Godeke Consulting has recently completed an engagement assisting The Rockefeller Foundation with the transition of its PRI portfolio from one team to another. This assignment included a wide range of activities from day-to-day management of the global, multi-asset class portfolio (due diligence, origination, execution, systems, and monitoring) to onboarding the new team on operational and strategic issues in order to create a firm platform for growth of the portfolio under new leadership at Rockefeller.

Godeke Consulting helped Voqal, a collaboration of five nonprofit organizations that work at the intersection of media and technology to advance social equity, to select their new investment advisor. In this investment advisor search, Godeke Consulting partnered with Voqal staff and their investment committee to construct a customized RFP, interviewed candidates and facilitated the investment committee decision-making process and new advisor onboarding.

Godeke Consulting was engaged to work with a high net worth individual to first develop criteria to evaluate candidate investment advisors and to then select a new investment advisor. We developed a customized RFP based on conversations with our client and a questionnaire about her preferences and other key selection criteria. We held initial interviews with over 20 firms, reviewed the detailed proposals from the finalist firms and facilitated in-person interviews with the firms and our client. We also supported the client through the negotiation of the advisor agreement and the onboarding process of the new investment advisor.

The Gates Foundation’s Education and Investment teams wanted to develop a guarantee structure to support the facility needs of high-performing charter schools. These schools had not been able to access the tax-exempt bond market due to the financial crisis and the lack of credit insurance in the market. We were engaged to undertake an extensive due diligence of national CDFIs active in the charter school finance sector to determine the appropriate partners and structures for the program. The resulting $40 million guarantee was one of the first times that Gates used its endowment to support its program activities.

Godeke Consulting has been at the forefront of the impact investing industry and has contributed to the field through several groundbreaking publications. Since the initial partnership of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Godeke Consulting in 2008, “Philanthropy’s New Passing Gear,” and “Solutions for Impact Investors,” have become industry pillars of knowledge, discussion and practice. These guides have been shared across organizations, used as educational materials, and cited in dozens of subsequent works including features in the World Economic Forum, the Social Impact Exchange, and the Institute for Philanthropy. Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors and Godeke Consulting are currently working on a 10th Anniversary relaunch of these monographs.

As part of the GIIN's strategy to bring more impact investing capital to the market, the ImpactBase database was created. ImpactBase is a searchable, online database of impact investment funds and products designed for investors to connect with fund managers. During 2014, Godeke Consulting managed all of the functions of ImpactBase for GIIN including curation of fund profiles, communications with subscribers and fund managers and the technology platform. Our team increased the number of funds on ImpactBase as well as subscribers.

Godeke Consulting worked with a multi-generational East Coast family foundation to explore impact investing opportunities and strategies across a range of sectors. We developed data on potential investment projects in the Washington DC area that broadly addressed poverty and opportunity, identified impact investing opportunities related to the foundation's focus areas (women's economic empowerment, supporting the incarcerated population, and progressive media and messaging) as well as opportunities in Colombia and the artisan sector globally. The results of this search served as the basis for an board conversation about the foundation's expanded impact investment portfolio.

Godeke Consulting worked with a leading impact investing mutual fund group to fine tune its strategy to expand its influence and market with institutional fund platforms through a series of targeted interviews with financial advisors. Our team developed an interview template with the goal of determining how financial advisors prioritize impact investing funds, gather information and education on impact funds, and how they incorporate impact investing funds into their advisory operations and capital deployment. Based on these results, we made a series of specific recommendations to the fund group about how it could re-allocate its marketing resources to accelerate its asset growth on these platforms.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJ) mission is to improve the health and health care of all Americans. One of RWJ’s grantees is Playworks, a nonprofit headquartered in California that improves children’s health and well-being by increasing opportunities for physical activity during recess in low-income public schools. Godeke Consulting worked with RWJ to create a PRI loan guarantee that allowed Playworks to access working capital financing from OneCalifornia Bank, a CDFI, to expand nationally. Playworks required the working capital to pay for its expenses such as hiring prior to the school year when it receives payment from the school systems it serves.

The Robin Hood Foundation and F.B. Heron Foundation co-invested with other foundations and the City of New York to capitalize a $32 million guarantee facility to support the lending activities of the New York City Acquisition Fund. This fund’s purpose is to provide pre-development capital to affordable and low-income housing developers on more favorable and flexible terms than is currently available in the market, and to expand the developers’ capacity to assemble parcels for new development and to preserve existing affordable housing. The Fund is expected to create or preserve approximately 30,000 units of low-income and affordable housing over 10 years. The Fund’s credit enhancement will also encourage private sector lenders to fund loans at higher debt levels and lower pricing. Godeke Consulting was engaged by Robin Hood and the F.B. Heron Foundation to complete initial due diligence of their investments into the Fund and to help establish metrics for ongoing monitoring of their investments.

We provided a cohort of Baltimore corporate philanthropies an industry snapshot that examined how other philanthropies—corporate foundations affiliated with financial services institutions in particular—were engaging in mission aligned investing. The goal was to help the foundation cohort to better understand the state of this market and then identify high level access points for their exploration of impact investing and alternative philanthropic models in Baltimore. We created a concise overview of the current state of the impact investing field and interviewed a series of peer foundations and other stakeholders. The issue brief and landscape was then shared with the cohort.

The New Hampshire Endowment for Health is a $60 million healthcare conversion foundation that wanted to develop a working capital fund for community-based health centers in its state. These centers provide care to a population that is either underinsured or not insured. Medicaid and/or Medicare reimbursement from government can take as long as 120 days. Due to poor economic conditions, normal lines of credit (such as local community banks) had become constrained. As a result, the foundation put in place a working capital fund that could provide short-term lines of credit while waiting for slow but earned revenue to arrive. We worked with the Endowment for Health to develop a request for proposal and then led the due diligence and selection of CDFIs to manage the fund. We also worked with the Endowment to structure its program-related investment into the intermediary.

Godeke Consulting worked as a third-party due diligence provider to the Altman Foundation on a range of PRI investments including supportive housing loan funds, evergreen loan funds for nonprofits and historical preservation loan funds. We met with the investees, reviewed documentation and term sheets, and prepared investment memos for the foundation’s investment committee. We provided independent assessment to Altman to supplement its staff’s ability to execute impact investing opportunities.

Godeke Consulting facilitated a board process at the Ralph E. Ogden Foundation to create an impact investing strategy for this family foundation with interests in arts and culture, community development, education and youth leadership, environmental sustainability, land conservation, agriculture and food, and social justice, human rights and international understanding. During this engagement, Godeke Consulting also led a search for a new investment advisor and worked with the three generations of family board members to develop the qualifications and framework for their investment advisor. This collaboration resulted in a customized RFP to use for interviews and the selection of the new investment advisor from a diverse range of wealth management firms. Godeke Consulting subsequently worked with the Ogden board to develop an investment beliefs statement in conjunction with their new investment advisor.

As part of the Rockefeller Foundation's Innovation Team's development and launch of the social impact bond structure in the U.S., we were engaged to develop “Building A Healthy and Sustainable Social Impact Bond Market: The Investor Landscape.” We led interviews and convenings with over 90 investors and stakeholders over an eight-month period to understand the requirements needed to scale the market and address social problems facing poor and vulnerable communities in the U.S. We tested investor interest in this new impact investing structure that crosses traditional asset classes prior to the first launch of SIBs in the United States.

Godeke Consulting was engaged by a national educational foundation to design an innovative pay-for-success financing structure to support a youth workforce development program for high opportunity youth in several cities in the U.S. We structured specific models around the success payments and explored potential corporate and public funding sources as a way to scale this highly effective workforce development model.