The concepts of local and impact investing are easy for most people to embrace: what’s not to like about investing in places you love and businesses who are doing good in the world? But the methods of doing so require specialized knowledge of securities laws.
That’s why lawyers may be the unsung heroes of impact investing and community capital.
Attorneys play a crucial role in supporting impact investing and social entrepreneurship. From Benefit Corp. legislation to regulations facilitating place-based investing, these developments would not have happened without some very committed lawyers.
And while we don’t often think of law as a creative field, lawyers can be every bit as innovative as the typical hoodie-wearing Silicon Valley entrepreneur. A growing number of sympathetic attorneys are actively and vigorously using existing tools and structures to find creative ways to make a wide variety of initiatives possible. (Hello, Sustainable Economies Law Center!)
These unsung innovators were the focus of a recent conference in New York. Called Legal Issues in Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Investing—in the US and Beyond and hosted by New York University School of Law’s Grunin Center for Law and Social Entrepreneurship, the two-day proceedings investigated topics ranging from ensuring that communities benefit from Opportunity Zones to embedding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into deals and blending capital sources to scale impact.
More Lawyers, Please
“Behind every pioneering social enterprise and new impact investment structure is a creative lawyer, often a whole team of creative lawyers,” says Deborah Burand, faculty co-director at the NYU School of Law. […]
The post Celebrating the Creative Force Behind Impact Investing: Lawyers appeared first on Locavesting.
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