Book Talk: Capital and the Common Good How Innovative Finance Is Tackling the World’s Most Urgent Problems

BOOK TALK

Capital and the Common Good How Innovative Finance Is Tackling the World’s Most Urgent Problems
with adjunct professor Georgia Levenson Keohane

Monday, October 17, 2016
Uris Hall, Room 332
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Refreshments and hors d'oeuvres with RSVP.

Despite social and economic advances around the world, poverty and disease persist, exacerbated by the mounting challenges of climate change, natural disasters, political conflict, mass migration, and economic inequality. While governments commit to addressing these challenges, traditional public and philanthropic dollars are not enough. Here, innovative finance has shown a way forward: by borrowing techniques from the world of finance, we can raise capital for social investments today. Innovative finance has provided polio vaccines to children in the DRC, crop insurance to farmers in India, pay-as-you-go solar electricity to Kenyans, and affordable housing and transportation to New Yorkers. It has helped governmental, commercial, and philanthropic resources meet the needs of the poor and underserved and build a more sustainable and inclusive prosperity.

Capital and the Common Good shows how market failure in one context can be solved with market solutions from another: an expert in securitization bundles future development aid into bonds to pay for vaccines today; an entrepreneur turns a mobile phone into an array of financial services for the unbanked; and policy makers adapt pay-for-success models from the world of infrastructure to human services like early childhood education, maternal health, and job training. Revisiting the successes and missteps of these efforts, Georgia Levenson Keohane argues that innovative finance is as much about incentives and sound decision-making as it is about money. When it works, innovative finance gives us the tools, motivation, and security to invest in our shared future.

About the author:
Georgia Levenson Keohane is the Executive Director of the Pershing Square Foundation, a New York-based family foundation that supports exceptional leaders and innovative organizations that tackle important social issues and deliver scalable and sustainable impact. From 2014-2016, Keohane directed New America's Program on Profits and Purpose, an initiative exploring ways in which social entrepreneurship, innovation and finance can address some of our most pressing social and economic challenges.

Keohane speaks and writes regularly on social and economic policy and the intersection of business and society. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, TIME, the Harvard Business Review, the Washington Monthly, Slate, The Nation, The American Prospect, and other publications. She is the author of Social Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century: Innovation Across the Nonprofit, Private and Public Sectors (McGraw Hill 2013) and Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance is Tackling the World's Most Urgent Problems (Columbia University, 2016).

Keohane’s career has bridged the private and nonprofit sectors. A former McKinsey consultant, she advises a number of organizations including philanthropies, community development and finance organizations, educational entities, think tanks and social purpose companies. From 2011-2014, Keohane was a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where she worked on a range of issues in economic policy, including poverty and inequality, employment and job growth, social entrepreneurship and the role of firms in society. She has taught at Yale, and serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.

Keohane holds a B.A. from Yale University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and an M.Sc. from London School of Economics, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.