals in Canada and is sold through the mainstream banks. So that's a very classic example where the partnership with government was really important to deal.for the second piece of the sense of isolation, plan has now developed a very innovative and award-winning social networking solution called Tyze, and I encourage anybody to look at that, which is a very private, focused network of putting the disabled individual, or disadvantaged individual in the middle of the social network and creating a really a care giving community around that.So and that is now going international and again is being adopted in the UK by the NHS and a number of other government agencies.

So a productive relationship to get to scale without warping and perhaps actually enabling a larger level of innovation is possible, but it depends not just on the default personalities governments and social entrepreneurs easily adopt. It depends very much on visionary leadership inside the individualindividual government departments to take and pull.

That's very helpful. I think a description of what A Lister sometimes over here is sometimes called a kind of co-production of services, right? You have a government role and a community role and this intermediary case study, an old Harvard case study, that I'll summarize in like one minute. Basically, it's a state the Oklahoma in the US that we used to pay in the disability world for job coaches for individuals with disabilities to help those people and they would coach them everyday even through the time they got the job.

And because the government was paying for job coaches by the day, they got days of job coaching and more days of job coaching and more days of job coaching. And one day the government bureaucrat, who had been on the social sector side, why don't we just pay for the outcomes? and will pay more for job outcomes for more severely disabled folks.

Well the government's change from paying for activities to paying for outcomes unleashed a great deal of innovation in that sector. I've one more question for the panelists, I am going to ask the first question to a non panelist. I just finished this book on power of social innovation, in this case there's really leading US social entrepreneurs and in the early days, there's one of the most successful, Dorothy Stoneham from an organization called YouthBuild.

Who is, who insists that she's able to maintain her own passion, commitment and mission, despite massive amounts of government funding. So, could you just defend yourself to the rest of the audience, you know? Why have you been successful not to idealize really, you're a very large scale organization and how do you maintain your commitment to your core passion mission, despite the demands of the government bureaucrats.

Gee, 10 seconds.

I'd say a minute and a half would be fine, yeah. It's a great fascinating challenge in fact, and I am writing down some nice quotes for me to, like a productive relationship, to get to scale without working, innovation is possible but it depends very much on visionary leadership inside the government.

And I think for us, and I'll just say over the past 14 years, we have generated about 800 million dollars that has gone direct to local programs. It doesn't go through us as the intermediary. Local programs compete for it and then they have to implement the social innovation, which we defined. And we defined it both by example, and in law.

So the model is one where we created a federal program and then the government contracts with us to provide training, technical assistance and inspiration to the local programs which they choose to fund on competitive basis to implement our social innovation.

So we define it as the government is the ocean liner and we're the tugboat. So the government provides the engine and the resources but we're whipping around on the outside and we're helping the local organizations and we're correcting the mistakes of government. We're persuading the government what direction to go in and it's a very constant interaction between us as the national non-profit source of the movement building, inspiration, cutting-edge, catalytic change, as well as the original vision and the government with the accountability and the metrics and the funding and the competition, you know.

And sometimes they think they are our boss and sometimes we think we are their boss, and sometimes we tell government, we tell the congress how they should change the law in order to make the government do what it should do, and sometimes, you know, the government tells us what we have to do in order to meet their standards.

It's a never ending partnership, negotiation, depends very much. In over 20 years, there have been very many different people in government, who are responsible for implementing the YouthBuild program, which is what it's called, and depending on who that person is, at any given time, it goes better or worse, and depending on how much creative leadership the person above that so-called bureaucrat provides, the political appointee, how much they understand our vision, it goes better or worse we provide the historical vision, we provide the long term view and when you get and one of the first bureaucrats, who was in charge of it, in one federal agency, is now the chairman of our board and the national non-profit that seems so good at it, we pulled him over, right, and when he left the government.

So it's, I don't know, if it answers your question, but it is certainly dynamic, challenging, exciting and, you know, we have been able to make substantial change by generating these resources.

