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?
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.
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.
This new toolkit from the German Marshall Fund offers policies and practices to empower communities to preserve civic assets such as public parks, libraries, and recreation centers in the face of public and private resource constraints. Based on research conducted in Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Baltimore, the guide offers a range of strategies to raise money, awareness, and community involvement for the preservation of community assets.
In this new book, Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin and Nathans Cummings Fellow Margot Brandenburg make the case for impact investing as an alternative to traditional investing and philanthropy. Intended as a primer for retail investors, high-net-worth individuals, foundations, and others wishing to broaden the social and environmental impact of their investments, the book highlights opportunities to invest for social good around the world.
Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2016 is an annual industry forecast about the ways we use private resources for public benefit. Each year, the Blueprint provides an overview of the current landscape, points to major trends, and directs your attention to horizons where you can expect some important breakthroughs in the coming year.
Madeleine Taylor Ph.D., Anne Whatley M.S. and Julia Coffman M.S.
This article describes the evaluation framework and its three pillars of network assessment: network connectivity, network health, and network results.
This issue brief takes a close look at two SIB initiatives currently in the development phase, each with Enterprise’s support. One initiative aims to reduce chronic homelessness in Denver, while the other aims to reduce the number of days homeless children stay in foster care in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The brief also looks at federal policy initiatives underway to promote SIBs and similar “pay-for-success” initiatives, including bipartisan legislation that would create a new fund at the Department of the Treasury to support SIB contracts.
“There is a symbiotic relationship between the health and resilience of a country’s economy, and the health and resilience of a country’s people,” notes Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, in his introductory remarks. In this paper, Dallas Fed economist Elizabeth Sobel-Blum aims to provide guidance to financial institutions seeking to comply with Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) obligations—as well as their customers, partners and target communities—regarding ways to leverage neighborhood assets to build community wealth and reduce health disparities.
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.
Earlier this year, the Surdna Foundation announced the creation of a $100 million impact investment fund (roughly 10 percent of their portfolio) in order to align their investment practices with their grant making activities. This new guide distills the lessons learned in establishing the fund, including their research on the spectrum of mission investment tools available to philanthropy, detailed information on their internal processes and timeline, and discussion of key milestones and challenges.
With income inequality in the United States at record high levels, employee ownership is increasingly being lauded as a potential solution to spreading wealth more broadly. Most recently, research from the National Center for Employee Ownership released in May shows that employee owners have a household net worth that is 92 percent higher than non-employee owners. They also make 33 percent higher wages, and are far less likely to be laid off.
But employee ownership requires new investment in order to get to scale. A new report by Mary Ann Beyster, president and trustee of the Foundation for Enterprise Development (FED), published by the Fifty by Fifty initiative of The Democracy Collaborative, examines the investing landscape for potential opportunities in employee ownership. The report, Impact Investing and Employee Ownership, reports on the results from six months of research showing that the opportunities for impact investors to support employee ownership are limited, but that an investing infrastructure is beginning to emerge across asset classes.
The aim of this study was to deepen the understanding of the specific practices and methodologies that established impact investors are using to measure the social impact generated by their investments, and to analyze the conditions under which each measurement method is most relevant. The intended audience for our analysis is impact investors themselves, as well as social sector organizations, traditional funders, and evaluators.
The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment released its tenth biannual report on what it labels the “sustainable, responsible and impact investing sector.” The report identified place-based investing, largely by public funds directing investment into their city or state, “as a new trend, accounting for nearly $90 billion in assets.” Additionally, the use of environmental, social and governance criteria by institutional investors, once a small market niche, now covers over $4 trillion in market assets, representing a four-fold increase from 2012 to 2014 alone.
This new report, authored by Democracy Collaborative Senior Fellow Marjorie Kelly, offers a comprehensive framework of community investing, ownership, and wealth control models to enhance the social, ecological, and economic well-being of rural areas.
This free course, which covers the basic legal rules for program-related investments, takes about forty-five minutes to complete. The course is part of Learn Foundation Law, a free resource devloped by legal staff at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that provides training on legal issues in grantmaking for private foundations.
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?
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.
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.
