Julianne Zimmerman | January 4, 2019

At the close of every year, email and postal mail boxes overflow with last-minute charitable donation requests.  All throughout December, my inbox, for example, brimmed not only with notices from organizations I support — including Artists for Humanity, More than Words, Respond, The Immigrant Learning Center, The Trevor Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, Poor People’s Campaign, WERS, WBUR, and our church, among others — but also from all manner of groups I’ve never heard of.

I’m not complaining.  Philanthropic giving serves a necessary and vital role in civil society, and the year-end holidays provide powerful religious and secular reminders of the importance of donating a meaningful portion of our resources to benefit others.

And yet.

A new year beckons us to raise our sights and enlarge our ambitions: how much more could we achieve if we also invested for the social / gender / economic justice outcomes we seek in our charitable giving?

It’s not a rhetorical question.  But I routinely meet people who struggle to believe that it is even possible.

So in this post we are calling out some of the pathbreakers who are leading the way on social impact investing.  They are already in the field, identifying and cultivating investment opportunities, sharing deals and best practices, and deploying capital for impact + return.

Why wait for another year to go by?  You can join them now.

[And this is an incomplete list, so please talk back to add to the roster!]

Advisors & Managers

Angel, Seed, Venture

Competitions, Incubators, Accelerators

Platforms

and don’t forget DAFs

Where can you go to learn more?

What’s it worth to you?

One of my favorite quotes of 2018 came from Daryn Dodson:

How much money are you committed to lose, by continuing to invest solely in white men?

Invest in your values.

There are lots of ways to get started.  See recommendations from Cornerstone Capital, Village Capital and The Aspen Institute, among others.

For our part, Reinventure Capital is working from the impact investing playbook Ed originally pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s, investing in overlooked, undervalued founders to grow profitable, value-creating enterprises.

Specifically, we are focused on deploying equity and debt capital in expansion stage (breakeven or so) companies led by people of color and women, across the US.  The Reinventure approach is proven effective at both creating real, measurable social impact and also generating nonconcessionary returns to investors.*

How much more could you achieve if you also invested for the impact outcomes you seek in your charitable giving? 

An order of magnitude?  Two orders of magnitude?  Could you begin to address root causes as well as symptoms?  How would the scope of your impact aspirations and success criteria change as a result?

How would your investment practices and selection criteria need to shift in order to enable that kind of transformative leap?

Just like all new year’s resolutions, it’s best to start with something small and achievable.  So don’t feel that you need to reorient all of your investments in order to make a difference.  Start with one or two investments, and go from there.  Most importantly, start now!

Have you already started to invest for impact?  Please share!  Or better yet, take the conversation to your network!

*While there’s no such thing as a guarantee in investing and no one can reliably predict the future, Ed’s prior track record provides direct evidence that it is indeed possible to consistently invest for both financial returns and social value creation.  If you are an accredited investor and would like to learn more about investments that can advance social, racial, and gender equity by supporting high-value companies led by women and/or people of color, please contact us to start that conversation.

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