That's, let me turn that into a question to Vivian. So, in this book I just finished, Dorothy is kind of the leading example of how to maneuver, for you to maintain your sense of balance between these. What, she just mentioned, Vivian, I heard loudly, is she found a champion inside government who could kind of protect her right to innovate.

So, what's your model look like without you, right? I mean, what's the danger that somebody less sensitive to the flexibility necessary for the social innovator, takes your place, and is more prescriptive with respect to the requirements.

I think you got to make it individual proof, because otherwise, it will not be sustainable for the long term. The, the key thing to managing the relationship is to understand that it is a difficult relationship. But it needs to have trust and respect, mutually. And the other big problem is measuring outcomes.

It's easy to measure inputs. It's somewhat more difficult, but it's still relatively easy to measure outputs, but outcomes, social outcomes, are very difficult to measure. And the trouble is therefore, government bureaucracy.

They've got huge piles money and you are to spend it, but you're accountable for it and you need some kind of metrics to justify why you've spent it. And sometimes the relationship gets caught in political polemics, you know. How can you not do more for a disabled child? inside a focusing on [xx] come [xx] proper and reasonable in accurate measurement another outcome, and therefore it justifies it.

Remember, at the end of the day, the bureaucrat and the activist are actually on the same side. They all want to do more. And to do the best for the beneficiaries. So i think that we can get the respect, if we can get some understanding, and if the activist learns [xx] some bureauocracies. And the bureaucrat learns, what is it that the [xx] is trying to achieve.

I think it can be a much more productive Speaker 1: i agree with everything you said. speaker 2: So, two things one if you wanted, if you have question, raise your hand, and this fleet of foot fellow in the orange will find you with a mic. Let's go up here, and while we do that, Alastair, what, what.

you have an example of of a, I think this debate between outputs and outcomes is really quite important. Sometimes, you know, the perfect does become the enemy of the good. Do you have an example of the kind of output measurement that you think has driven the social entrepreneur that you've assisted?

I think I would challenge that a little bit. Social entrepreneurs use the currency of trust in terms of creating things, and making things happen in their communities. They're, they, they are often selfless in the way that they build momentum behind ideas. It is a huge push in the UK to unitize and matrix impacts and outcomes, and a laudable push and all good stuff, and to measure everything within an inch of its life.

Now the, the truth of the matter is that we need to make a choice in terms of do we want to build and cement a contract this culture, or a trust-based culture. If we're looking to empower the the poorest, who are not in the system, and we have got to fund, with an element of, as you were saying Em, at the outset, in terms of your fund, and the kind of openness of your fund, we've got to be comfortable to take some risks, and push things down in funding a trusted way, as opposed to trying to, kind of, contract and manage every, kind of, I think it's quite a fundamental discussion.

The the other thing is, obviously the politicians in the UK have lost public trust, full-stop. The banks have lost public trust, full-stop. Guess what two sectors are desperately knocking at our door to do partnerships. And I think we need to think long and hard about, yes we need to do those partnerships.

We need to think about what we've got as a currency, as a movement--social entrepreneurship, social enterprise--and we need to bargain carefully with that. We use the currency of trust, remarkably effectively to create value. And I think we need to be extremely aware of that in our negotiations in going forward.

So I'm not a huge fan of contract output/outcome measurement to the end degree. I believe push money down and give people freedom, and see what happens is also incredibly useful.

Audience: Applause That was the first outbreak of just applause. Yes sir, would you speak loudly and kind of tell us who you are as you ask your question, please.

My name in Jack Sim. I'm the founder of the World Toilet Organization, and I'm from Singapore. So, basically everybody is aligned. They want to make change, they want to make it happen, but their incentive system is rather different. The bureaucrat is incentivized to play it safe, to pretend that he is doing a good job, to pretend that there's no problem, and that the current situation is rather good and the social entrepreneur is coming to make it better.

The social entrepreneur has a burning desire to solve a problem. So in this conflict of interest, we have to give the bureaucrat a lot of safety, in case he puts up the head and says, "Actually this whole place is so screwed up that I need the social entrepreneur." When he says that he, he becomes very honorable.

So how do we reconcile these two situations so that the bureaucrat who is really interested to solve the problem, is safe to put his hand up and say, "I want to solve this problem." Whereas this current system is the bureaucrat if he follows the rules and just hi around and camouflage himself, he gets to retirement safely and nothing really disastrous happened.

But if you take a on a social entrepreneur and it takes some time and the result haven't come yet but he trust this guy may be he get questions and he is not protect so this is a great question. I'm going to ask the panel so they respond to the question, but kind of respond briefly because we do have a lot of hands up and everyone will have a response.

My 30-second response is This is a brilliant question for which there is no answer. B, it could take an elected leader, or a cabinet minister and that person could be champion for room for change wright Obama has fifteen million dollars x x of New York city is x two hundred million dollars social venture fund.

And so that the bureaucrats who administer the fund are administering a fund where the person who has the public profile has said, this is a fund for change now it doesn't totally resolve the problem administering this problem for president Obama and I have x joked with the folks in the white house I am suppose to go to the congress and say We've only failed half the time with our fund and that's the definition of innovation, right?

So it just feels like I'll be a little bit vulnerable, but this isn't kind of going forward.

Quick responses from anybody?

I would say, two-fold. Get the bureaucrats and the ministers out to visit you lot. And get the odd and able person to go in. So, Campbell Robb, who was the Director General of the Office of the Third Sector, who led all this stuff, was actually from the NGO sector, and went into the bureaucracy. So, I think mixing the cultures is useful, if we could ever bear to go in there.

Alright, that's it. I'm sorry go ahead.

The model we've created is a little bit of a, create a neutral space that is not government, not business, not academia, not, you know, where those parties can all come together and then sort of facilitated and funded Sandbox, where government is a key partner in it can watch almost the experiment being conducted and house the ongoing commitment to take solutions that emerge and fund them.

At the same time something really wacky happens out there the risks are somewhat boxed and they can blame us for stimulating those.

Yes sir, and then we'll down here and we'll jump up to the back. I don't know who's caught. How many max do we have two tree or lets take this gentlemen in blue and pick somebody up and kinda where we can see up here.

Yes sir.

Hi! My name is Jason Sull. I run an advisor firm called Mesh And Measurement. I just want to make one quick comment and a question. The comments related to measuring, you know the outputs. My concern is actually, I see somewhat of the opposite, where there is actually too much trust. We are spending a tremendous amount of money and we absolutely no idea what is going out there and I think that is actually creating distrust because the cost of what works the cost of 'I don't know' is getting pretty high, right, so I feel like I think that there is some very good proxy metrics for outcomes that we can get as leading indicators of what's going to happen and we don't have to wait ten years and see.

There's been a lot of, in many many fields, a lot of what works. So I do think that, I'm hopeful that we can find some short term proxy, clever metrics that are indicators of ultimate outcomes, and not just measure the throughput of the organization. The second is I'm a Kennedy School alum and my question to all of you is, how do we remove the 'and' from the title of the session?

How do we get social entrepreneurs into government? Why is it always government and social entrepreneurs? Why aren't all of us working in government and how do we get more of us young smart idealistic people to actually get in there and take over some of the levers of influence?

We'll give Vivian a first, since Singapore has a reputation of having maybe the highest performing government in the world, we'll let him explain how he tracks all of these folks and then Well, I'll just give a short answer to that. In Singapore we have no professional politicians. All of us have had a life. And if you've had a life, you've got some track record of success, you got trust and you've got competence. Good luck to you and we would try to recruit people, but its a very hot place so its not a prescription I can wish upon anyone else.

But but your point is, you need that type of mentality, that type of activism and passion within government as well. I totally agree with you.


Somebody up there hold up their. Oh! You've got the mic, okay thank you.

Hi, Rick Blick Standwell.

