Invest with Values

The Investor's Gateway to Positive Change

The Investor's Gateway to Positive Change

Impact Investing News

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Tech Moguls Bet on AltSchool to Transform Education

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AltSchool has a big new vision for schools and now it has $100 million to roll it out. The financing comes from Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Andreesen Horowitz, EBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network and others, another sign of the surge of tech investors into education.  Ed-Surge reported that $1.36 billion went into new ed-tech companies in […]

Making Nature Pay: Bankers Work to Finance Conservation at Scale

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Restoring forests, wetlands and wildlife habitat is exciting. Leave it to the bankers to make financing such environmental projects downright boring. As climate concerns and other environmental anxieties mount, Wall Street and global bankers are hammering the complexities of conservation into the kind of mature, repeatable financial products bankers sell every day. That the payments […]

Fifth Annual Impact Investor Survey Reflects on Industry Growth, Past and Projected

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SOURCE: JPMorgan Chase & Co. DESCRIPTION: Click here to download the report May 4, 2015 /3BL Media/ -146 of the world’s largest impact investors, including fund managers, banks, development finance institutions, foundations, and pension funds report having committed $10.6 billion to impact investments in 2014, with plans to commit 16% more in 2015. The surveyed […]

Goldman’s Big Bet on Bitcoin (and Circle Internet Financial)

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Think bitcoin is a trending fad?  Banks and institutional investors don’t. Goldman Sachs and IDG Capital Partners announced a $50 million investment in Circle Internet Financial yesterday, one of the largest investments yet into the bitcoin space. That kind of interest may be why Richard Branson will be inviting an elite few to his island […]

The Women Effect in Independent Media: Tough Entrepreneurs in Tough Environments

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(Editor’s note: The Women Effect in Independent Media series highlights women in media building commercially viable, independent, news businesses in environments hostile to the press. Released in recognition of World Press Freedom Day, ImpactAlpha and the Media Development Investment Fund (MDIF) will present the series in three parts. The first installment, published today, explores how Natasa Tesanovic’s radio […]

Natasa Tesanovic: Building a Radio Business to Help Rebuild Bosnia and Herzegovina

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For the last two decades Natasa Tesanovic’s radio station has challenged a nation to face its violent past and reconcile issues that would otherwise tear it apart. Her independent media outfit has succeeded in a patriarchal society, accustomed to partisan news, for two main reasons: a well-run business and courageous, professional journalists—most of whom happen […]

Changing Capital: Four Strategies for Shifting Capital to Communities

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By Sarah Trent This is the third in a three-part series featuring Local Economy Fellow Jessica Norwood. Below, read about four strategies ECN is implementing to change how capital works for under resourced communities in the Black Belt. In part one, learn about Jessica’s journey to Localism and her passion for changing how capital works to support communities. […]

Warby Parker Raises $100 Million for Bricks and Mortar Expansion

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Neal Blumenthal, CEO of Warby Parker, has long said that calling the designer eyewear company an “e-commerce brand was too narrow a definition.” He demonstrated that this week, raising $100 million to expand the company’s physical locations.  The financing valued the company at a cool $1.2 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. The growth […]

Indian Jobs Marketplace Babajob Attracts Follow-On Funding

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Babajob, an India-based, informal employment platform, has raised second-round funding from Seek Ltd., one of the largest global employment marketplaces. Babajob, founded in 2007, connects workers to jobs as delivery staff, office helpers, drivers, cooks, maids, security guards, and more. Seek, based in Australia, joins initial investors Khosla Impact and Gray Ghost Ventures, which invested in 2012. […]

Women Rule: Why the Future of Social, Sustainable and Impact Investing is in Female Hands

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By Marta Maretich In the early days of the social investing movement, women and girls were arguably seen more as program beneficiaries than financial movers and shakers. Social lenders changed their view when they realized that focusing initiatives like microfinance lending on women turned out to be the most effective way to make whole communities […]

Impact Makers Gifts Company to the Community

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RICHMOND, Va., Apr. 29 /CSRwire/ – Impact Makers has gifted the company’s equity ownership to two nonprofit organizations, The Community Foundation Serving Richmond and Central Virginia and Virginia Community Capital. The company took this action, a first amongst social enterprises, in order to preserve and grow its philanthropic mission. The gift also is helping enable […]

Save Organic Citrus!

