This episode of Money and Meaning is a recording of an onstage conversation at SOCAP22 between Dr. Allison Boxer, Managing Director of Sorenson Impact Center, and Dr. Roslyn Artis, President and CEO of Benedict College. The college in Columbia, South Carolina, is among the highest-ranked historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, in the Southeast. Benedict College is also a partner in Sorenson Impact Center’s MAPS Project. Using data and a student-centric approach, the MAPS Project ...
Feb 13, 2023•48 min•Ep. 72
Empowering women impact entrepreneurs to reach their fullest potential and drive social and environmental change is the goal of the Cartier Women’s Initiative (CWI), which became SOCAP’s newest Entrepreneur Program partner in 2022. Through the SOCAP Entrepreneur Program, CWI fellows and other selected social entrepreneurs from around the globe gain access to SOCAP’s broad network of investors, donors, and changemakers. In fields from fashion to wastewater management to health care, the CWI fello...
Jan 23, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 71
For 30 years, Advantage Capital has imagined new possibilities for impact by investing private institutional capital in businesses from traditionally underserved communities. Ryan Brennan, Managing Director at Advantage Capital, says the firm’s goal is to get funding to innovative entrepreneurs poised for growth by moving “capital to places where it doesn’t naturally go.” Brennan is featured in the newest episode of SOCAP’s Money + Meaning podcast recorded live at SOCAP22 in San Francisco. In a ...
Jan 09, 2023•16 min•Ep. 70
Biases that limit investors and support organizations are often reinforced by a lack of market visibility. One unexploited solution involves using systems data to boost the visibility of the relationships that small and growing businesses have in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in which they operate. Featured voices: Jason Eaves, CEO of Discover Markets; Adesuwa Rhodes, Founder & CEO of Aruwa Capital Management; and Pratap Raju, Founding Partner of the Climate Collective Foundation.
Oct 16, 2022•32 min
For the third year, SOCAP Global is pleased to present the State of the Field and Practice of Impact Investing. Join Fran Seegull, President of the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance; Monique Aiken, Managing Director or TIIP & Co-founder of Make Justice Normal; and Cathy Clark, Faculty Director at CASE at Duke to hear about the current state, emerging trends, threats and opportunities as impact investing moves more mainstream. This podcast is presented in advance of SOCAP22, held Oct. 17-20 at Y...
Oct 10, 2022•42 min•Ep. 68
For 75 years UNICEF has been supporting the well-being of children around the globe, helping to save more children’s lives than any other humanitarian organization. In 2011, UNICEF USA launched an impact investment fund, the Impact Fund for Children (IF4C). Since the fund’s launch, IF4C has deployed close to half a billion dollars. On this episode, Alex Kravitz is joined by the President of the Impact Fund for Children, Cristina Shapiro. They discuss the innovative fund design that utilizes both...
Oct 19, 2021•28 min
On this episode, host Alex Kravitz is joined by Jasper van Brakel, the President and CEO of RSF Social Finance. Since the 1980s, RSF has been driving capital to social enterprises supporting a more just and regenerative world. As an intermediary, RSF has long supported direct relationships between transactional partners, which led to the launch of their innovative Community Pricing Gatherings in 2009. These meetings bring together investors in their flagship Social Investment Fund, borrowers fro...
Sep 22, 2021•33 min
“It’s not just about what you invest in, it’s about how you invest.” In their new book ‘Letting Go’, Ben Wrobel and Meg Massey make the case that in order to effectively tackle social challenges, philanthropists and impact investors need to cede control of funding decisions to people with lived experiences of the challenges they are trying to solve. During this episode, Meg and Ben join host, Alex Kravitz, to discuss the origin of the participatory funding movement, examples of innovative organi...
Jun 16, 2021•39 min
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,...
May 04, 2021•29 min
“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...
Apr 21, 2021•34 min
“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 i...
Apr 07, 2021•34 min
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 intere...
Mar 23, 2021•25 min
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 ...
Mar 02, 2021•38 min
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 Co...
Feb 17, 2021•32 min
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 mo...
Feb 02, 2021•40 min
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 the...
Oct 27, 2020•35 min
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 busine...
Oct 06, 2020•35 min
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 ...
Sep 22, 2020•42 min
Last year, MIT Solve launched Solve Innovation Future, a first-of-its-kind donor-advised venture fund. The philanthropic venture fund is structured as an evergreen vehicle where proceeds are paid forward into future social entrepreneurs. The evergreen nature allows the fund to provide appropriate forms of capital tailored to each entrepreneur's unique situation. Leading Solve Innovation Future is Casey van der Stricht. In this episode, Casey sits down with Alex to talk about how they landed on t...