Oh, I'm sorry, wait. I just totally offended the guy in the front row, who I've been telling like for 10 minutes I'm gonna call on him. So just hold on one second.

He's a keener down there at the front, so you go ahead first.

He's more visible than you are too.

You are hiding at the back there.

Yes, sir. It's Tobia Culs from Social Finance. A couple of comments and a question. The first is this debate around Accountability and risk management being the background flavour when being government versus trust in (xx) on the social entrepreneurs side. And the need for measurement if you are in government versus the, we should get on with it, if you are on the entrepreneurial side.

Just first comment, speaking as spending the last 2 years is closing a transaction with government which make indicate the range of the issues concern. You cant get away from democratic accountability in a democracy. You might be able to intermediate it. Your comment, I thought, was very interesting about the idea that you can, potentially put in an entity that's in charge of trying to develop the long-term outcome, and they then have some, maybe more trusting relationships with serious of social entrepreneurs to deliver on that outcome.

Going direct and then trying to do it at scale, my present experience is it doesn't work. An organisation built the program with the begining in the entire of twenty years and then that indefined plans output vs outcome is where my first disagreement with Alistair, I guess,is I can't put them in the same category.

They fundamentally one is a measure of process and government had been measured everyone else some process then looking to the cheepest process and then wondering why they didn't get the outcome is probably one of the most deeply frustrating aspects of dealing with government. It's one that gets my hackles up.

Trouble for outcome is it takes a while to work out what it was.

It's damn difficult.

And so, the next element which we're looking at and which I'm seeing interest in the panelists how one develops a marketplace for it, is one needs to be able to finance outcomes. Social entrepreneurs can't take the risk of waiting for three years to get paid. So developing, and the bit that we're becoming interested in, is how does one develop a market?

Okay, takers?

You need to explain to people why you're social impact bond. It's worth explaining. It's a real example of this concept in practice.

I'll be as brief as I can. Sorry, Steven. I've lost control of my panel there.

That's good, that's good. I always liked that bit.

Talk about being disinter mediated.

In essence free contract with Mr to avoid offenders from being re-convicted. And that's on a well-defined amount, so you'll get paid this amount of money for every conviction does not happen against a control group. Now we've used that contract to set up a fund to raise money now to pay for the set of services that will try and produce outcome.

So that's if you like that definition of inter-mediation. The trick is everyone, as you say, it becomes the sexy thing. It's in the labor party manifesto. it's in the Conservative Party when I first. The trouble is, we've now got to raise five million pounds, but actually we can't go to a hundred million pounds.

cause there's no track record yet. So it's this intervening period of trying to build out an outcome finance market place I was talking about this actually, I didn't realize I was talking about you earlier. So, I want to go back to there, but let me ask you a real quick question. So let's, I'm government, okay, in this conversation.

And I love this model of paying you for folks not to re offend. Just talk for a minute about how you don't gravitate to the easier of the Felons. That's actually rather too easy, you get the metric right. So, if we're focusing on reconviction rate, then those who bound to reconvict anyway, you would But if you focus on the total number of convictions across the population, then working with someone who is get convicted time and time again, and just get them only getting only re-convicted occasionally as you slowly change their life around, is just as worthwhile, if not more worthwhile, than working with the guy you might be able to stop re-convicted.

But how do you count--I don't want to get too caught up in you but, how do you count the number of non-convictions--the number of convictions you prevent?

By having a control group.

So just gross numbers in the control group?

But your control group is picked to be as similar as possible. And they do the total number of convictions on your group, total number of convictions on the alternative group and get paid for the difference.

Now this is a really important conversation, obviously worthy of like another seven hours. Just real quickly, we've reached an output outcome compromise with President Obama's fund in the following way. We haven't actually picked the people we're gonna win yet so this is just--take this as all hypothetical, but... So we're gonna get--and this just goes right to the heart of the conversation but it might provide an example--So, US is now fixated on these horrible, except for Dorothy's program, high school graduation rates in the US, which are just kind of catastrophically awful.

and so we would like to cause them to occur. While it looks like the reading levels of third and fourth graders are statistically correlated to whether they eventually will graduate in the 12th grade. But we're not going to have 15 year funding, you know, and then say probably going to end up with something that looks like the following: if your program helps kids read at grade level over a two-year period of time in the grades that make a difference, that's an output that we think is my other necurical [sp?] results connected to the outcome we want and we will fund that.

