Impact Investing

Risk, Return and Impact: Understanding Diversification and Performance Within an Impact Investing Portfolio

Jed Emerson

This brief offers impact investors a review of key considerations concerning risk, return and impact when constructing an impact portfolio. Various types of risk are identified along with a review of the “New Efficient Frontier” and the types of impact investing options that may be arrayed across a range of financial, social and environmental returns. 

Solutions for Impact Investors: From Strategy to Implementation

Steven Godeke and Raúl Pomares

Solutions for Impact Investors: From Strategy to Implementation aims to increase the rigor with which impact investors frame their investment decisions and demonstrate the integration of impact investing across asset classes. In conjunction with the team of academics and practitioners who have produced this monograph, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors highlights some of the areas in which behavioral economics and innovative organizational and legal structures can be applied to the discipline of impact investing. By describing best practices in transparency, disclosure and rigorous decision- making, we also hope to bridge the divide between traditional and social purpose investing. 

Making Big Bets for Social Change

William Foster, Gail Perreault, Alison Powell and Chris Addy

Why does such a large gap exist between what donors say they would like to achieve with their philanthropy and where they actually make their biggest bets? And how can we close it?

When Can Impact Investing Create Real Impact?

Paul Brest and Kelly Born

Although it is possible for impact investors to achieve social impact along with market rate returns, it’s not easy to do and doesn’t happen nearly as often as many boosters would have you believe. 

Strategies for Financing the Inclusive Economy

Marjorie Kelly, Violeta Duncan and Steve Dubb

How can impact investors, family foundations, and financial institutions strategically leverage  their investments toward solutions that help stem and reverse rising economic inequality? This new report from The Democracy Collaborative explores ways in which impact investors can  help build an inclusive economy by accelerating  the growth of broad-based ownership models—worker cooperatives, social enterprises, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), hybrid  enterprises, and municipal enterprise.

Community Foundations Pursue Impact Investments to Build Local Economies

Catherine Covington
The Chronicle of Philanthropy

In this issue of The Chronicle of Philanthropy, our Senior Fellow Marjorie Kelly was featured for her work on equitable, sustainable community development and innovations in the community wealth building field.

Zevin Asset Management, LLC

Zevin Asset Management, LLC is an employee-owned socially responsible investment firm established in 1997. The firm manages accounts for endowments, foundations, religious institutions, and families. Zevin Asset Management was built to perpetuate the unique investment and social investing approaches pioneered by Robert Zevin, who started what is now Walden Asset Management in 1975, making it the first explicit socially responsible unit in any bank. Read more about Zevin Asset Management, LLC...

SRI Annual Conference

November 9th, 2016 to November 11th, 2016
Denver, CO

New Orleans Start-up Fund

The New Orleans Startup Fund (The Startup Fund) is a nonprofit seed fund formed to accelerate the growth of early-stage, innovative New Orleans area businesses into venture-ready companies, and thus, create jobs and economic prosperity for New Orleans.  Established by area business and financial leaders, The Startup Fund has initial commitments of more than $5 million, from which it invests between $25,000 and $100,000 in businesses located in the Greater New Orleans area. Read more about New Orleans Start-up Fund...

What is Community Wealth Building and Why is it so Important?

CWB builds on local talents, capacities and institutions, rebuilding capital to strengthen and create locally-owned family and community owned businesses.

Crossposted from Veris Wealth Partners

More than a decade ago, my colleagues and I at The Democracy Collaborative began using a term for a new kind of economic development – Community Wealth Building. For years, the term was so uncommon that it almost invariably appeared within quotation marks when used.

Today, a Google search identifies 124,000 entries and is growing daily.

Community Foundations in Pacific Northwest Expand Impact through Collective Impact Investing

The Cascadia Foodshed Funding Project offers a model that is critical not only to the development of good funding, but also to the development of a social and financial infrastructure to grow any local economy.
http://www.csrwire.com/

Kapor Capital

The Kapor Center works to leverage information technology for positive social impact.  It has two arms:  1) Kapor Capital, which invests in for-profit information technology-focused, seed-stage startups that create positive social impact and economic value, and 2) Kapor Center for Social Impact, which develops partnerships that advance the presence and power of underrepresented populations in the tech ecosystem.  Kapor aims to make 20 to 25 new $100k-$250k investments a year. Read more about Kapor Capital...

Cutting Edge Capital

Cutting Edge Capital provides consulting services to help small business, cooperatives, social enterprises, and nonprofits raise capital in in a manner compliant both with complicated securities law as well as a business’ values. Its efforts include helping the California Air Resources Board with the state’s new cap and trade system, developing strategies to increase financing for the local food system, as well as designing a community investment fund for western Massachusetts. For their impact, Cutting Edge Capital was recognized as a B Corporation that is “Best for Communities”. Read more about Cutting Edge Capital...

How Community Foundations Can Accelerate Social Change

“The world has changed, and so must we.” – Clara Miller of The F.B. Heron Foundation

Originally published at Veris Wealth Partners

Clara’s right.

The time is now for community foundations to embrace a new vision that accelerates social progress and rebuilds local wealth. Read more about How Community Foundations Can Accelerate Social Change...

A New Anchor Mission for a New Century: Community foundations deploying all resources to build community wealth

Marjorie Kelly and Violeta Duncan

As the community foundation field reaches the century mark and faces growing pressure on its business model, many communities at the same time are struggling with economic distress. To meet these converging challenges, an innovative group of community foundations are beginning to deepen and shift how they work—adopting an anchor mission that seeks to fully deploy all resources to build community wealth. They are calling on all assets at their disposal—financial, human, intellectual, and political—in service of their communities’ economic well-being. Moving into territory relatively uncharted for community foundations, they are taking up impact investing and economic development—some in advanced ways, others with small steps. This report offers an overview of how 30 representative community foundations, large and small, urban and rural, are working toward adopting this new anchor mission.