Speaking at EVPA’s conference: Venture Philantropy and Humaniarian aid; all focus on impact, but semantics from different worlds

By Claire Barnhoorn - On

This year the EVPA’s Annual conference took place virtually, as many conferences over 2020. I was invited to share our lessons learned with Solvoz. The interactive event for foundations and impact funds, gathered around 700 practitioners and experts aimed at creating impact. The 16th edition was dedicated towards ‘Building alliances for Impact’ and took place online between 21 – 24 September 2020.

Introducing EVPA

The European Venture Philanthropy Association (EVPA) is a lively community of organisations sharing the same vision and a common goal: creating positive societal impact through venture philanthropy. Since their launch in 2004, they build up a community of organisations interested in or practising venture philanthropy (VP) and social investment (SI) across Europe.

EVPA defines venture philanthropy as an approach to building stronger investee organisations with a societal purpose, by providing them with both financial and non-financial support. Venture philanthropy’s ultimate objective is to achieve societal impact. VP does this through both social investment and high-engagement grantmaking.

Roundtable discussion: Sharing my lessons learned

During the event I was able to host a roundtable discussion on the 23rd of September, presenting lessons learned with Solvoz and our foundation. How can you enable system change? How to change dominated thinking? Why we need to invest humanitarian aid responses? How to facilitate effective and responsible procurement process as well as provide transparent, efficient and accountable procurement processes?

While we had some digital glitches, happy to discuss topics close to my heart. The real things we need to solve in order to achieve impact beyond imagination. Challenging our thinking in impact measuring… Venture Philantropy and Humaniarian aid; we are all after impact, but our semantics come from different worlds, maybe it feels from different planets sometimes. However, the desire for impact is something that resonates beyond wording itself.