An offbeat event coming to San Francisco will bring together foundation heads and financiers, nonprofit leaders and businesspeople to explore ways to marry the
social good to the bottom line. About 800 people from more than 26 countries are expected to attend the Social Capital Markets Conference, which opens Tuesday at Fort Mason. “We represent a new kind of investing where you look at the social impact of the idea and add that to the traditional notions of risk and return,” said conference organizer Kevin Jones, of Good Capital, a San Francisco firm involved in this trend. The economist who runs President Obama’s new office of social innovation is scheduled to address the conference on Tuesday. This trend is sometimes called social investing or social entrepreneurship. The idea is that profit-making investments can serve social ends, especially when some of the payback comes in nontraditional returns such as fighting poverty, helping the environment or both. “We talk about a double bottom line and in some cases a triple bottom line,” said Timothy Freundlich, a senior vice president with the Calvert Giving Fund in Bethesda, Md., which has been making social investments since 1997. Freundlich said the fund has attracted $175 million in capital from more than 6,000 investors. It lends this money at below-market rates to help build affordable housing or launch small businesses in impoverished areas. The loans are repaid and the proceeds used to provide investors an average return of 2.4 percent, Freundlich said.
The fund, which has loaned money to more than 250 projects in the United States and abroad, tracks the social benefits derived.