Despite positive economic growth within Latin America and a relatively smooth transition through the 2008 crisis, there are concerns about how this trend will continue.

“The Inter-American Development Bank, Foreign Policy magazine, FEMSA (A leading beverage company in the LAC region) and the Corporación Andina de Formento (CAF) organized the Latin Social Forum entitled ‘The Democratization of philanthropy’ in June 2010. The main purpose of the event was to recognize the profound changes in philanthropic and charitable donating in Latin America. As is happening around the world, the regional trend in philanthropy is toward decentralization, with a growing number of individuals and companies donating through private foundations to social causes.

“The Biotechnology Program of the United Nations University (UNU) has called for applications to its short-term scholarship program and several academic initiatives for 2011. The application process is from June 1st to September 30th. The program includes: (i) climate change and biotechnology, (ii) control of vectors and biotechnology; (iii) biotechnology in human health; (iv) industrial biotechnology, agricultural biotechnology, and biotechnology applied to art conservation; and (v) copyright and technology transfers in biotechnology.

Socialstructing, defined as the movement to bring the social back into our economy and our institutions is becoming a buzz word or movement. People are increasingly feeling inundated with consumerism and big business, feeling the eternal hunt for GDP growth is overshadowing our social processes and needs.

Where in the world might we have the best ingredients to get socialstructing off the ground? LATNAM provides a useful mix of relatively productive economic sectors with a political environment geared towards the left.

“According to the latest OECD Development Center “Latin American Economic Outlook 2011: How middle class is Latin America?,” the relative size of the middle class in each country is: 55 percent in Uruguay, 49.9 percent in Chile, 47.7 percent in Brazil, 46.8 percent in Peru, 44.9 percent in Ecuador, 43.7 percent in Argentina, 38.5 percent in Colombia, and 36 percent in Bolivia. To determine those figures, the study established the median per capita income of the country, then defined 50 percent and 150 percent of that number as the range of the middle class.

Freedom of the press appears to be increasingly challenged in Latin America. According to FORO, “[o]ver the last five months, a group of South American governments have been promoting key initiatives regarding media control and content limitation. President Correa in Ecuador has obtained additional power to regulate media content after winning a highly disputed referendum.

Training services and public-private partnerships are seen as key to successful microfinance initiatives. In the past 10 years microfinance organizations have spread throughout the globe. But not much attention has been paid to how successful they really are, or even how successful microenterprises are in lifting families or communities out of poverty.

"...the Chilean Legislature was discussing increasing royalties to new mining projects from 4-­‐9 percent to 5-­‐14 percent starting in 2018. This will significantly affect several large new projects according to the union that groups the biggest mining companies in Chile, since the effective burden is currently between 4 and 5 percent. However, there seems to be a favorable political environment to increase taxes to these companies.

"While conditional cash transfers by governments have a clear effect on poverty reduction, a more sustainable and resilient to economic crisis impact could be achieved by taking into account the multiple dimensions of poverty and applying more spending, targeting and scaling up government efforts. Inequality —by gender, ethnicity and access to education and health services— is the main factor behind continuing poverty.

FORO writes,

"A CG/LA Infrastructure LLC report was released during the 8th Annual Latin American Leadership Forum, which took place in Bogotá from the 21st to 23rd of April, 2010. This report estimated that investment in infrastructure will amount to US$ 450 billion in 2015, over 2% of the region’s GDP. However, the report notes that India and China are currently investing 6% and 10% of their GDP annually, respectively."