So, that's just one kind of potential compromise.

That was very interesting. Thank you for calling on him. It was excellent. Very well done. Yes, sir.

Hi, Rick Lickstad[sp?] with the wellesley institute in Toronto. I'd like to pose a question to the panel regarding the risk reward. You know, having been in the private sector and come into the third sector, I'm actually quite amazed how good and honest bureaucrats are. 99.9 percent of them are really trying to make a the system is very difficult for them to do that.

So when i meet with deputy ministers or other for the government. The challenge is they are not paid to take rests because they are the guidience of the public trust of the tax payers money and I'm not sure that will ever change. And so therefore when i say we can get 4 out of 10 successes, paid to get 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10.

So my question is, just like we've had to outsource access to capital can you outsource access to risk? Now the UK tried to do it i understand, and sort of off loaded some of these decision making But i am convinced that we're barking up the wrong tree on this. We're not going to get governments to accept That kind of venture entrepreneurship risk taking and is there a mechanism therefore to change that?

They also talked about. Mars. I'd like to hear how you might be doing it, and to say hello to Jack, who I attended Harvard with, in the nonprofit program. He's building toilets all over the world and making a better place for people. So congratulations to you Jack, sir.

These are great questions. We'll do a Vivian and Alister and then whose got the next question so we can down with the mike? Okay, go ahead.

That's a very fundamental point worth appreciating. I always view government money as dumb money. Sounds paradoxical. If we in government understood risk, and we're willing to bare the risk. And we understood entrepreneurship, and we're able to stop things up, we shouldn't be in government. We should be an entrepreneur, or we should be an activist.

So the key to getting this right it's assemble a coalition. So, for instance if I need to assess a proposal. It shouldn't be done unilaterally by me. The business side of it, if i can get a real entrepreneur to examine the business case, the social outcomes someone of proper ability to give me measurements and to say, yes, this is the right metrics and this is not.

Then what government can do. As we can provide some of the dum money as seed funding as [xx] but right on the risk is [xx] capability of people out there who are able to do that and ride on passion and domain of the social activists out there, who understand the needs of the beneficiaries. The problem we will get is when any one of this triangular part starts to say "i'm preeminent and i know it all." So we understand that we know what we know and we know what we don't know and when we need the others.

Possible to create it. In the case of Singapore for instance, i have a social enterprise fund. I start off by being a skeptic. but I put the money there anyway. If a social entrepreneur comes up to me and says, 'take it on trust', I say, "I'm sorry John, that's not enough. I need you to get together with someone else who will also be able to provide the performance metrics." And you tell me this is going to make money?

Come in with another entrepreneur who's put it some of his own money. Then I'm all willing to trust. Because you've put your money where you're mouth is. And I'm willing to take a risk on you, and if things go wrong accountable to the public. But nevertheless, I've shown due process and a certain amount of common sense in approaching it.

So that's how we do it in Singapore. Government money never goes in as 100% infusion. It's always co-funding. And we always to see who your partners are. And that's why in fact this conference and social entrepreneurship, and the key obsession with joining the dots; meeting people who have been investment bankers before who understand finance.

People who started up companies. People who cared deeply about causes. And then getting the relation government is so crucial and I see this school conference at work . This conference as an opportunity to develop those relationships and performance metrics. So I agree totally with what you're proposing.

Yes you have something you want to say?

So why can't you? I came to this world somewhat direct from the private sector and I want to make another observation that has been a big surprise to me. I've been really surprised at how reluctant government is to stop doing certain things. And if we really want, even when, you know, the evidence seems to be pretty clear that it's not working.

