AWARD ACCEPTANCE REMARKS FROM GEORGE ROBERTS:

I am sorry that I could not be with all of you today in person to accept this wonderful tribute from NESsT.

With so much exciting, innovative and meaningful work being done in the field of social entrepreneurship, I feel extremely proud to be the first recipient of the International Venture Philanthropist Award on behalf of The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund, or, as we are more often referred to, REDF. However, this award should not go to me alone. It should go to the entire REDF team, whose work has made REDF the great organization it is today. The team includes Managing Director Melinda Tuan; Cynthia Gair, our Enterprise Development Director; Julia Jones, Director of Innovation and Integration; Kristen Ace, REDF's Enterprise Development Fellow; Vanessa Collins, Administrative Director; and, John Collins, our Project Associate. Jed Emerson, who is co-founder and former Managing Director of REDF, remains a highly involved advisor, though he left his day-to-day responsibilities at the Fund in 1999 to pursue a fellowship at Harvard Business School.

So on behalf of this whole team, I would like to express our deepest gratitude to NESsT's staff and trustees for recognizing REDF's contributions to the field of venture philanthropy and for honoring us with this award.

Given the focus of the International Venture Philanthropy Forum, I thought it might be helpful to describe how REDF came to be and what it has accomplished.

In the late 1980s, my wife Leanne and I formed The Roberts Foundation. Our goal was to assist nonprofit organizations in Northern California, the community where we live. In doing this, we wanted to take a different approach to philanthropy. In addition to more traditional grantmaking, we also wanted to give in a way that would add value. As best we could, we wanted to improve social outcomes for nonprofit organizations. In short, we believed this could be achieved through marrying the worlds of charity and business.

We were then very fortunate to meet Jed Emerson, a veteran social worker with a great deal of business training. Jed shared our desire to find a way to improve the performance of nonprofit organizations. So, we sat down and thought through how this could be best accomplished. And from that we decided that the combination of Jed's experience in the nonprofit sector with the investment and management practices I'd employed as a private equity investor could be the basis for a new approach to giving.

To put our theory to work, in 1990, we founded The Homeless Economic Development Fund. This Fund was focused on expanding economic opportunities for homeless and very low-income individuals. Over a period of seven years, HEDF made grants in excess of six million dollars to more than forty nonprofit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. In doing this, HEDF focused its efforts on supporting nonprofit-run social purpose enterprises by developing investment and management strategies designed to help these growing businesses succeed, and to make sure this success was being directly applied to the individuals it was mandated to help. In 1996, we dissolved HEDF, and used the successful strategies it had developed as the basis for creating REDF.

REDF is a venture philanthropy fund that works with a portfolio of ten social purpose enterprise organizations. We assist them in a variety of ways, ranging from providing financing and building organizational infrastructure, to many forms of strategic business development counsel.

But, the best way to describe how REDF works with its portfolio enterprises is to give an example. In 1997, REDF began working with Community Vocational Enterprises, or CVE. At that time, CVE was a small organization that did not have its own nonprofit legal status. And, while it had started several small service businesses, none of them were competitive in the for-profit market. Today, after five years of partnership with REDF, CVE is running six social purpose enterprises, which generate one-point-five million dollars in revenue and employ over one hundred disadvantaged individuals on an annual basis.

REDF's partnership with CVE involves monthly business strategy meetings, recruiting top talent to run its enterprises, providing capital for starting and operating expenses, improving CVE's accounting, technology and social outcome measurement systems, and providing the networking contacts for CVE to grow its businesses.

However, working with our portfolio enterprises is not all REDF does. A primary part of our mission is to contribute to improving performance in the nonprofit sector overall. To do this, REDF shares the benefits of what we have learned through our hands-on venture philanthropy work. Through our intern and fellows program, students and professional businesspeople gain experience within the REDF portfolio and take that experience into other communities. Kristin Majeska, who is with all of you at The Forum, worked with a REDF portfolio organization for a year and then started a similar initiative in Maine.

And, in addition to sharing our experience through people, we publish our research, we participate in forums, and we work to actively engage in dialogue with the nonprofit community. The most recent example of REDF's efforts in this regard is Social Return On Investment, or SROI. In short, SROI is a framework for social venture organizations to use in order to calculate and potentially increase the benefits that their programs yield to society. This means, at the simplest level, SROI supports the belief that charitable donations should not simply go to a "good cause." Rather, they should be made as sound social investments that are managed with the same level of strategic thinking and resource allocation practices used in the for-profit sector.

The most recent example of REDF's efforts in this regard is Social Return On Investment, or SROI. In short, SROI is a framework for social venture organizations to use in order to calculate and potentially increase the benefits that their programs yield to society. This means, at the simplest level, SROI supports the belief that charitable donations should not simply go to a "good cause." Rather, they should be made as sound social investments that are managed with the same level of strategic thinking and resource allocation practices used in the for-profit sector. We have applied the SROI framework to our portfolio of organizations. And, we have found it to be an invaluable tool for tracking, calculating and attributing value to the impact that the organizations have in creating social cost savings to society and in impacting the lives of the individuals involved in the programs.

REDF's work on SROI has been widely discussed in the nonprofit community. We are now working with other organizations to help them apply the methodology to their work. And, there is great excitement about what its future holds for evaluating and improving the performance of social purpose organizations.

I now must express how particularly proud all of us at REDF feel to be receiving this award from NESsT. NESsT is a true leader in the field of venture philanthropy and a pioneer on an international scale. We are well aware of this because REDF and NESsT have had a fruitful relationship based on sharing research and intellectual resources for several years. Among other ways, this is reflected in the fact that Cynthia Gair and Julia Jones from REDF have conducted trainings with NESsT in Budapest as well as worked with NESsT on developing its handbook on social enterprise for Central European and Latin American nonprofit organizations. And, Joanna Messing, who was a REDF Intern and later managed our portfolio member Youth Industry, is today Enterprise Development Manager of NESsT.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate NESsT on the publication of its book Not Only For Profit: Innovative Mechanisms For Philanthropic Investment. Like the International Venture Philanthropy Forum itself, this book is representative of the outstanding work NESsT is doing to advance the practice of venture philanthropy.

Again, REDF and I greatly appreciate the award we received today. And, we look forward to continuing our wonderful relationship with NESsT. Thank you.