This new toolkit from the German Marshall Fund offers policies and practices to empower communities to preserve civic assets such as public parks, libraries, and recreation centers in the face of public and private resource constraints. Based on research conducted in Detroit, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Baltimore, the guide offers a range of strategies to raise money, awareness, and community involvement for the preservation of community assets.
In this new book, Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin and Nathans Cummings Fellow Margot Brandenburg make the case for impact investing as an alternative to traditional investing and philanthropy. Intended as a primer for retail investors, high-net-worth individuals, foundations, and others wishing to broaden the social and environmental impact of their investments, the book highlights opportunities to invest for social good around the world.
Philanthropy and the Social Economy: Blueprint 2016 is an annual industry forecast about the ways we use private resources for public benefit. Each year, the Blueprint provides an overview of the current landscape, points to major trends, and directs your attention to horizons where you can expect some important breakthroughs in the coming year.
Madeleine Taylor Ph.D., Anne Whatley M.S. and Julia Coffman M.S.
This article describes the evaluation framework and its three pillars of network assessment: network connectivity, network health, and network results.
This issue brief takes a close look at two SIB initiatives currently in the development phase, each with Enterprise’s support. One initiative aims to reduce chronic homelessness in Denver, while the other aims to reduce the number of days homeless children stay in foster care in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The brief also looks at federal policy initiatives underway to promote SIBs and similar “pay-for-success” initiatives, including bipartisan legislation that would create a new fund at the Department of the Treasury to support SIB contracts.
“There is a symbiotic relationship between the health and resilience of a country’s economy, and the health and resilience of a country’s people,” notes Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, in his introductory remarks. In this paper, Dallas Fed economist Elizabeth Sobel-Blum aims to provide guidance to financial institutions seeking to comply with Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) obligations—as well as their customers, partners and target communities—regarding ways to leverage neighborhood assets to build community wealth and reduce health disparities.
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.
Earlier this year, the Surdna Foundation announced the creation of a $100 million impact investment fund (roughly 10 percent of their portfolio) in order to align their investment practices with their grant making activities. This new guide distills the lessons learned in establishing the fund, including their research on the spectrum of mission investment tools available to philanthropy, detailed information on their internal processes and timeline, and discussion of key milestones and challenges.
With income inequality in the United States at record high levels, employee ownership is increasingly being lauded as a potential solution to spreading wealth more broadly. Most recently, research from the National Center for Employee Ownership released in May shows that employee owners have a household net worth that is 92 percent higher than non-employee owners. They also make 33 percent higher wages, and are far less likely to be laid off.
But employee ownership requires new investment in order to get to scale. A new report by Mary Ann Beyster, president and trustee of the Foundation for Enterprise Development (FED), published by the Fifty by Fifty initiative of The Democracy Collaborative, examines the investing landscape for potential opportunities in employee ownership. The report, Impact Investing and Employee Ownership, reports on the results from six months of research showing that the opportunities for impact investors to support employee ownership are limited, but that an investing infrastructure is beginning to emerge across asset classes.
The aim of this study was to deepen the understanding of the specific practices and methodologies that established impact investors are using to measure the social impact generated by their investments, and to analyze the conditions under which each measurement method is most relevant. The intended audience for our analysis is impact investors themselves, as well as social sector organizations, traditional funders, and evaluators.
The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment released its tenth biannual report on what it labels the “sustainable, responsible and impact investing sector.” The report identified place-based investing, largely by public funds directing investment into their city or state, “as a new trend, accounting for nearly $90 billion in assets.” Additionally, the use of environmental, social and governance criteria by institutional investors, once a small market niche, now covers over $4 trillion in market assets, representing a four-fold increase from 2012 to 2014 alone.
This new report, authored by Democracy Collaborative Senior Fellow Marjorie Kelly, offers a comprehensive framework of community investing, ownership, and wealth control models to enhance the social, ecological, and economic well-being of rural areas.
This free course, which covers the basic legal rules for program-related investments, takes about forty-five minutes to complete. The course is part of Learn Foundation Law, a free resource devloped by legal staff at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation that provides training on legal issues in grantmaking for private foundations.