And if we want to bring new innovation into government we're gonna have to stop doing things to make room for new things and that's something I have no idea how we're going to address.

That is the problem. Alright let's, I think what we'll do here is. We've got a lot of hands up as just. We'll take two or three questions without having us respond. So, who has a mic? Here and there's a whole group of questions in here.

Hello, my name is Lars Henson, I'm from the Scandanavian think tank Monday morning, we work the social innovation and society. And I couldn't help, I have a common question, a comment to Alister, because I took your comment on white men in suits in. And I think you have to appreciate when you talk about governments and social enterpreneurs that, for instance the British goverment, you know, the guys from OTS, they've been on the learning journey too.

You criticize them for getting it wrong the first time, but for others who are now learning from the British example, it's fantastic. Because we might be able to who leap the ten years you took in three years. Because of the mistakes and learnings you've made along the way. So I think that's an important perspective to take in when you talk about corporations, you know, governments and government's facilitating social entrepreneurs.

Now in Demark, we just led a major task force creating the first blueprint for Danish national strategy for social entrepreneurship including both the suit government guys and the social entrepreneurs. and that makes me want to pose a question to Vivian. From your, from the lessons you've made, what's the key policy, or the key instrument that you from government in Singapore has developed, that you feel has made, you know, the greatest difference to social entrepreneurship in Singapore.

I think what I'm gonna do is, would you guys just write down. You can pick the questions you want to ask them. Let's get two or three of these up in a row and then, 'cause I think we'll get people a better chance to participate. Yes, sir.

Hi, my name is Essan Jamil and I'm from the Renew Foundation which is based out of Pakistan, we're involved in health, education and nutrition. Renew Foundation. My question to the panel is that, in Pakistan where government is another kind of entity than what we see in Britain, USA, and Singapore.

The role of the social entrepreneurs that much more critical in providing services, etc. I'd like to hear a little bit more from the panel Countries like Pakistan and India and Iraq etc. which have an absence of real government.


Excellent question. Let's take one more and then we'll get some answers, then we'll do another round and then we'll be out of time. Right behind you there, thank you.

Actually the question is quite related to the question of the gentleman from Pakistan. Because I am actually not, in admiration with the systems we are hearing right now. But, my question is: How do you deal with the context of a lot of developing countries where you have endemic corruption and endemic threats within the government?

Like the government sometimes colludes with the people you're fighting against. The government is sometimes on the payroll of criminals. And sometimes they use the social sector as fake NGO's so they can funnel money back into their pockets. So, I'd like to hear some advice how to deal with that kind of system.

Okay, one more question then we'll matter on the news. This is more of a comment to to question that you've made. The point you've made about the government being paid to get 9 or ten successful, 9 out of 10. Success is rather important and actually, if you look at the track records of the public/private partnership with big business, rather than social entrepreneurs.

Or, if you looked at the track record of outsourcing, it's a big business, and I come from big business, you know you see that the track record isn't 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 and it is actually kind of much more along the lines of what we're talking about in social enterprise. So, I think the key thing there is like looking at the base line bench-marking with other areas that are already getting a lot of traction.

We'll just start down the panel and let's start with you Vivian and explain how you're going to solve these difficult problems. The key lesson I've learnt is not just in this field. Get the right people. Get them organized. And then empower them to do what needs to be done. And it's all about right people and relationships.

And you've got the wrong people and the wrong motivations and the wrong teams. You can get all kinds of dysfunctional outcomes. The question on states with should I say more esoteric forms of government. It's complicated. And I don't think any one of us wants to make unnecessary comments that will get us into problems, but let me just state, again from our perspective, in Singapore we believe the first and most paramount attribute of government is honesty.

If you don't have an honest This government or if you have a corrupt government, you can't get off the ground and that is something which needs to be fixed at the political level. And there's no amount of intervention externally that is going to do that. And I understand what you mean that sometimes you get perverse relationships.

And the truth is, and I think those in this room need to know, there's actually a lot of money to be made from social activism. and philanthropy, and there are people out there who'll take advantage of it.

