Dear Colleagues and Friends,
In case you missed the news last week, I’m pleased to share that the Impact Investing Handbook: An Implementation Guide for Practitioners is now available for free to anyone interested in learning how to align their investments with their values.
After spending over two years interviewing experts and collecting tools, frameworks and case studies from impact investors around the world, it’s exciting to finally get this resource into the hands of both new and existing impact investors. In addition to media coverage in Barron’s, Pensions & Investments and Karma, you can also read excerpts from the handbook in ImpactAlpha -- starting with the “Who.”
But before you dive into the 180-page guide, I wanted to share a few words about why I started this project with my co-author, Patrick Briaud from Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (RPA).
As the impact investing field has grown and evolved, the mission of impact investing has become increasingly clear to me: deploying capital to tackle broad systemic challenges and crises like the climate emergency, COVID-19, institutionalized racism and the growing divide between Main Street and Wall Street.
But deploying capital for impact won’t solve these challenges if there isn’t also a focus on systems change. There are no shortage of resources to describe what an impact investment is or how to build an impact portfolio. But often missing from these resources is any discussion of a theory of change -- the “why” behind why we identify as impact investors and what we are trying to accomplish.
We need to collectively rethink the role of capital in driving positive change, not just investor by investor or portfolio by portfolio, but as a system.
The handbook is designed to give asset owners a roadmap for thinking about these challenging questions, with step-by-step instructions and exercises for taking a theory of change and turning it into reality. By empowering those with capital to invest for impact, it is my belief and my hope that together we can achieve meaningful systems change.
I invite you to take the next step in your impact investing journey. Let’s do this.
All the best,
Steve