David Geilhufe

Recent Activity

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  David commented on the article | about 2 years ago

  Will The Social Innovation Fund Really Change the Nonprofit Market?

  I often tell the story of a food pantry run out of a church basement in Oakland. That group was horribly inefficient... technology, logistics and scale could deliver food more effectively to more people. But who would know that so and so's niece was about to get in trouble? Who would connect so and so's uncle to a job?

  
  

  The value of a small charity is seldom about its core mission (food distribution for example). As we build out nonprofit capital markets, we need to be more conscious of what our goals are. Are we guilding lillies? Are we transforming a sector with 1.8M organizations? Are we making it easier to access capital for the biggest charities?

  
  

  In the commercial sector, capital markets drive large business growth and profitability, yet in our country most jobs are create be small businesses without access to those capital markets. If you care about profitability, commercial capital markets are great. If you care about jobs, they might not be structured optimally.

  
  

  It's still not clear what we are actually going to care about in nonprofit capital markets. 

  
  

   

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  David commented on the article | over 3 years ago

  The Weakest Critique of Social Entrepreneurship

  The "too many nonprofits" arguement + the "scalability" arguement drive me absolutely nuts.
  We scaled away from too many local banks providing mortgages to a highly efficient centralized fianncial system which then collapsed.
  Lets look at the social mission... numerous duplicative church food banks might actually be more efficient at social impact than a single buyer of food stuffs for all food bank operations nationwide. If fact 10s of thousands of food pantries could use centralized agregated procurement and achive the same economy of scale without the food pantries being scalable and there being 4 on the same block.
  I think there is the same Kill mechanism in the nonprofit sector that there is in the for profit sector... the folks giving you money lose confidence. Madoff managed to keep confidence in a non-performing enterprise and was sucessful for decades even though his enterprise was failing every year.
  I do concede that the mechanism for loosing confidence in the nonprofit sector is far less strong than in the for profit sector. The solution there is transparency and disclosure. We've seen the beginings of this with the new IRS form 990 and the emergence of charity rating entities. Keep it going and we might find there is not a structural probelm with too many non scalable charities, but a problem with the transparency and information avaliable on charities.