And the point then, is that good intentions are not enough. You need to have accountability and you need to have outcome measurements. Otherwise, you cannot hold all the parties to this ecosystem to account. So, that's why I have to disagree with Alice that "trust me" is enough. It may be good enough in your society; it doesn't work universally.

The final point about risk reward and expecting it to succeed 9 out of 10 times; I don' t think that's necessarily true. We all know, certainly those who have done business, you can't succeed 9 out of 10 times. And I think that's why this whole process of intermediation by organizations like you all now, if we can get the financial sector, or the business sector, to come in and intermediate that risk so if I end up with a portfolio of projects, and even if the majority of them fail, on those which succeed, I emerge net positive, enough to be able to explain to my people why I took their tax dollars took those risk.

I think governments will be more willing to take those risks. So again its the trust and risk ratio which you need to manage.

Now start.

I think, I wasn't really clear with what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that obviously you need to understand, for instance with rehabilitation of offenders, is the inputs are the outputs of what you're doing, are they are having the desired effects? So I am not against matrix measuring and outputs and impacts per se.

What I'm saying is we need to do both, because if you're trying to engage people who really are disengaged then if the benchmark is to buy contracts of particular types to deliver particular, you know, outputs or impact or sorry out Problems or impacts all gets very confusing then actually you cut off that lifeline of those people having a stake and getting involved.

Now the problem is Very messy, that's people, that's a lot of people. And therefore, the way of doing it is obviously don't like that because they have accountability. It's tax based dollars or whatever therefore they have to do something about it. So the way that works for instance with us is our government Realize is that they do need to back people on a trust basis, in the poorest communities, without Matrix and with out big barriers, to engage and to be.

gain that journey and therefore what they do they funneled millions through us in order that the risk is distanced so the has back up to back social entrepreneurs in the now we free said actually we don't back on trust, we only use Matrix. Lets get a few MBAs to work in what Matrix works. Actually, you're cutting out the exact currency that you're trying to achieve, which is trust, and community glue, and input of communities, and inclusion.

Your cutting that all out of the equation. So that's not an "either-or." It's a "both," and we need Matrix for scaled things and for public services. But also, we need interventions that reach out and devolve power to people who are cut out of power.

Are you working with anybody who's, have you fronted or trade folks working in countries where the government's the problem. No. It's not my area. I can't really answer those questions. Although, I've got to say, to the chap from Monday morning think time, what a dreadful thought, "Monday morning think time;" my brain doesn't start working until Tuesday afternoon.

And, the, I've realized, I've got to say also, I realize how lucky we are in Britain, I said to the boss of OTS. You know, I think Britain is a shame because we've kind of policy, leaders in this area say, "That's a shame. We're not allowed to sell policy because with our deficit, we need to sell something overseas quickly".

And it's a shame that bureaucrats cant flog it, because, you go around the world and their brainstorms consist of clicking on the OTS website and downloading all materials. So, I am well aware how privileged we are and how much our government have engaged in this and I congratulate them and actually they're a great times people and what is interesting is their journey, to get to where they got to What's worse, essentially the fact here that, nobody has asked questions that are not representative.

We don't think rep. The panel is not representative or qualified to answer with respect to what happens when the government is the problem other than, other governments and world wide funders of NGOs need to be sensitive about how they spend their money. Lets get one last answer. Yeah, you can pick any one of these questions and you can answer it.

Yeah, I think I just have to echo that I think we have no, there is no getting away from measurements You know, there's some rational balance we have to strike and I think it's imperative upon the social entrepreneurial community to work very closely with the funders whether they're government orient foundations to try and keep the measurement systems rational and relevant to actually doing social entrepreneurial businesses.

So, we appreciate that several people had questions, and this is a really well informed audience, so we encourage you to continue the conversation. But the people who are in charge of the room asked me to ask you to encourage you to continue your conversations outside the room, and exit relatively quickly.

Thank you very much for your time.