Vistas: Geri Stengel’s Blog: Social enterprise

No Jewish mother could want more for her daughter than to be fixed up with a doctor. Even better, the meetup led to marriage of sorts. Cheryl Swirnow, a Human Resource and insurance specialist, and Jay Parkinson, MD, MPH, became business partners.

Impact investing has the ability to unlock much more money for good causes from the world capital markets than philanthropic sources can provide. These investments balance financial return with social good. It’s a concept I wholeheartedly support and have written about in the past. Now I plan to write regularly on the topic so I thought I’d give you an overview of why impact investing rocks.

So you think you want to be a philanthropist or a social entrepreneur, to use your hard-earned talents to make the world a better place.

Social entrepreneurs -- those using business skills to accomplish social good -- have many choices these days. New York and California recently joined five other states in allowing social good to be given as much weight as corporate profit by approving Benefit Corporations in which the well-being of all stakeholders (employees, community, clients, environment), not just shareholders, are legally taken into account when decisions are made.