Right.
If I understand your question, you're asking, for the Victorian Order of Nurses, how would that work in getting the capital?
Maybe something that links where I'm speaking from with what Laura is speaking about is that there is a change happening in the investor universe towards what people talk about, double or triple bottom-line investing, or some people now call it impact investing, or other people call it blended value investing. Investors are willing to make an investment, and they want to get a financial return, but they're also interested in understanding what's the social and/or environmental return that they're also getting. Right now, we have a reporting system that primarily gives us financial returns but doesn't do anything on the social or on the environmental side.
The metrics on that latter piece I think are starting to really grow, and there's going to be a lot more happening that will be useful to organizations like the Victorian Order of Nurses, or other non-profits who decide they want to create a social enterprise that would be like a CIC.
I think that basically it's almost like what you're saying: the Victorian Order of Nurses, or somebody, would create a particular entity to carry out a particular project, they would issue shares, there would be a set price for the share, and people would be buying the shares. In a certain sense they're called shares, and they operate like shares, but in one sense, as you allude to, it's almost like putting out a bond and breaking it up into little pieces and calling each of them a share. Presumably if when they sold it the value was less and they had a loss, it would be a capital loss, and people could include that on their tax return.
But, yes, that's how it would operate: they would be appealing to people who would want a financial return on the share, almost like buying a bond in a sense then, and who also were interested in a social return, and that would be another aspect of what the entity would be reporting on. So people would get a financial return sheet at the end of every year, but they would also get a social report of this is how many beds we were able to create, these are how many people we were able to serve, this is what we're able to do for the community.