The Sector

Driving Positive Change: Adam Livshits’ Work in Social Innovation

adam, consulting analyst, the sector

Adam Livshits, a Consulting Analyst at The Sector who’s all about impact fund design and social enterprise strategy. He’s is super passionate about impact investment, social entrepreneurship, and social innovation. With a Bachelors of Commerce in Economics and Sustainability from McGill University. Adam Livshits has had some pretty cool experiences. He actively worked with social enterprises through Propel Impact, conducting academic research on impact investing at McGill, and making contributions to the UCeed Social Impact Fund at Innovate Calgary. Adam’s got a bunch of skills up his sleeve, from economic analysis to project management. We asked Adam a few questions to get to know him better:

Q&A with Adam Livshits

Q: What gets you excited about social innovation?

A: So, during my studies and work in social innovation and social entrepreneurship, I’ve been lucky enough to see some seriously innovative solutions to social problems. And let me tell you, the variety and creativity of these ideas blows me away. I constantly come across new ideas that amaze me – whether it’s innovative business models, cool tech, or clever approaches to tackling social issues. There are endless ways to make an impact, and I find it incredibly inspiring.

Q: What’s your gig at The Sector all about?

A: As a Consulting Analyst at The Sector, I’m all about designing and developing impact funds. That means I dig into primary and secondary market research, figure out investment strategies, create financial and impact models, and design fund and program structures. It’s a pretty exciting gig, I must say.

Q: What accomplishments are you most proud of?

A: One thing I’m really stoked about is this impact initiative I did during my time at McGill. Basically, I spent a whole year researching and talking to folks to identify a problem with compost contamination. Then I came up with a solution and actually put it into action on McGill’s campus. It’s a project that’s making a sustainable impact on compost disposal, and that makes me really proud.

I recently went back to McGill to give a guest lecture on my experiences with impact investment and social enterprise advisory. It was awesome to share my knowledge and resources with the students.

Lastly, through my consulting work and business accelerators, I’ve been able to use my research and analysis skills to make a positive impact on various organizations that are doing great things for society and the environment. It feels good to be part of their journeys.

Q: What are your goals in social innovation?

A: Well, social innovation is always evolving, which is pretty cool. My main goal is to keep learning and stay on top of the latest tools and methods. As new problems arise in the world, I want to have the knowledge to find meaningful solutions. I really want to make a positive impact on people who have been historically overlooked, especially when it comes to access to financing.

The Sector

Recent News in Social Impact and Social Finance

Stay on top of the latest happenings in social impact and social finance with our monthly roundup. We cover new funds, innovative products, impact reports, events, and more in the world of impact investing and social entrepreneurship.

line of chairs. All white except 1 yellow

Jobs

There are some great job opportunities right now in impact investing and social enterprise. Here are a few current openings:

  • Chief Lending Officer at XYZ Community Finance, closing July 31st. They’re seeking someone to lead lending strategy for affordable housing and small business.
  • Investment Manager at ABC Foundation, closing August 15th. Looking for someone to manage their impact investment portfolio focused on cleantech, healthcare, and education access.
  • Director of Partnerships at 123 Social Ventures, closing September 1st. Seeking a leader to develop corporate and nonprofit partnerships for their workforce development programs.

New Funds and Products

Exciting to see some new impact-focused investment products launching:

  • Green Bank LLC closed their inaugural climate tech venture capital fund at $250 million in capital commitments. The fund will invest globally into startups reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Community Credit Union launched a new impact GIC product that directs invested capital toward affordable housing projects. Great to see mainstream financial inclusion.
  • Breakthrough Ventures announced the first close of their women’s economic empowerment fund at $75 million. The fund will invest in companies improving livelihoods for low-income women globally.

team referring to charts and new funding

Reports and Learning

Some good resources published recently:

  • ABC Foundation released their 2021 impact report, detailing impact metrics and case studies from across their portfolio. Kudos on the transparency.
  • XYZ University published a research report on racial equity as a systemic investment risk. Recommended reading on this important topic.
  • Skillup Canada shared findings from their recent workshop series on social procurement. Lots of insights on how to boost social enterprise participation.

Upcoming Events

Mark your calendars for these upcoming events:

  • Regional Impact Summit, August 10-12th in Calgary. Connecting Alberta-based foundations, nonprofits, social enterprises and impact investors.
  • Women Investing for Impact, September 20-21st in Toronto. Convening high-net worth women interested in impact investing.
  • Impact Finance Course, starting October 5th online. Eight week course on impact measurement, deal structuring and more.

 

Content inspired by the excellent regular roundups by Lars Boggild on LinkedIn. Check out his feed for the latest news and opportunities in impact investing and social finance.

