MI Exchange Blog Post: Organizing Approaches to Mission Investing ...

There are any numbers of ways to organize approaches to?mission investing. Much of the conversation over the past few years has focused on endowment management practices ? how to build investment policies, integratemission investments?into the portfolio, work with consultants, find mission-related fund managers, build reporting systems on impact, and so on.

But what brings foundation trustees and professionals into the conversation ? what captures their interest ? is usually not the technical aspects of?mission-related investmentmanagement, but rather the targeted outcomes of?mission investing. So we?ve spent time thinking about how to organize the conversation around specific sectors of interest to potential investors, including health, sustainable agriculture, transit-oriented development, and investment in specific places.

The first was a conference in June organized by members of the Sloan School at MIT ? a roundtable on philanthropy and investment in the clean energy sector. Participants from the Department of Energy, the venture capital?sector, foundations, startups, and academia explored the potential role of foundations to invest in weak links in the financial chain that takes ideas to successful businesses.

A few things stood out. The different actors are not as well connected as they could be, making the meeting a way to start or advance conversations in the early stages of development. Enterprises and venture capitalists didn?t necessarily get the role that foundations might play in the sector; foundations were not necessarily clear on how the larger goal of commercialization of clean energy products tied into mission that often focused on social goals rather than clean energy alone; and the public sector hadn?t fully capitalized on the potential role of foundations as investors, or as supporters of efforts to make high-impact clean energy products and companies investable. For a sector that has received so much attention, the role of mission investing?seemed relatively undeveloped, and a promising avenue to explore. ?There may be ways that foundations and universities can work together to help build a sector-specific approach to?mission investing?in clean energy, a relationship that could serve as a valuable example for future investor collaboration in sector-specific approaches.

The second conference, this one in July, was organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and Opportunity Finance Network, and focused on?CDFIs?in the South. I was struck by the number of attendees ? 200 or so ? and the real interest in exploring the regional significance of community investment activity that had attracted them to the meeting. The day I attended focused on capacity building for?CDFIs, and questions of scale, rural vs. urban investment, and geographic expansion. But the regional focus ? and the sense of place that drove it ? proved a very useful way to make the conversation concrete, and to build the institutional and personal relationships that are so important to building capacity for the field.

(reposted from the Mission Investors Exchange, July 2012)

Source: http://hausercenter.org/iri/mi-exchange-blog-post-organizing-approaches-to-mission-investing-by-outcomes

msg network ray j anthony shadid gary carter this means war bobby brown suzanne somers