To find out more about “Financing Farm to Fork” or to sign up, click here.

The GoodWeave certification standard will soon include green benchmarks to reduce water and air pollution related to rug washing and dyeing, along with living wages and improved working conditions for of-age workers.  RugMark also recently announced the launch of a customized carbon offsetting program in partnership with Carbon Clear. The carbon calculator will help RugMark’s North American member companies offset the carbon dioxide that is unavoidably emitted in the process of shipping their GoodWeave certified rugs made in India and Nepal. RugMark estimates that more than 1,900 tons of carbon dioxide could be offset through its member importers alone – equivalent to the electricity usage of more than 900 homes over the course of a year or the use of more than 725,000 gallons of gasoline. The amounts paid for offsetting will fund development projects, including two textile projects in India.

To find out more about RugMark and the GoodWeave certification program, visit www.goodweave.org.

To be eligible, applicants must currently hold positions as C-level executives (CEO, President, Executive Director, etc.) at a business or nonprofit having a positive social or environmental impact, and their organization must have been in operation for at least six months, and not more than five years, as of April 15, 2010. Past Innovation Award winners include Peter Liu (New Resource Bank), Brenda Palms Barber (Sweet Beginnings), and Priya Haji (World of Good), an RSF borrower.

To learn more about the Awards or to download an application, please visit www.svn.org/awards. Applications are due by April 15, 2010. If you have questions, please contact Lars Olson at larso@svn.org.

To register for SVN’s upcoming 2010 Spring Member Gathering, taking place April 29 – May 2 in Stevenson, Washington, please click here.  RSF is proud to be the SVN Local Gatherings sponsor for 2010, and we look forward to seeing many of you at both the Local Gatherings and the annual Spring Member Gathering.

OSA students starring in "The Wiz" at the Fox Theater

Times are tough and the outlook is bleak for California’s public school system, with over $8 billion in annual cuts expected for educational spending.  For California’s 750 public charter schools, per-student state aid has been dramatically reduced and payments have been delayed, causing budget shortfalls and forcing teachers and administrators to make cuts to programs and resources which will undoubtedly reduce the quality of our children’s educational experience.

Against this austere backdrop are the many schools and districts that have already been struggling to meet the basic needs of students and their families in our communities.  For the Unified School District in the city of Oakland (OUSD), the budget cuts could not come at a worse time.  Performance in Oakland’s public schools has been notoriously poor.  In the English portion of the 2008 California Standard Tests, only 21% of the district’s 11th grade students scored at least “proficient,” while over 50% of students taking the test performed “below basic.”  OUSD’s high school dropout rate is close to 40%, exceeding the state’s dropout rate of 24%.

In stark contrast lies the Oakland School for the Arts (OSA), a tuition-free public charter school in the OUSD that opened its doors in 2002 with a mission to train pre-professional arts students in a college preparatory setting.  RSF is proud to have recently made a loan to OSA, which maintains a graduation rate of nearly 100% and a college admissions rate exceeding 95%.  The school’s talented students have gained admission to top notch schools including Stanford, Columbia, Amherst, UC Berkeley, Oberlin Conservatory, Boston Conservatory, Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, and UCLA’s renowned School of Film, Theater, and Television.   In 2009, OSA was the only Oakland school to win the Distinguished Schools Award from the California Department of Education, and the school’s most recent Academic Performance Index (API) score ranked number one in the district.

Yet the outlook and performance at OSA didn’t start out this way.  The Oakland School for the Arts first opened its doors in September 2002 with 100 students in a ninth grade class, adding another high school grade each year.  In 2005, a middle school was added, and OSA now educates students in grades 6-12 with a total enrollment of 524 students.  For six years, though, the school operated out of mobile classrooms and tents in a heavy construction zone. During this time, OSA suffered a period plagued with high teacher and administrator turnover, as well as a 30% drop in enrollment for the 2006-2007 school year.

The tide turned during the 2008-2009 school year when Donn Harris, former principal of the San Francisco School of the Arts, was brought in to head OSA.  Donn’s experience, energy, and leadership helped to turn OSA around, and over the last two school years, OSA has seen 97% faculty retention and significant growth in enrollment.  The school has also found a permanent home with 59,000 square feet in which to be creative: Oakland’s historic Fox Theater. In January 2009, OSA moved to the restored and expanded building that wraps around the 3,800 seat theater.  The Fox reopened in February 2009 after a $100 million makeover, and now operates as a commercial venue for live performances. The combination of an historic theatrical venue and a public arts school is one-of-a-kind, and has been an exciting opportunity for the students of OSA.  For two nights this past winter, OSA students performed “The Wiz” at the Fox Theater and tickets were sold out for both nights, proving the success of the partnership.

