Purpose Driven or Shared Value?

“Corporations can profit by solving social problems” said Mark Kramer writing in the Guardian about Creating Shared Value.

I didn’t agree. 5 years ealier in our strategy plan for tackling social problems in Ukraine, we’d argued the converse, that profit could be applied to resolve a wide range of social problems:

Profits can be directly applied to help resolve a broad range of social problems: poverty relief, improving childcare, seeding scientific research for nationwide economic advancement, improving communications infrastructure and accessibility, for examples — the target objectives of this particular project plan. The same financial discipline required of any conventional for-profit business can be applied to projects with the primary aim of improving socioeconomic conditions. Profitability provides money needed to be self-sustaining for the purpose of achieving social and economic objectives such as benefit of a nation’s poorest, neediest people. In which case, the enterprise is a social enterprise.”

“In this case, for the project now being proposed, it is constructed precisely along these lines. Childcare reform as outlined above will pay for itself in reduced costs to the state. It will need investment for about five years in order to cover the cost of running two programs in parallel: the existing, extremely problematic state childcare scheme, and the new program needed to replace it for the purpose of giving children a decent life.”

As you may read from comments the Guardian article, sharing this got me censored. Offering a different view was violation of their policy.

It came soon after founder Terry Hallman died in his efforts to leverage support for malnourished and abused children in institutional care.

In 2008, Hallman realised when Bill Gates spoke at Davos about applying capitalism to help the poorest, that Gates was reiterating the point he made. He called on USAID and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, referring to Gates’ speech. A year later Gates would be among those speaking as a Davos roundtable about more effective social programs in Ukraine.

These included Bill Clinton, the recipient of Hallman’s position paper when he served on the steering group of the Committee to Re-Elect the President in 1996 and Tony Blair, the British PM who’d made social enterprise government policy. Both the Clinton Foundation and Blair’s Faith Foundation had benefitted from the generosity of roundtable organiser, Viktor Pinchuk who was otherwise know as one of Ukraine’s Scrooges, for his lack of philanthropy to his own people.

This it seems, was the Nonprofit Industrial Complex in full swing and they didn’t want us at the table.

Speaking out about ‘Death Camps for Children’ in 2006, Hallman had not been flattering to these plutocrats when he wrote:

“Excuses won’t work, particularly in light of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine having been allowed to loot Ukraine’s economy for tens of billions of dollars. I point specifically to Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, and Kuchma, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. These people can single-handedly finance 100% of all that will ever be needed to save Ukraine’s orphans. None of them evidently bother to think past their bank accounts, and seem to have at least tacit blessings at this point from the new regime to keep their loot while no one wants to consider Ukraine’s death camps, and the widespread poverty that produced them..”

A year later in 2010, USAID would partner with The British Council to create their own social enterprise development initiative in Ukraine with the foundations of two major oligarchs as partners. We reponded to solicitation for partnership from The British Council and were told eventually that their partners are expected to make a financial contribution.

The 1996 paper which critiqued neoliberal economics made this point in ts core argument:

“Modifying the output of capitalism is the only method available to resolving the problem of capitalism where numbers trumped people — at the hands of people trained toward profit represented only by numbers and currencies rather than human beings. Profit rules, people are expendable commodities represented by numbers. The solution, and only solution, is to modify that output, measuring profit in terms of real human beings instead of numbers.”

Shared Value is clearly about profit rather than people.