Money + Meaning

“You’ll get no argument from me that there are sectors where moving institutional scale, finance-first money is what’s needed. Our argument is that in places where the market is not functioning, in places where markets have left people behind, that this kind of low-cost money is required in order to make a difference in the lives of poor, marginalized, vulnerable communities and we shouldn’t delud...

“Lending has the capacity to transform what people can do based on their capabilities and not necessarily based just on the opportunities that they’ve been dealt. If you believe, like I do, that capabilities are equally distributed but opportunities certainly are not, then lending can be a way to try to level the playing field a bit more.” This episode of Money and Meaning features Jacob Haar, the...

In late 2020, TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecommunication companies, launched a $100mm corporate impact fund. Named the Pollinator Fund for Good, the fund invests seed and Series A capital in social entrepreneurs working across four impact areas: environment, agriculture, health, and inclusive communities. Joining this episode is Blair Miller, the Managing Partner of the fund to talk about ho...

Ever since being denied a Small Business Association loan for being a Black woman, Melissa Bradley has dedicated her career to building support ecosystems for historically marginalized entrepreneurs. From her time working in the Treasury Department of the Clinton White House to the recent launch of both Ureeka and the 1863 Fund, Melissa has helped support entrepreneurship and wealth creation from...

Jewel Burks Solomon is the Managing Partner of Collab Capital and the Head of Google for Startups in the US. