The Year in Social Enterprise and Impact Investing: 5 Happenings of Note in 2016

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

As 2016 draws to a close, it’s time to look back at some of the year’s most noteworthy events and trends in the world of social enterprise and impact investing:

Social enterprises embrace the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. 2016 saw a spate of social enterprises and impact investors adopting the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as the basis for their missions. A set of 17 global goals, such as “no poverty”, “zero hunger”, and “good health and well-being”, with a total of 169 targets for helping to ensure those objectives are reached, the SDGs were adopted by the UN in 2015.

Example: investorflow, a platform aimed at connecting lead impact investors to potential followers. Founded by Michael “Luni” Libes, co-founder of Fledge, a Seattle-based startup accelerator, it will include a network of investors, categorized according to the specific SDGs they’re most interested in. Another example: 17, a fledgling effort which centers, among other projects, on a startup accelerator for social enterprises that will address the SDG objectives, started by Jason Neff, a professor in the environmental studies program at University of Colorado at Boulder and faculty director of Sustainability Innovation Lab at Colorado (SILC), and Ben Webster, SILC’s managing director.

Source: Forbes (link opens in a new window)

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SDGs, social enterprise