DSVP and Youth Village Foundation featured in Dallas Morning News

If any of you have ever had the pleasure of working with business columnist Robert Miller for the Dallas Morning News, you know he's a legend among the nonprofit community. I can't think of any other writer who has dedicated his golden prose to amplifying the missions and elevating leaders of Dallas' social sector. A nonprofit leader recently stating that you "know your organization has arrived" when Robert Miller has written about your work.

Today's article, "Many Help Young Offenders Refocus", features DSVP's most recent investment, Youth Village Foundation, and highlights the relationship we are embarking on over the coming years. DSVP has indeed begun to create our strategy working with Jerry Silhan, Executive Director and their Board to map out how we can best be relative to their efforts. We have identified our Lead Partners, Lynne Thorby and Scott Chase, who will serve as the partner liasons between Youth Village Foundation and DSVP. DSVP Engagement Manager, Sari Raskin, is busy crafting an engagement strategy to maximize the use of DSVP's human capital, intellectual capital, social capital, along side the grant dollars.

A Primer on L3C - Tax Status - an alternative corporate structure with a social responsibility.

Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR, has certainly earned a name in the philanthropic lexicon. It seems that everyone has an opinion on if and how corporations should engage in social impact work.

From the corporate/for-profit perspective, the idea is that you give back to the communities of customers, employees, and the global public. This can be a pure marketing strategy that is determined to reach your customer where they're are at; or by taking on a systemic social issue that your own for-profit product development encounters to help society or the environment.

However, either as Cause Marketing or as work for Social Impact, the ultimate goal of a corporation is to maximize profits for their shareholders. So, as Public Relations or Philanthropy, it must ultimately be self-serving to the Limited Liability Corporation, or LLC, for it to truly reach corporate nirvana. A bit of a pity, but at least we know the true stripes of the animal we call a corporation. Regardless, the CSR concept begins to acknowledge the value and impact a corporation already has to the social fabric of a community and our global ecosystem. In fact, many organizations and leaders are currently dedicated to developing the standard of measures for ROI that are social and environmental.

An evolution of these ideas is a new business status of a Low-profit Liability Corporation, or L3C has made it's way into 3 states. Vermont has passed the law, Michigan is waiting for the Governor's signature, and North Carolina has it in the Senate Finance Committee. For a good definition and information on the structure, read Americans for Community Development's FAQ's on L3C. "An L³C is run like a regular business and is profitable. Unlike a for-profit business, however, the primary aim of the L³C is not to make a profit, but to achieve socially beneficial purposes. Profit is a secondary goal. The L³C thus occupies a unique niche between the for-profit and charitable sectors."

In the white paper Mobilizing Change released by the Aspen Institute in 2008, L3C status was listed as one of the top ten policy recommendations for the social/nonprofit sector in the future.

"Idea #2: Promote the growth of enterprises that mix business practices with social missions by creating a special tax code designation for social-benefit enterprises." Quoted in that article is Heather Peeler with Community Wealth Ventures who wrote The L3C: A New Tool for Social Enterprise.

Other Resources via wikipedia:

International Business Report (2008). Corporate Social Responsibility: a necessity not a choice, Grant Thornton.

Baker, Mallen. "Arguments against Corporate Social Responsibility". Business Respect. Retrieved on 2008-03-07.