The Sector

A The Sector Case Study: Let’s Get Proof 

Seeding Medical Research via Crowdfunding & Social Finance

Let’s Get Proof’s mission is to bring proof to researchers, allied healthcare professionals, funders, and patients all over the world. In 2022, the platform was launched to maximize efficiency, inclusion, and impact in medical research by combining peer review, open-source contribution, and crowdfunding.

This enables innovators in medicine to find the expertise, insight, and funding they need to make their projects a reality. Medical research funding is an inefficient, slow, and biased process. 80% of applications for medical grants are unsuccessful. Feedback from patients or stakeholder groups is not taken into account. And even when attained, disbursement of funding can take years.

Let’s Get Proof provides an alternative. It was designed and built by medical researchers and innovators who saw promising ideas suppressed by red tape and bureaucracy inherent to the field. The team believes that no set of institutions has a monopoly on “great ideas” — innovation is the product of diverse voices coming together.

Meet the Founders

Dr. Rosalie McDonough, CEO and Co-founder

Rose has always been inspired by the combination of hard work and serendipity that drives scientific discovery. She followed this passion to build a career as a research physician. Rose has spent many years working in some of the world’s foremost medical research environments — working alongside leaders in stroke, neuroradiology and cardiovascular research throughout North America and Europe. This gave Rose a deep understanding of what it takes to bring a new treatment or therapeutic from concept to creation.

Partnering with Dr. Mayank Goyal, Rose has shifted her focus to creating a platform that will facilitate the next great ideas in medicine, by creating the conditions where hard work and serendipity can yield transformative results.

Rosalie received her MD from the University of Hamburg, where she graduated Magna cum laude. She received a MSc in Biology from McGill and graduated with honors from the University of New Brunswick.

Dr. Mayank Goyal, President and Founder

Mayank is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Radiology and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Calgary and a Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiologist at Foothills Medical Centre. He is a widely respected, cited and published clinician-scientist: a leading voice in stroke research with over 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Mayank founded Let’s Get Proof, formerly Collavidence to fulfill a longstanding dream: a collaborative, global platform to increase the efficiency and funding of high-quality, high-impact research. Mayank is intimately acquainted with the drawbacks of the current systems: from the gatekeeping faced by early-career researchers to the countless layers of red tape faced by trialists looking to produce meaningful research. He hopes Let’s Get Proof will empower researchers who have felt resistance to their “out of the box” ideas, and open the floodgates for true global collaboration in medicine.

The Sector

The Sector team has worked with Let’s Get Proof to develop and impact investor relations strategy and capital raise. Over the coming months LGP shall adopt a blended finance approach to developing its desired capital structure. Working with private donors, institutional funders, impact investors, and strategic partners. The Sector & LGP will work together in ensuring that the appropriate ecosystem is developed around this venture to enable the developing Canadian Social Finance Ecosystem to scale this timely and disruptive social innovation.

The Sector

Evolving your Fundraising Team into your Social Innovation Team

For charitable organizations to reach their potential, fulfill their social contract, and break free from their dependency on market scraps, outcomes-based-funding contracts must become normalized.

Establishing a Culture of Social Innovation

At the Sector, we encourage charitable organizations to develop a Culture of Social Innovation. By doing this we ensure the development of capabilities across all functional units to enable organizations to change societal systems by accessing new forms of capital and resources. Social innovation refers to the design and implementation of new solutions that imply conceptual, process, product, organizational, and systems, which ultimately aim to improve the welfare and well-being of individuals and communities. Social enterprise and social finance are approaches toward implementation. Your fundraising team is a critical organizational unit in this process. Post-change-process, they will deal in resourcing true social innovations in the market rather than “making asks,” without transacting value.

Principles of Change-management Towards Social Innovation

The first step is to eliminate your “fundraising culture.” Stop chasing scraps and dealing from a scarcity mindset. Charities often over-focus on utilizing short-term funding agreements without a long-term plan. This destroys value in terms of incurring the subsequent opportunity costs in potential program implementation and sustainable impact. Short-term fundraising has never been a sound strategy for building sustainable organizations and impact.

A dependence on such reactive fundraising has found its way into the culture and strategies of charitable organizations for decades now. Misleading managerial decision-makers and causing systemic internal turnover, siloed teams, and impediments to social innovation. Externally, it causes donor fatigue and distrust, structured gate-keeping, and has kept the needed talent required for social innovation from entering organizations. Yet, more and more charities are developing Theories of Change, greatly expanding their mandated social contracts. Charitable organizations need to be realistic. Before you “change inequitable societal systems,” you need you change YOUR own systems….

