How the development of a Learning Community can introduce innovative topics to the university.

Opinion/On April 17 I had the opportunity to share in a “Community Conversation”, within the framework of the Ashoka Exchange 2020.

This was about our experience with the first Impact Investing Learning Community, in which we collaborated with the Chilean organization 2811 to develop a learning community made up of students, business and social entrepreneurship professors, Zona Ei collaborators, and allied mentors. from our Social Entrepreneurship ecosystem and from the Development Bank of Latin America (CAF).

We learned about money and consciousness, investment portfolios and instruments, climate and financial indicators, and the challenge: to create an indicator that reflects the relationship between investment and impact on the environment.

After 4 months of work, the 3 pioneering students from the community created an indicator for the mobility sector that converts the gases (CO2 and others involved in emissions from private vehicles into the atmosphere) into a loss percentage that represents the cost in the nature for emitting these gases.

The experience, in addition to being challenging, was a great learning experience, since we were able to combine the experience of different disciplines (environmental, financial, and entrepreneurship) to demonstrate a real cost, which falls directly on companies, but to which we are all subject.

Sharing this with the Exchange participants was very gratifying as it made me realize the important steps we have taken to raise awareness of this issue from the university and change our way of seeing the profitability, profits and real costs of our day to day.