RSF is thrilled to be providing OSA with a loan to fund their operations, as the school is a shining example of the kind of projects we look to support in our focus area of Education & the Arts.  For more information on the Oakland School for the Arts, visit: www.oakarts.org.  If you are interested in helping RSF make more loans like the one to OSA, learn how to open an account with our Social Investment Fund by clicking here.

Scott Hackenberg is Lending Manager at RSF Social Finance.

The Refugee Agriculture Project at MercyCorps Northwest, a 2009 Seed Fund grantee

In the Pacific Northwest, refugees and immigrants are getting help starting organic market gardens and small farming enterprises that will improve self-sufficiency, as well as provide their communities with nutritious food. In Sierra Leone, rural families are taking sustainable apiculture workshops and learning to build beekeeping enterprises that will give them access to a sustainable livelihood. What do these worthy projects have in common? Both were funded by the RSF Seed Fund, a small grant-making program that seeds new initiatives within RSF’s three focus areas.

March 15^th is the upcoming deadline for the Seed Fund, which makes small grants ($1,000-$5,000) to projects that further the field of social finance with innovative solutions.  Although the grants are small, they have a large impact on the projects they support due to their need for start-up funding.

Unlike most of the other funds at RSF, the money for this fund comes from small donations.  While RSF has not engaged in active fundraising for the Seed Fund, we have been able to make $12,500 in grants annually thanks to contributions from RSF’s donor community.  (We welcome all donations, so please see the bottom of this post for information if you would like to give!)

A unique aspect of the Seed Fund is that it’s one of RSF’s only grant-making programs that accepts unsolicited proposals. While most of our grant-making is done through Donor Advised Funds, this small pot of money allows us to review proposals from any eligible candidate, giving new and potentially transformational projects an avenue to become known to us.

The fund is advised by a rotating group of staff members who review the proposals and then decide which projects will receive grants. Staff members enjoy a chance to participate in the grant-making process and their diverse professional backgrounds make sure that we have a fresh perspective in each grant-making cycle.

Despite being our smallest fund, the Seed Fund has always held an important place at RSF for the number of exciting new projects it has helped to kick-start.  We hope that you will consider supporting this fund with a donation, however large or small.  Thank you!

To help RSF continue to operate the Seed Fund, make a donation by visiting: rsfsocialfinance.org/services/giving/donate-now/

To apply for a grant from the Seed Fund (before the March 15th deadline), visit:  rsfsocialfinance.org/services/giving/seedfund/apply-for-a-seed-fund-grant/

To read more about our 2009 Seed Fund grantees, visit: rsfsocialfinance.org/services/giving/seedfund/2009-seed-fund-grantees/

Kelley Buhles is the Program Manager of Philanthropic Services at RSF Social Finance.

Moving your cash out of big banks and into local banks and credit unions is one way to move your money, but even this choice doesn’t address one of the major issues I have with banks, regardless of size: how are they lending the money I’ve deposited? Can you even find out if their lending practices align with your own values?

Two years ago, I embarked upon an effort to move my money away from Bank of America (where I had my checking account) and ING Direct (where I had the bulk of my cash savings, both in a savings account and in several laddered CDs), and into banks whose activities I felt were more aligned with my own values. In the case of Bank of America, I simply could not justify spending the majority of my waking hours working at RSF and thinking about how to invest in companies that were solving social and environmental problems, while much of my own savings were helping contribute to those problems.*

I didn’t have the same concerns, per se, about ING Direct – partially because I couldn’t find any information about their policies – though it was clear to me that there were other places to park my cash that were putting it to work in ways I knew I could feel good about.

Here were the guiding principles I used in looking for a checking account:

• First and foremost, I wanted a bank that I had some kind of personal connection to, whether directly or through my professional connections.
• I wanted to find a small bank that was committed to social and environmental values in some way.
• I preferred to bank locally, not because I frequently visit the branches, but because I wanted to ensure that my bank’s Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) activities were benefitting my local community (CRA encourages “depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound operations.” Click here to search CRA performance ratings for specific banks or states); and
• I wanted to be able to view my account activity and balances, pay bills, and view cancelled checks online.

