The Family Impact Canvas – a new tool for change makers

In about six weeks, CSSL will formally launch our new Social Impact Collective, a new community of high net worth families seeking insight, tools and connection to make their giving and impact investing more effective. Our inaugural group will gather for our Discovery Weekend in Half Moon Bay at the beautiful Miramar Farms.

In addition to the amazing people who are founding the Collective, we’re fortunate to have a tremendous group of faculty for the weekend to drive learning, reflection and action on social impact. The faculty includes:

• Laura Tyson, our former Dean, and the Director of the Institute for Business and Social Impact here at Haas
• Paul Brest, the former President of the Hewlett Foundation and Professor Emeritus at Stanford
• Kat Taylor, co-CEO of Beneficial State Bank and signer of Warren Buffett’s giving pledge
• Diane Parnes, Board Officer at SV2 and former ED of the Sobrato Family Foundation
• Fay Twersky, Director of the Effective Philanthropy Group at the Hewlett Foundation
• Paula Goldman, Global Director of Impact Investing at the Omidyar Network

And we’re still adding speakers.

A new phase and home for “Armed Conflict” research

Dr. Angana Chatterji

The Armed Conflict Resolution and People’s Rights Project (ACRes) is moving to the Center for Race and Gender at UC Berkeley. The project has been with the Center for Social Sector Leadership (CSSL) at Berkeley-Haas since it was instituted in April 2012. Along with the move, the project will also take on a new name and focus; it will be called the “Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project.”

The Center for Race and Gender (CRG) is the new home for the project effective January, 2016, with the full and enthusiastic support of CSSL and CRG. The move will further enable the interdisciplinary commitments of the project in the next phase of its work. A pioneering, interdisciplinary research center, CRG houses research initiatives and working groups concerned with race and gender (as well as coloniality and other relations of power), allowing them to develop freely and flourish.

The first and successful phase of ACRes, led by founding co-chairs Professor Angana P. Chatterji and Professor Shashi Buluswar, and director of programs, Mallika Kaur, included project partnerships with civil society organizations in the areas of focus in South Asia, and with the International Human Rights Law Clinic (IHRLC) at Berkeley Law, and both the Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) and the Center for Human Rights Documentation and Research (CHRDR) at Columbia University. The project produced a collaboratively authored monograph entitled, Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence: The Right to Heal, with a statement/preface by Navanethem Pillay, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008-2014) and a foreword by Veena Das, Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. The project co-produced a co-authored a report with IHRLC entitled, Access to Justice for Women: India’s Response to Sexual Violence in Conflict and Social Upheaval [PDF]. The project also initiated an archive on the legacy of conflict.

HSIF: Documenting Health Access in Nepal – Grace Lesser

This is the seventh post in our Haas Social Impact Fund (HSIF) series.

Mora, 29 years old: “This is my second child. More than this would be a challenge with the economics and with the health. If I don’t use a family planning method I’ll have another baby, and I don’t want that. Most women choose a permanent method for that reason. I will too.”

As an MBA/MPH student, Grace Lesser (2016) had the unique opportunity to receive both the UC Berkeley Global Health Reporting Fellowship and support from the Haas Social Impact Fund (HSIF) and Rashell Young Fellowship this past summer. With these fellowships, she pursued a customer insights/photojournalism study on access to maternal and reproductive health services in post-earthquake Nepal with One Heart Worldwide (OHW), a maternal health NGO with an extraordinary boots-on-the-ground presence in relief efforts there. “My goal in doing this project,” Grace said, “was to provide a counterpoint to the dryness of the policy conversation, or the flatness of the funding dialogue. My original goal was to document narratives across several different countries, but when the earthquake hit Nepal and I had the opportunity to go through a relief organization with a real local presence, I focused my efforts on examining health access in the wake of the crisis.”