Aug 25, 2020•40 min
“It needed to be easier, faster, more dynamic, and more value-add to everybody involved to understand impact. It just doesn't make any sense; people are committing decades of their lives to trying to make a change in the world and the act of figuring out whether or not that’s happening is an exceptional activity.” In this episode, Alex Kravitz is joined by Sasha Dichter, the Co-Founder of 60 Decibels - an end to end impact measurement company. Previously Sasha served as the Chief Innovation Offi...
Aug 11, 2020•43 min
“Finance at some fundamental level is about making bets on the future. Nobody makes money in the present - we only make money because we were right about the future that we bet on. So one really important way to think about investing with a gender lens is to question your assumptions about the future." - Joy Anderson On this episode we are joined by Joy Anderson, Founder and President of the Criterion Institute, a leading think tank focused on shaping markets to create social and environmental g...
Jul 28, 2020•40 min
“It is a privilege to have any investable assets for savings or retirement but if you do, in any amount, you have power. You have the power to invest in companies, in funds, in a financial system and an economy that supports your values. You don’t need to have 6 or 7 figures. Anybody can do it and can do it today.” - Beth Bafford, VP of Syndications and Strategy at Calvert Impact Capital In this episode, we dive into the details of one of the most common questions we get: how do you start impact...
Jul 14, 2020•50 min
For our 50th episode, we take it back to the basics. What is impact investing? What does it look like across asset classes and impact areas? Is impact investing inherently concessionary? And, mostly importantly, is it working? Joining us for this conversation is impact investing thought-leader Rehana Nathoo, Founder and CEO of Spectrum Impact, a strategy consulting firm that supports a range of organizations looking to expand their impact investing footprint. Prior to founding Spectrum Impact, R...
Jun 30, 2020•52 min
This week’s guest is Antony Bugg-Levine, impact investing pioneer and CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF). Founded in 1980, NFF is a community development finance institution that provides financing and consulting to nonprofits across the country. In his role at NFF, Antony recently helped launch a $75mm Covid-19 response fund to support NYC nonprofit organizations most affected by the pandemic with both grants and interest free loans. Prior to his work at NFF, Antony was a Managing Director...
Jun 16, 2020•51 min
“Our board and our team believe that you can define any societal problem as either a climate change problem or an inequality problem…so our thesis has evolved over the years to bring our resources to bear against those two large challenges.” The Autodesk Foundation is a private foundation that focuses on how design and engineering solutions can solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges. In this episode, Alex sits down with Joe Speicher, the Executive Director of the foundation, to discu...
Jun 02, 2020•35 min
MORTAR is a Cincinnati-based accelerator working to help historically marginalized entrepreneurs get the resources they need to start and run successful businesses. Whereas most accelerators pull from as large a pool of entrepreneurs as possible, MORTAR has taken the opposite approach, starting with one specific neighborhood in Cincinnati, Over-the-Rhine, and designing a curriculum to be both relevant and culturally competent for that community. In this episode, Alex sat down with Allen Woods, t...
May 19, 2020•41 min
Entrepreneurship is a leading driver of economic growth, job creation, and wealth building yet 83% of entrepreneurs do not have access to either bank lending or venture capital. To reduce this barrier to starting or growing a business, the Kauffman Foundation recently launched the Capital Access Lab. In this episode, Alex sits down with Philip Gaskin, Vice President of Entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation and Agnes Dasewicz, Entrepreneur in Residence and Capital Access Lab Lead. They disc...
May 06, 2020•32 min
“About a month ago, we asked ourselves at CASE, ‘what can we do really quickly to help entrepreneurs through this crisis?’ We had already seen some very significant businesses in our local area shut down in the first week and that scared me.” -Cathy Clark, Faculty Director of CASE at Duke Realizing there was a need for a centralized database of emergency funding sources for entrepreneurs struggling during the current pandemic, Cathy Clark built and launched covidcap.com, a searchable website for...
Apr 14, 2020•30 min
“I encourage all of us who are the dreamers to continuously put forth new visions for what is possible - particularly in this moment - because, if we can’t do it right now, when can we do it?” - Rodney Foxworth, CEO of Common Future Common Future, formerly BALLE, is an organization dedicated to shifting capital into local communities, uplifting local leaders, and accelerating the development of local economies. In this episode, Lindsay sits down with Rodney to discuss his work, why it is more ur...
Apr 07, 2020•34 min
In his plenary address at SOCAP17 Jed Emerson said, “We need to understand the purpose of capital is not simply the absence of evil from our pursuit of wealth, something hard enough and potentially impossible for us to achieve, but the active pursuit of healing, wholeness, and love in this world.” In this episode, Lindsay sits down with Emerson, a personal mentor and longtime pillar of the SOCAP community, to discuss the field of impact investing from its origins to the present day.
Mar 24, 2020•46 min