After a bit of research, I moved my checking account to New Resource Bank, which is based in San Francisco. Mark Finser, who is Chair of the Board of RSF, is also Chair of the Board of NRB, and RSF was an early investor in the bank. I had also worked with the bank’s Initial Founder & Vice Chairman Peter Liu on several projects related to sustainable agriculture through Roots of Change, so the personal connection was well covered. Best of all, when I call “customer service,” I talk to Jennie, who helped me open my account two years ago and always remembers who I am!

As far as their lending goes, according to Peter Liu, “We have been active lenders in the areas of clean energy, green buildings, and green consumer products.  We also make classic local community banking loans and work with our borrowers to help them find ways to green their building or operations.  We also use our specialized knowledge for tailored or innovative products to finance solar systems or sustainable foods companies.”

Regarding my savings, I was deeply inspired by the composition of the RSF Donor Advised Funds’ Liquidity Portfolio (see Taryn Goodman’s recent post), and had initially hoped to mirror that. Unfortunately, as an individual with limited capacity to manage such a complicated portfolio, I soon realized I’d be better off finding one financial institution to steward my cash, based on the following:

• Because I had chosen a bank for my checking account, I wanted to join a credit union (credit unions are member-owned and non-profit, and both these features score high on my values meter), and preferably one that defined “community banking” in terms beyond just banking in the local community – ie, one that also addressed ecological issues.
• Assuming I could find such a credit union, I wanted to find a more simple solution to laddering CDs that would help maximize my interest rate, while minimizing the amount of work I had to do to keep track of what was happening.  Plus, I wanted to leave room for liquidity in the event that I miraculously found a home to buy.

And so I recently opened an Emergency Share Fund Account at the Permaculture Credit Union in Santa Fe, an investee of the RSF Donor Advised Funds’ Liquidity portfolio (as is New Resource Bank), in addition to having a close lending relationship with the RSF Social Investment Fund. Many of their loans offer discounted rates for sustainable projects and most of their mortgage and property loans have what they call “sustainability features” (ie, solar panels and water heaters, composting toilets, rain catchment, solar water heaters, roofing materials that reflect sun in summer and keep the heat in during the winter, etc). Personally, I am most excited about the fact that they can offer loans for off-the-grid buildings that don’t qualify for conventional mortgages. The type of account that I opened was perfect for my needs: because the funds are parked there indefinitely, I get a higher interest rate, but I can take them out in case of an “emergency” such as a home purchase, major life change, etc. Whenever I’ve called, Eileen and Don have been incredibly helpful and responsive – far beyond my expectations!

Now, I’m no investment advisor, and I imagine that if I had one, they would likely caution me against much of the approach I’ve outlined here… I find that I tend to have priorities that are very hard for many traditional investment advisors (or elders within my own family) to understand. Which is why I feel so grateful to be part of the RSF community, where we can dig into difficult questions like: what is true wealth? How can we redefine a portfolio theory that has values at its very heart? In short, how can we transform the way the world works with money?

*(RSF grantee Green America keeps tabs on the track records and policies of the big banks here. For more information on how banks are contributing to climate change, check out the “Banks, Climate Change, and the New Coal Rush” report from RSF grantee Rainforest Action Network, which was published as part of their global finance campaign.)

Elizabeth Ü is Manager of Strategic Development at RSF Social Finance.

Registration for the conference is now open, with early bird rates available through March 19th. For more information or to register, visit http://www.investorscircle.net/2010-conferences-1. RSF is a proud sponsor of Investors’ Circle’s 2010 Spring Conference & Venture Fair.

Meeting the Demand is focused on exploring the challenges and opportunities for growing local and regional markets for environmentally sustainable and ethical meat and dairy products. The conference will bring together investors, institutional consumers, and sustainable meat and dairy producers for a day of conversations on topics such as product sourcing, certifications and metrics, building distribution networks, and investment opportunities.

For more information on the conference or to register, visit www.iccr.org/calendar.php.

The Decater family, founders of Live Power Community Farm

In response to my recent blog post “Towards an Economics of Place,” one reader raised a very interesting issue about a closer linkage between price and place. Of course, price itself is a very complex topic, no matter whether considered in the context of place-based or global exchange. I think it is fair to say that even an approximation of true price will never be achieved as long as there are any externalized costs; that is, when portions of the real costs are passed off to others not part of the consumer-producer price transaction. The consequences of externalized costs are more often than not the incalculable costs of human and ecological degradation. It is no small irony that such degradation cannot be anything other than place-based even if on a wide-spread basis.

