The first session of this year’s Social Impact Salon will be held on Tuesday, August 5th, from 8 – 10 PM at the MBA Cafe in Huntsman.

Join your new classmates to reflect on the role social impact issues might play in your Wharton experience.  You can meet classmates with similar interests, discuss substantive current issues in the field, and have some fun!  Ben & Jerry’s ice cream will be provided.  There will be two more Salon sessions during Pre-Term, but the format of each session will be quite different and the three sessions are intended to build upon one another. 

To register, email Josh Densen by Monday, August 4th at 5pm at: jdensen@wharton.upenn.edu.  Feel free to contact Josh with any questions or for more information.

Salon dates, locations and Information:
All sessions will take place from 8 – 10 PM and be followed by a social gathering in Center City
Light, after-dinner snacks will be provided

First Session: Getting to Know You
Date: Tuesday, August 5th,
Location: JMHH MBA Café

Second Session: Social Impact Opportunities at Wharton
Date: Tuesday, August 12th
Location: JMHH F 85 or F 90 (depending on group size)

Third Session: Net Impact North America Conference Information and Preparation
Date: Tuesday, August 19th
Location: 1500 Locust, top floor, PC Deck

The Wharton team of Ashish Mehta, Xiao Chen, Xiaoying (Alice) Zhang, Hui (Vicki) Yan, and Xiaoming (Vivien) Zuo recently won the National Sustainable Venture Capital Competition.  A big congratulations is in order as the team bested competitors from UC-Berkeley, Columbia, University of Michigan, NYU, UNC, Duke, and Northwestern to take the title.  It is a testament to Wharton’s emerging strength in developing students with a keen sense for identifying business opportunities that combine financial and social return.  According to the official conference press release:

“The SVCIC is the only MBA competition in which students evaluate business plans that incorporate financial profitability, environmental integrity and social equity from entrepreneurs actively seeking venture capital funding.”

Some of us may dream of a day when this is not a specialized competition, but rather simply the way that all businesses are evaluated, but in the meantime, we’re quite happy to be at the forefront of an emerging field!

David Brooks presents a spot-on description of the modern social entrepreneur in “Thouroughly Modern Do-Gooders”, painting an accurate picture of the backgrounds, methodologies, and drive behind today’s new breed of social activist…

“The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of résumé bling. Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business to help the less fortunate.

Earlier generations of benefactors thought that social service should be like sainthood or socialism. But this one thinks it should be like venture capital…

The venture-capital ethos means instead that these social entrepreneurs are almost willfully blind to ideological issues. They will tell you, even before you have a chance to ask, that they are data-driven and accountability-oriented. They’re always showing you multivariate regressions or explaining why some promising idea “didn’t pencil out.”

In classic Brook’s Bobos in Paradise fashion, he also calls out a more restrained sense of external identification amongst this new generation of social entrepreneurs…

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

Brooks portrait is in many ways inspiring and the power of bringing market oriented solutions to global problems is undeniable, yet I do wonder if we will be doing so by sacrificing passion.  When he depicts the generation as “willfully blind to ideological issues” he does so as a compliment to our practicality, but by trading the irrational and helpful commitment that comes only from ideological drive do we risk burning out when our quantitatively and economically derived solutions do not pan out fast enough?  I certainly do not have the answer, but I believe it is important question for us to ask ourselves. 

While most people at Wharton would associate Grow To Be Great with the business textbook arguing against corporate downsizing, those of us in the world of social entrepreneurship think of growing to be great to be the challenge of the developing world.  William Easterly, professor of Economics at New York University, has a wonderful recent article in the Los Angeles Timescommenting on these growth challenges in the face of the Western “aid machine” that fuels itself off perpetuating the perception that Africa is a starving, war torn, and backward place.  Easterly’s commentary is powerful and supportive of a view that resourceful, social entrepreneurship and not a continuous stream of handouts is the key to growth.

“The real Africa needs increased trade from the West more than it needs more aid handouts. A respected Ugandan journalist, Andrew Mwenda, made this point at a recent African conference despite the fact that the world’s most famous celebrity activist — Bono — was attempting to shout him down. Mwenda was suffering from too much reality for Bono’s taste: “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” asked Mwenda.”

