At the end of September, New York was busy thinking and talking about social progress and impact: Mashable's Social Good Summit led to the Clinton Global Initiative, which overlapped with the United Nations General Assembly meeting, all in one week. 

Of many big announcements made at the Clinton Global Initiative (including my own organization's social enterprise salon project to fight sex trafficking and empower survivors, in partnership with The Estee Lauder Companies--read the announcement on Reuters here), one new company stood out: Tau Investment Management, an investment company setting out to "orchestrate and implement capitalist solutions to capitalist failures." In short, they're planning to clean up global supply chains and prove the profitability of responsible practices in the process.

Oliver Niedermaier, Founder and CEO of Tau Investment Management, announced Tau's first commitment: to raise and deploy $1 billion toward supply chain turnarounds, starting within the global garment industry. The process will include overcoming inefficiencies, environmental degradation, and of course labor issues, made strikingly apparent in the past year with the catastrophe in Bangladesh.

Rather than steer clear from unsustainable, irresponsible suppliers and hope the public learns enough of the details to follow suit, Tau will intentionally target these companies, and apply enough capital and expertise to turn them into candidates worthy of use by leading companies and brands. Purpose may not always be more profitable in the short term, but right now we can't afford not to think longer and larger about our impact.

Read more on their website and watch their CGI announcement here.