(Submitted by Jennifer Hancock)

Read Dr. Elizabeth Castillo’s (IHMA member and co-host of our recurring Humanistic Management Professionals Lunch and Learns) latest article on “Counting What Counts: Why Social Accounting MATTERS”. This article was featured in the winter 2018 edition of the Nonprofit Quarterly. In this piece, Dr. Castillo narrates the necessity of social accounting in a society that largely focuses on financial accounting.

Here is a brief excerpt from the article: “However, decision making for large government projects generally neglects intangible resources, instead mandating financially focused analytics, such as cost-benefit analyses geared toward efficiency and cost-effectiveness. While this approach is useful when the primary goal is to preserve financial resources, a singular focus on financial assets often leads to underinvestment in intangible resources essential to long-term success and adaptation. If we are not attuned to them, it can be easy to overlook resources that are more difficult to see and quantify, such as equity, quality, timeliness, and positive social impacts on the community.”

As Jennifer Hancock (founder of Humanist Learning Systems and co-host of the Humanistic Management Professionals Lunch and Learns) states: “We need to change how we think about business, the economy, and whether we should be using gdp as a measure of economic success. Metrics that include well-being must be taken into account!”.

The full article can be found here: https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2019/02/11/counting-what-counts-why-social-accounting-matters/