Read the Fall edition of the Wharton Alumni magazine to learn about the incredible work Wharton alumni and current students are doing in the field.  Click here.

Wharton prepares for its largest conference in the school’s 127 year history: the 2008 Net Impact North America Conference. Net Impact is “an international nonprofit organization whose mission is to make a positive impact on society by growing and strengthening a community of leaders who use business to improve the world.” The organization has a member base of approximately 10,000 professionals and graduate students who use their business acumen to solve complex environmental and social challenges.

Wharton Social Impact (WSI) is the school’s local chapter of Net Impact with 200+ members.

In spring 2007, Wharton won the competitive bid to host the Net Impact North America Conference. With this honor comes the opportunity to demonstrate Wharton’s thought leadership in social impact issues and strengthen the brand in an otherwise overlooked category.  A team of 80+ students have been working tirelessly to organize the three-day conference whose theme is, “The Sustainable Advantage: Creating Social and Environmental Value”.  Below are a few things you can expect: 

90+ Panels:

A ‘curriculum team’, led by Katie Mullen (WG09), has organized 90+ unique panels to span the three day conference.  Panels are organized into six themes: Finance (led by Lenore Kistinger, WG09), International Development (Suma Reddy), Corporate Leadership (Lisa Nager), Energy and Environment (Chau Tong), Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Anna Mohrman), and Community Development (Katherine Foo). For more information on these panels, visit www.netimpact.org

Philadelphia Green Economy Case Competition:

Case team participants will be asked to develop strategies to grow ‘triple bottom line’ businesses in Philadelphia which may not be appropriate for traditional venture capital or other lending.  The strategies developed will be used and considered by the Funding subcommittee on the Philadelphia Green Economy Task Force. First Prize: $5000, Second price: $1000. Teams of six are encouraged to apply. Further details of the case can be found here.

Social Stock Market:

The Wharton Social Stock Exchange is a simulation game that aims to create the experience of Muhammad Yunus’ (Noble Peace Prize recipient, 2006) proposed stock market where investments will be valued on their social as well as financial performance.  Built on a dynamic real-time platform this game creates an authentic trading experience by simulating the tools used by traders while incorporating environmental and social indicators.  The Social Stock Market is an example of how the conference organizers are using Wharton’s strength in finance to advance social impact innovation. A special thanks goes to Saket Saurabh (WG09) for making this happen.

Career Expo:

More than 70 companies will be recruiting at the Net Impact Career Expo on Friday, November 14th thanks to the work of the Careers Team led by Chhavi Ghuliani (WG09). Attending companies will receive a resume book of conference participants and Wharton Social Impact members. For a list of confirmed companies, visit www.netimpact.org/conference. 

Keynote Speakers:

In addition to the 250+ panelists, the Wharton team has attracted some notable keynote speakers, including John F. Brock, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc.; Carter Roberts, President and Chief Executive Officer of World Wildlife Fund (WWF); Matt Kistler, Senior Vice President of Sustainability at Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.; Kate Roberts, Founder of YouthAIDS and more! Dean Robertson, a strong supporter of social impact at Wharton, will also be giving the welcoming remarks.

Fun:

A three day conference would not be complete without ample networking opportunities and a wide array of social events that have been planned for students, visiting professionals and Wharton alumni.

The Conference is SOLD OUT and has been since mid-October.   Volunteering for 4+ hours is the only way to have access to the conference and hear some of the amazing content we have lined up.  Please e-mail dwissel@wharton.upenn.edu to express interest in volunteering. 

Beginning Mon. Oct. 27th from 7:00 – 9:00 p.m. and continuing every Monday until December.

Participants will tune into a live video broadcast lecture series on Microfinance hosted by the Haas School at Berkeley. Each week, a prominent industry leader will facilitate the seminar and discuss a “hot topic.”

Confirmed speakers for the series include:
• Elizabeth Funk, Chairman of Unitus
• Jessica Jackie Flannery – Founder, Kiva
• Monica Brand – Vice President, ACCION International
• Kendall Mau – CFO and COO, Prisma Microfinance
• Chris Dunford – President, Freedom from Hunger

Students from Columbia, Kellogg, Yale, Michigan, Chicago, Dartmouth, Case Western, Colorado State, UNM, Denver University, UC Davis will also participate. Throughout the seminar, participating students will skype questions to Haas so we can better engage as a community.

“Businesspeople spend too much time worrying about the burdens brought by global warming — the possibility of carbon taxes and greater regulation of emissions — and ignoring the potential commercial upside, according to participants in a recent Wharton conference titled, “Winners and Losers in Green Technologies,” sponsored by the William and Phyllis Mack Center for Technological Innovation. Indeed, the participants added, the so-called “green economy” presents lucrative opportunities for companies willing to invest the effort in seizing them.”  To read more, click here.

Oliver Ardery, WG’10 writes in the September 22nd edition of the Daily Pennsylvanian about community service during pre-term: “This belief in Wharton’s potential for “brotherly love” is not some ephemeral attitude. During the dean’s lunch in August, Dean Thomas Robertson told us pre-termers that making Wharton a force for good in the world is one of his top priorities. I think there are many in the Wharton and larger Penn community who share this view.”  To read more, click here.

Welcome to Wharton Social Impact!

Pre-term, affectionately deemed math camp, has come to a close and the school year is underway. WSI has a packed year ahead and in the coming days we will be electing first year Officers to fufill leadership positions.  Check out our Upcoming events and stay tuned…

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.”