To start, let’s address some key points which will influence this change-management process:

    Your fundraisers are no longer “fundraisers,” they don’t react to the scraps of the market.They are social innovation professionals, presenting evidence-based, systems-changed-lensed interventions to the market, for resourcing.
    Capabilities that are required are business acumen, social innovation, social finance, impact measurement, government relations, entrepreneurial finance, program design, and thematic depth, as these bring the Social Innovation Team to life.
    The component of Social Innovation teams previously “Fundraising,” should no-longer be separate from the program’s teams or the program-design process. Performance is not measured by dollars raised alone, but rather by the team’s success in defining and acquiring the appropriate resources to make social innovations successful.
    A Vice President or Director leads the Social Innovation team, with team members matrixed across the program design, revenue generation, finance, governance functions across the organization.

The Social Innovation Team and the Government

At The Sector, we assist organizations to undergo this transformation as part of the overall process of adopting a Culture of Social Innovation. To address the needed cohesion between programs and fundraising teams, we support the integration of programs & fundraising into a social innovation unit, which we like to call Active Performance Management (APM).

APM is the process through which the new Social Innovation Team identifies and recruits cross-sector project partners to work together and identify and resolve project challenges in real time. They do this by leveraging a clear set of performance metrics, access to quality data, collaborative problem solving, and innovative adaptations. Every initiative is designed through a lens of Collective Impact, (Collective Impact is the commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem, using a structured form of collaboration). APM is the management methodology. For this discussion, let us examine the parameters in which the Social Innovation team aligns with the Government.

Governments manage the definitive funding and policy levers addressing the most critical issues in our country. The Social Innovation Team understands these levers and seeks access to funding by becoming proactive in their program design, utilizing social finance and fundraising by helping governments maximize the impact of taxpayer dollars. This helps deliver better outcomes and deploy resources where they are most needed. The Social Innovation Team:

    Design programs that support government funding tools that link funding to outcomes to maximize the impact of taxpayer dollars.
    Identify building ecosystem approaches by supporting partners in collaboratively designing and executing innovative programs, practices, and partnerships. Grounded in Pay for Success principles, optimizing the catalytic intent of government funding.
    Ensure continuous programmatic improvement by analyzing, integrating, and visualizing data to support better decision-making for all stakeholders involved.
    Design programmatic financing through social finance, utilizing the outcomes-based-funding model to structure impact investment opportunities and crowd-in additional program capital.
    Help to actively manage outcomes by establishing collaborative governance strategies to drive improvement and innovation.
    Confidently pitches social finance opportunities for the market. With the intent of acquiring a resource-base for sustainable program implementation and impact.

Social Finance helps to strengthen government departments’ capacity to enable more effective and equitable delivery of public services. With your Social Innovation Team bringing this value to the market, your organization will become proactive. Funding for initiatives will no longer be reactive and designing strategy from a resource-constrained view.

So, what does an organization look like after adopting social innovation? Well, your Social Innovation Team is now integrated and practicing APM. APM is not a discrete set of activities. Instead, it’s an ongoing process to track progress, identify problems, and rapidly address project challenges. Governance structures provide a framework for ensuring that the right people are committed to and engaged in the process of managing issues, opportunities, and competing priorities throughout APM. They ensure that the elements of APM are effectively implemented with buy-in from all stakeholders. Implementing APM your Social Innovation Team works in unison with all funders and stakeholders to:

    Develop Metrics. The APM process begins by aligning stakeholders on a core set of metrics to measure performance. In the context of a PFS project, the ultimate outcome metrics have already been identified through the contract. But it can be helpful to select additional operational metrics that can provide real-time actionable insights into project performance. These metrics include enrollment rate, progress through phases of the intervention model, and attrition rate.
    Collect & Analyze Data. Once key metrics have been identified, the next step is obtaining and analyzing data to identify core challenges. The analysis is often a repetitive process, as an initial finding may lead to further questions about what is causing a particular trend.
    Discuss Performance. The third critical step of this process is discussing the findings with project partners at regular APM meetings. By creating a forum where all project stakeholders can regularly meet to share information about the day-to-day progress of the project. Project partners can pin down what operational changes might be necessary and figure out collaborative solutions to ensure future project success.
    Adapt Program Models. Finally, following an APM meeting, the APM team works with project stakeholders to adapt and implement new program models. The process then begins again, potentially with new metrics to account for any changes made in the last cycle.

The Social Innovation Team now designs projects based on outcomes-based contracts. That is designed to reduce pressures on government spending for social services, leveraging social finance toward funding sustainable program operations and impact. Possessing the skill sets, acumen, and capabilities to convene stakeholders and pitch systems-change interventions. You will have shifted the dynamics that limited your organization’s abilities to resource the projects needed to truly realize your Theory of Change.