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We are in the peak of citrus season here in California and while we’re all blissfully enjoying juicy doses of Vitamin C, you may not realize that the organic orange you’re biting into is on the verge of dying off from a disease called Citrus Greening. Jessica Shade, the Director of Science Programs at The […]

USDA: Investments in Agriculture and Forestry Yield Climate Solutions

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Farmland may be even more important than factories when it comes to finding solutions to climate change. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, with  public and private partners, last week announced actions to help the agriculture sector  mitigate its carbon emissions and adapt to the long-term effects of climate change. The expected impact: a reduction of two […]

Investing with the head and the heart: reflections from the AVPN conference

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Reflecting on my three days at the Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) conference, held 20-23 April in Singapore, I was struck by the number of conversations that wrestled with seemingly dichotomous concepts: head vs heart, disruption vs sustainability, local solutions vs scale, perseverance vs ‘fail fast’, and even as far as love vs hate. But […]

Is the Public Etsy Still Part of the Sharing Economy?

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Etsy’s IPO took Wall Street by storm last week. The conversation was peppered with questions about whether or not a company that claims to be “a mindful, transparent and humane business” could succeed on Wall Street, a space where these adjectives are rarely used. Yet, this is not the question I’ll ask today. Instead, I’ll focus on is whether […]

RSF Social Finance Extends Additional Financing to GREEN CREATIVE

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SAN FRANCISCO, April 24, 2015 /3BL Media/ –  RSF Social Finance (RSF) is pleased to announce a new loan to GREEN CREATIVE, a San Francisco Bay Area-based developer and manufacturer of commercial and specification grade LED lighting solutions. RSF financing, in participation with New Resource Bank, will be used to fund working capital needs and build inventory […]

Kyle Zimmer: The Triumphs and Tribulations of Impact Investing

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Both the triumphs and the growing pains of “impact investing” were on display in Oxford, England last week. Impact investing goes beyond the passive tactic of limiting investments to, say, companies that are green or that don’t produce guns. Rather this practice combines traditional and cutting edge investment strategies to provide financial return through active […]

Here’s How to Take the First Steps Toward Impact Investing

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Written by Don Shaffer of RSF Social Finance for ImpactAlpha. The movement toward investing in what’s good instead of just screening out what’s bad is growing, spurred by a new generation of investors. Millennials are questioning conventional systems and approaches across the board, from food to education to finance. That’s leading many to start aligning […]

ImpactAlpha and ImpactSpace tie the knot

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Editorial leadership and open data around impact investing go together like, well, ImpactAlpha and ImpactSpace. And, in fact, our teams have been working together for more than a year to build out our complementary offerings. The time has come to go legit. We are very pleased to announce that ImpactAlpha and ImpactSpace have officially merged as ImpactAlpha Inc., a for-profit […]

What’s Behind the Boom in Women Entrepreneurs?

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Woman-owned nonprofit Untapped Shores provides an opportunity for travelers to make a difference by carrying and delivering a life-saving business-in-a-box to a woman or a family in need. There are now 8.3 million women-owned businesses in the United States. Together they employ more people than McDonald’s, IBM and Wal-Mart combined, and their revenue of $1.3 […]

Bamboo Finance Raises $31 Million for “Next Generation” Microfinance

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Bamboo Finance is doubling down on microfinance. Backed by a decade of experience and an appetite from mainstream investors, the private equity firm specializing in business models that benefit low-income communities announced a first close of $31 million for its Bamboo Financial Inclusion Fund II. The close attracted institutional investors including Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America (TIAA-CREF) and AXA-IM. […]

Embracing a New Definition for Social Investing

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By Marta Maretich Definitions — we are so over them in the social investing sector. I mean, we wrangled over those darn meanings for years: ethical investing, responsible investing, socially responsible investing, triple- and double-bottom-line investing, green investing, sustainable investing and finally — boom! — impact investing. We split hairs, we waved banners, we made […]

