Social finance and social investment are not challenging concepts to grasp. They use commercial-style investment tools to create a social as well as a financial return. The application, however, is not always as straightforward. This book begins in the wider field of social finance but focuses primarily on social investment as a tool. The reader is helped to understand this from different angles: introducing social investment, discussing social investment and taking a "deep-dive" into it to bring it to life. This unique book takes the reader on a journey from first principles to detailed practical application. This book examines the policy context and asks why social investment has only recently become so popular, when in reality this is a very old concept. This is linked to the agenda of making charities more "business-like", set against the changing face of investment, as charities can no longer rely on donations and grants as guaranteed income. The work they do is more important than ever and social investment, used with care, offers a new opportunity that is further explored in this text. Mark Salway, Paul Palmer, Peter Grant and Jim Clifford will help readers understand how a small amount of borrowing, or a different business model focused away from grants and donations, could be transformational for the non-profit sector.

Health systems across the world face multiple pressures. Input costs are soaring, systems are struggling to keep up with increasing demand for their services and areas of the world still lack universal health coverage. All of this whilst health inequalities between the best and worst-off within countries persist and, in some countries, are even widening. There is a need to think of new initiatives in response to these global health challenges. One such response is social finance. Social finance is about creating social returns. This innovative and rapidly growing sector promotes new ways of banking and funding social and public services. However, social finance has an under-recognised, and potentially underexploited, role in responding to specific aspects of global health challenges: funding and facilitating access to health(care) services and acting on health. The objectives of this book are to conceptualise and evidence different forms of social finance - microfinance and impact bonds - acting in these ways and to critically engage with current debates and challenges. With such evidence to hand, we can either avoid adoption of new trends in financing public services or, more hopefully, attract greater policy support and resources for new tools for public health and in supporting more precarious, but potentially essential, parts of the finance sector. This book will be essential reading to students, researchers, policymakers and the general public alike who are interested in, or who work in, and across, health systems and social finance.

Our world is experiencing increasingly complex social and environmental challenges. The prevailing business models and, to some extent, capitalism per se, are frequently blamed for these problems due to their neglect of social and environmental values in favour of financial returns. Within this context, social finance has attracted the attention of governments, organizations, entrepreneurs, and researchers as a means of mobilizing resources and innovation with the goal of establishing effective long-term solutions. This edited collection summarizes, discusses, and analyzes new innovative trends in social finance. It features contributions that aim to highlight emerging trends (products, tools, and processes) in social finance, present a series of case studies related to the development, deployment, and scaling of social finance innovations, offer an understanding of how non-economic externalities are being incorporated, managed, and assessed in recent innovations, reveal the disruptive potential of social finance innovations by analyzing how they are redefining mainstream finance, analyze the scales – of operation and impact – of different innovations, and explore the complex relationship between social finance and social innovation. Featuring contributions from both the research and practitioner community as well as policy actors, the book provides more than a snapshot of the current social finance field by specifically highlighting the major challenges and difficulties that require the urgent attention of policymakers and social entrepreneurs.

There are more than 1.8 million nonprofits in the United States and at least 3 times that many internationally. Workers in these nonprofits and civil society organizations increasingly look to academic programs to provide leadership and management training. This edited volume is designed to provide new and experienced faculty and program administrators with a broader conception of how the nonprofit leaders of the future are and could be educated. The chapters are written by experienced nonprofit program leaders who provide guidance on all aspects of building and more importantly maintaining a successful nonprofit program. Many of the chapters are written by former leaders of the nonprofit Academic Centers Council (NACC), a recognized international leader in nonprofit management curricular development, while others are written by successful founders and administrators of nonprofit programs both in the US and internationally. All chapters are however grounded in the experience of the authors, supplemented with research on best practices and focusing on future trends in the field. Preparing Leaders of nonprofit Organizations examines key issues and challenges in the fi eld from multiple perspectives, some of which are curricular and intellectual while others are related to program administration and oversight. The text explores core concepts, distils distinctive features of new or emerging academic programs, and identifies ways program leadership might ensure those features are reflected in their programs regardless of where these are housed within a university. The book is an essential resource for faculty and administrators who work with or are seeking to develop a nonprofit education program. It is also a useful guide for graduate students seeking a career in the nonprofit academy.

Providing an in-depth case study on the emergence of social impact investing in the UK, this book develops a new perspective on financialization processes that highlights the roles of non-financial actors. In contrast to the common view that impact investing gears finance toward the solution of social problems, the author analyzes how these investments create new problems and inequalities. To explain how social impact investing became popular in British social policy despite its unclear effectiveness, the author focuses on cooperative relations between institutional entrepreneurs from finance and various non-financial actors. Drawing on field theory, he shows how seemingly unrelated social transformations – such as HM Treasury's expanding role in public service reform – may act as resonance spaces for the spread of finance. Opening up a new perspective on financialization processes in the terrain of public policy, this book invites readers to refocus scholarship on capitalist dynamics to the meso-level. Based on this analysis, the author also proposes ways to transform social impact investing to increase its potential for reducing global inequalities.

Britain faces challenges that weren’t imaginable thirty years ago, challenges which charities, rooted as they are in community action and the public good, should be ideally suited to tackle. But the charity sector seems paralysed. Even after a decade of cuts and immense social and environmental disruption charities are still fighting hard to maintain business as usual. To develop new responses to our changing world the charity sector desperately needs to reinvent itself, radically re-engaging with communities and developing powerful and scalable responses to the challenges facing the UK in the coming decades. What are the ties that bind charities, rendering them unable to re-invent themselves and to re-imagine their services, even when they face existential crises? This book explores how charities in the UK really operate, as seen through the eyes of people who work in and with charities, and investigates what holds charities back from change. It demonstrates what we can learn from entrepreneurship and market disruption in the private sector, and points to ways in which the sector can re-imagine what it does and how it does this. It presents a new ambition for charities to break free of their history and imagine a new role for themselves in shaping the future for our society. Presenting a new ambition for charities to imagine a new role for themselves in shaping the future for our society, this volume is especially valuable for academics and professionals in the fields of charity and non-profit management, organisational change, and strategic management.

Islamic Social Finance provides an introduction to the Waqf system, which has played a significant socio-economic role throughout the history of Islamic civilization. In a contemporary framework, Waqf creates new networks between micro-entrepreneurs, Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), and entrepreneurship through voluntary donations made by individuals in a society. In other contexts, Waqf supports the financial system and contributes to the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs).

This book examines the detrimental impact of illicit financial flows on South Africa’s development, political economy, and transformation in the 21st century. Over the years, illicit financial flows have led to the systematic looting and channelling away of South African resources, yet they are rarely studied by researchers looking to explain the country’s underdevelopment and political economy. This book looks across sectors, showing that illicit financial flows cut across all the key pillars of development, frustrating the betterment of peoples’ lives in South Africa. Investigating the problem from a decolonial perspective, the book delves deep into the catastrophic impacts of illicit financial flows for people and the economy, discusses how the problem is being combatted, and ultimately suggests solutions for rebuilding social trust between people and the state. Making an important contribution to the decolonial debate, as well as to discussions of South Africa’s political economy, this book will be of interest to researchers across African studies, global development, political science, law and corruption studies.