The reader’s point was that it was possession or access to capital that allowed ships to sail to distant lands to bring back whatever precious goods were desired. Those on the home front driving the marketplace were blind to the procurement methods, or the inexorable social and environmental behavior of the procurers. The consumers had only their desire as a guide to what price they were willing to bear; merchants were driven by the accumulation of wealth without heed of or accountability for the destructive wake left behind. A more contemporary portrayal of this cycle can be seen in Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, a short but poignant animated film about the way our current economic system works.

So the question remains about how to rethink a sustainable economic system which centers in place, has no externalized costs, and where price actually meets the basic needs of all the parties to the transactions. There are two threads to this inquiry that deserve attention. The first is the practice of associative economics as articulated by Rudolf Steiner in his lecture cycle Economics: The World as One Economy (1922). The second is Jane Jacobs’ notion of import replacement which she articulated in The Economy of Cities (1969), and again in Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984). Both were innovative systems thinkers and addressed the economic reality or potential of place. Since Steiner posits price and how it is set as a key to a new economic practice, I will focus on his approach to association, and leave a fuller exploration of Jacobs’ concepts for a subsequent posting.

Perhaps the simplest and clearest application of associative economic practice is to be found under the heading of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The modern origins of this economic approach came with the development of biodynamic farming (also started by Rudolf Steiner) in the 1920s and CSA was first adopted in the US in the early 1980s. The form arose out of the question of how a farmer might make a sustainable living from his or her chosen vocation, and not be at the whim of the marketplace and the weather.

As a founding member of the first CSA west of the Mississippi (Live Power Community Farm) in 1988, I would like to describe how we work.  While there are various interpretations of what CSA is, there are some core principles that are essential to the deeper value of the practice—especially the relationships between the farmers and member-shareholder-eaters (the community), price, and risk. At Live Power, the farmers and some of the interested eaters gather to consider the annual budget for the farm. The farmer lays out all the costs for twelve months including seed, apprentices, housing, health insurance, transportation, maintenance, retirement funds, etc. Based upon the capacity of the garden, the farmers also determine how many families or shareholders they can reasonably grow food for in a year. After some (often lively) discussion of the details, this total annual cost is divided by the number of shareholders to arrive at the cost per share.

When this amount is determined, shareholder-eaters commit for the year and make a deposit for their share. The food comes over a seven and half month period, but the farmer is actually supported for all twelve months. This is a simple form of associative economics, but accomplishes many things. First, the food itself is not a commodity, because the shareholder is not paying for the food but rather the real cost of the farmers’ living and all that it takes to grow the food. Second, the farmer’s labor is not a commodity because there is no direct way to tie the work and winter rest to the farm income. The farmer manages a closed-loop, bio-diverse farm organism. He grows virtually all the feed the animals need, uses the manure for compost to renew the soil, and then from the soil grows the food and feed. There are no imported inputs, no externalized costs. The farmer works constantly on building the fertility of the soil rather than thinking of the land, as in petro-chemical farming, as nothing more than a vehicle to produce food. Being supported by the community, the associative form operates completely outside the market economy. What this also means is that the community shares the risk of the farm and the produce. The farmer will still have a means of support even if the growing season is bad; in fact, they will be able to make it financially to the next season when things will hopefully be better.

I have been asked how this approach is different than a farmers’ market or a veggie-box subscription. Both these approaches are warmer, friendlier (and better for the farmer) versions of a commodity marketplace. While there is less intermediation between the farmer and the customer than in a typical grocery store system, it is also true that the farmer will have no income if there is no produce to sell. And how are the prices for food at the farmers’ market set? On what basis—what the traffic will bear?

In an associative economic model such as Community Supported Agriculture, place and price are inseparable. The community connection to the farm and farmers is fundamental. It is in many ways an economic form that parallels the organic processes in bio-matter compost. In the associative price setting process, all aspects of the farm and operations (except, of course, who will do the farming) are visible and up for consideration. The multiple perspectives of the eaters and the farmers are transformed through the community dialogue process with price as the outcome—a price that reflects a market-free system warmed by care for the land and the vocation of farming. Such an associative approach is demanding of time and human effort, and not every farmer or eater can work in this way. But, the “inconvenience” of such an economic community is well worth the convening if transformation of economic practice is a heartfelt longing.

John Bloom is the Director of Organizational Culture at RSF Social Finance.  If you enjoyed this post, look for John’s recently published book, The Genius of Money, now available from steinerbooks.org.