Congratulations to Pay It Forward, the new Wharton Graduate Association (WGA) Executive Board.  The slate claimed victory in last week’s WGA election and has an ambitious agenda with numerous social impact related initiatives:

• Replacing the core curriculum TAP project (a leadership project which for many students has become a source of humorous derision) with a community service project.
• Instituting an “adopt a non-profit” program whereby each cohort commits to working with a local non-profit over the course of the 2 year MBA program.
• Creating a “Business 101″ seminar during pre-term for students with non-traditional backgrounds.
• Expanding the Legal Aspects of Business & Ethics portion of the core curriculum.

Given the extent of Pay It Forward’s social impact focus, it was actually quite (pleasantly) surprising, at least to this second year observer, that they won.  I suppose the general lesson of the “pay it forward” philosophy is that there is a great deal of untapped goodness to humanity.  Apparently there is a nascent well of goodness in the Wharton community that showed up at the ballot box last week.

With any luck, this will be the start of a groundswell of change that will indeed begin to reshape the Wharton brand around educating socially responsible business leaders.  By initiating change now, we will all ”pay it forward” to future generations of students creating an institution committed to the idea that business for global good (as new Dean Robertson would say) is not just a catch phrase, but a professional commitment.

According to this month’s “Wharton Update”, a monthly email publication circulated on behalf of Dean Robertson, Wharton undergrads are pioneers on the social impact front.

“The newly formed Social Impact Consulting Group is one of the first pilot chapters in Net Impact’s new undergraduate initiative. The partnership will raise interest and awareness among Wharton undergraduates in how to make a social impact through business.”

The Social Impact Consulting Group is sending young business students out to work on non-profit consulting issues and to develop a sense of the importance of social responsibility in the context of business.  For many in this newest generation of business leaders, the need to balance social good and profit is an important component of how they will choose employers and how they will choose to manage.  It is nice to see Wharton’s undergrads acknowledged as one of the first groups admitted to this pilot program - with any luck, their pioneering enthusiasm will carry through the halls and influence their older (yet not always wiser) classmates! 

Nicholas Kristof has an inspiring column on the rise of social entrepreneurship in this past weekend’s New York times. He cites, among others, current Harvard Business School student Andrew Klaber, founder of Orphans Against Aids, as an example of a generational shift towards applying entrepreneurial solutions to global problems…

“Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways. Bill Drayton, the chief executive of an organization called Ashoka that supports social entrepreneurs, likes to say that such people neither hand out fish nor teach people to fish; their aim is to revolutionize the fishing industry. If that sounds insanely ambitious, it is. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan title their new book on social entrepreneurs “The Power of Unreasonable People.”

Dean Thomas Robertson published a great piece in the Financial Times earlier this week about the importance of social responsibility to the business school curriculum and Wharton’s efforts to be a center of innovation on these critical issues:

“Today we use terms such as “social impact” and “social responsibility” when discussing the ways in which businesses need to take into account not only their shareholders, but other stakeholders as well. Social responsibility is no longer relegated to the relatively small percentage of students who seek to work in the nonprofit sector. It has become integrated into our way of thinking in business education and in the coming years needs to be further developed…

…We would like to graduate students who are capable of generating financial returns, but at the same time who are concerned with social good, as this is part of the original mission of our school…

…We want them to be ethical and sensitive to corporate social responsibility issues. We hope they take a broader view and think about how their business decisions can contribute to the overall social good.”

Robertson had previously told the Associated Press that he intends to make Wharton “a force for good in the world.” The article also features comments from Net Impact’s Director, Liz Maw, who mentions that Wharton is hosting the conference next year.

Welcome to the new face of Wharton Social Impact!

In an on-going effort to showcase the efforts and activities of our club, we are relaunching our website in a decidedly new and conversational format.  Our goal is not only to be a resource for information, but to be an active forum for dialogue on issues of social and environmental responsibility, business ethics, and international development.  We will seek to highlight members of the Wharton community (and the global business community) doing extraordinary things to advance the integration of business and social good — and will not shy away for criticizing those in the same communities who could be doing more.

We hope to bring in the voices of current Wharton students, faculty, and alumni, and hope that those from other institutions and the business world at large will join in.  Welcome and we’re excited to begin this new conversation!

Last month a record 46 Wharton students and several administrators attended this year’s Net Impact Conference, held at Vanderbilt’s Owen School of Management in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition, six Wharton students were named finalists in the first-ever Project Pyramid Case Competition. The team, consisting of Lauren Clark, Ann Kim, Linda Lu, Anna Mohrman, Saket Saurabh, and Ruby Suga competed among 12 other finalist teams charged with producing tangible solutions to poverty-related conditions in society. Read more in a Wharton Journal article written by our own Ann Kim.