Fish 2.0 is Searching the Seven Seas for Seafood Entrepreneurs

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A Fish 2.0 workshop in Fiji last month to explore ways to develop the South Pacific’s fishing industry was interrupted by a staggering object lesson: the devastation of Vanuatu by Super Cyclone Pam. For workshop participants, who also came from Tuvalu, Kiribati, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, the crushing impact of Pam underlined […]

UPDATED: Next Generation of Impact Finance Talent Converges on London

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ARTICLE UPDATED ON 4/20/15 A proposal to address California’s historic drought and wildfire risk took first place in the fifth annual Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge. A team of business students from Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley won the competition’s $10,000 prize with its plan to fund strategic forest thinning in Northern California that distributes the […]

ImpactBase Snapshot: Funds Have Raised Less than Half Their Targets

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Our friends over at ImpactBase have published the first analysis of the more than 300 impact funds in the database. Their conclusion: most impact investing funds remain young and hungry. The analysis, released by the Global Impact Investing Network, which operates ImpactBase, found that a whopping 70 percent have been launched since 2009. Only 13 percent were founded before 2006.  Among […]

Sankalp Q&A: Unitus Seeks to Launch Seed Funds Around the World

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Most of the thousands of investors and entrepreneurs descending on New Delhi this week for the Sankalp Global Summit are looking to beat out their competitors. Dave Richards and Will Poole, managing directors of Unitus Seed Fund, are looking to create more competition for themselves, by seeding additional funds like their own. Fresh off their success […]

Equilibrium Capital: Building Real Assets for Sustainable Returns

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“Creativity is not the finding of a thing,” as the 19th-century New England poet James Russell Lowell noted, “but the making something out of it after it is found.” Dave Chen, CEO of Equilibrium Capital, has built a $1 billion asset management platform out of the finding that environmentally and socially beneficial practices can drive […]

Where Does Your Money Spend the Night? Rethinking Capitalism

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The global nonprofit sector has played a crucial role in identifying solutions for the needs of the world’s most marginalized populations. As the severity and scale of the problems escalate, however, it has become clear that the 20th century paradigm of maximizing profits in the capitalist realm of the economy then donating a percentage of […]

What Kind of Financing Do African Social Enterprises Need?

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The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Capetown in South Africa is conducting a survey on the funding needs of social enterprises in Africa. Social enterprises in Africa can participate in the survey to generate a clearer picture of their financing needs. The results will be used to promote African social enterprises, […]

10 do’s and don’ts of gender lens investing

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by Najada Kumbuli, Sr. Investments Officer on March 09, 2015 International Women’s Day 2014. Photo courtesy of Flickr user IAEA Imagebank. When Calvert Foundation launched our women’s initiative, WIN-WIN, three years ago on International Women’s Day, we approached it as a pilot initiative. Given that WIN-WIN was the only gender lens investment vehicle available to everyday investors […]

Join the WIN-WIN Investment Movement

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Today we’re in New York at the Cookstoves Future Summit, a global gathering hosted by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. The event marks the opening of our second round of fundraising for the Women Investing in Women Initiative (WIN-WIN), which will spur global development and distribution of cookstoves and other clean energy products. During […]

Measuring the “Impact” in Impact Investing

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Without solid metrics to quantifiably measure results in social and environmental terms, the whole “impact” part of “impact investing” would be worthless. The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) is working to build an understanding around impact measurement, and they have collaborated with their members, TriLinc included, to write a report on the “State of […]

Don Shaffer: Momentum Builds for 100 Percent Impact Investment Movement

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When I first started working in impact investing, the field’s challenges were foundational: refining the concept, finding suitable investments, figuring out how to measure impact, even determining what to call the concept. Work in all those areas continues, but the field has matured to the point where it’s on the agenda of the G8, finance […]

Don Shaffer: Community Foundations: What It Takes to Become Dynamic Hubs of Local Capital

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Community foundations — with their deep local ties, significant unrestricted assets, and community benefit missions — are ideally positioned to play a leading role in solving our communities’ most profound and difficult challenges. Yet many are stuck in a pattern of disbursing only a small percentage of their assets in grants and investing the rest […]