Money + Meaning

On this episode of Money and Meaning, host Alex Kravitz is joined by Shalini Rao, Director of Growth Equity at Generation Investment Management. Originally founded in 2004 by Al Gore and David Blood, Generation currently manages over $30B in assets with 100% invested in long-term, sustainable investments. The growth equity team recently closed their third Sustainable Solutions Fund with over $1B in committed capital, which they invest in three broad impact areas: planetary health, people health, and financial inclusion. During the conversation, Shalini talks about the importance of fully integrating sustainability into the investment process. She also discusses Generation’s use of investment roadmaps to identify systems positive outcomes (outcomes necessary to drive change in our economic and social systems) and how they work back from these desired outcomes to identify viable investment opportunities.

“You’ll get no argument from me that there are sectors where moving institutional scale, finance-first money is what’s needed. Our argument is that in places where the market is not functioning, in places where markets have left people behind, that this kind of low-cost money is required in order to make a difference in the lives of poor, marginalized, vulnerable communities and we shouldn’t delude ourselves into believing that finance-first [impact investing] is a magic bullet.”

On this episode of Money + Meaning, Alex Kravitz is joined by Greg Neichin, Director and Board Member of Ceniarth, the impact-first single family office of Diane Isenberg. Ceniarth’s investment strategy focuses on geographies and markets where commercial, finance-first investment is not realistic. Investments in these areas, primarily marginalized, rural communities, necessitates a meaningful tradeoff between impact and return. During the conversation, Greg talks about the evolution of Ceniarth's impact-first approach and the important role that family offices and foundations can play in the sector.

“Lending has the capacity to transform what people can do based on their capabilities and not necessarily based just on the opportunities that they’ve been dealt. If you believe, like I do, that capabilities are equally distributed but opportunities certainly are not, then lending can be a way to try to level the playing field a bit more.”

This episode of Money and Meaning features Jacob Haar, the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Community Investment Management (CIM). CIM is an institutional impact investment manager that provides debt capital to lenders who are doing innovative work in underserved communities. The CIM capital both helps these organizations scale up their lending practices to serve more customers and helps to bring responsible and transparent solutions for the underserved into the financial mainstream.

In late 2020, TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecommunication companies, launched a $100mm corporate impact fund. Named the Pollinator Fund for Good, the fund invests seed and Series A capital in social entrepreneurs working across four impact areas: environment, agriculture, health, and inclusive communities. Joining this episode is Blair Miller, the Managing Partner of the fund to talk about how the TELUS culture of social capitalism led to the fund’s creation and what other corporates interested in impact investing can learn from their experience.

Ever since being denied a Small Business Association loan for being a Black woman, Melissa Bradley has dedicated her career to building support ecosystems for historically marginalized entrepreneurs. From her time working in the Treasury Department of the Clinton White House to the recent launch of both Ureeka and the 1863 Fund, Melissa has helped support entrepreneurship and wealth creation from leadership roles across the public, private, and social sectors. 

Melissa is the Managing Partner of 1863 Ventures, a nonprofit accelerator of New Majority entrepreneurs - their term for the aggregation of diverse ethnic groups that will represent a majority of the US population by 2044. Here she recently launched the 1863 Fund, which aims to both reduce the cost of capital for New Majority founders and to better align that capital through the use of revenue-based financing. She is also the co-founder of Ureeka, an online platform for entrepreneurs to access the people, programs, and connections they need to grow. She is an Adjunct Professor of impact investing and social entrepreneurship at Georgetown University and served as a political appointee under both Presidents Obama and Clinton, most recently serving as the Director of the Social Innovation Fund for President Obama.

Jewel Burks Solomon is the Managing Partner of Collab Capital and the Head of Google for Startups in the US. Having founded and sold her first company, Partpic, to Amazon in her mid-20s, Jewel has made a career out of investing in and helping to mentor traditionally underrepresented founders. Having experienced some challenging investor conversations while growing Partpic, Jewel set out to design an investment fund that better aligned the incentives of investor and entrepreneur. The result is Collab Capital, where she and her two partners are about to close their first $50mm fund. On this episode, Jewel joins our host, Alex Kravitz, to talk about the innovative structure of Collab Capital and the ways that her entrepreneurial journey shaped the direction of the fund. 

On this week’s episode, Alex is joined by Dr. Angela Jackson, the Managing Partner of New Profit’s Future of Work initiatives. New Profit is a venture philanthropy that has provided over $325mm in support to social entrepreneurs since its founding in 1998. Their Future of Work initiatives seek to equip workers with the skills necessary to find livable wage jobs. This work took on a new urgency in 2020 with the pandemic causing unprecedented disruption in the labor market, particularly for the most vulnerable workers. During the conversation, Dr. Jackson talks about the benefits of the venture philanthropy model for scaling social enterprises, the importance of investing in “proximate leaders”, or those closest to the challenges they are trying to solve, and ways that everyone can help build a more equitable future of work.

As demand for impact investments grow, more and more organizations are creating investment products labeled as ‘impact’. However, without any regulatory body or industry-wide standards, there are significant concerns about impact washing, the practice of branding products as ‘impact’ more for marketing reasons than any social or environmental substance. Tideline, an impact investing consulting company, responded to this need by launching their independent verification business in 2019, which they recently spun out into BlueMark. Joining us on the podcast this week is Christina Leijonhufvud, co-founder of Tideline and CEO of BlueMark. Christina discusses the evolution of impact measurement and management practices, the need to measure for both positive and negative impacts, and the increasing importance of independent verification as more and more products are introduced and labeled as impact.

On this week’s episode, Alex is joined by George Ashton III, Managing Director of Strategic Investments at Local Initiatives Support Corporation or LISC. George recently helped launch LISC's Black Economic Development Fund. Targeting up to $250mm and initially seeded by $25mm investments from both Netflix and Costco, the Black Economic Development Fund will work to close the racial wealth gap through both a direct and indirect investment strategy: directly through investments in black-led businesses and anchor institutions, and indirectly through working with black-led financial institutions. Our conversation covers the growth of CDFIs, their role in community development, the economic incentive for corporations to help close the racial wealth gap, and how more corporations can unlock their balance sheets for impact.

On this episode, host Alex Kravitz is joined by Margret Trilli, the CEO & Chief Investment Officer of ImpactAssets, a nonprofit impact investing firm with over $1.2B in assets under management. They discuss ImpactAssets’ flagship donor-advised fund and the surge in both charitable giving and impact investments they have seen in 2020. They also discuss the partnership between ImpactAssets and the nonprofit Stop the Spread, which has led to hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and impact investments being deployed into COVID response funds over the past six months.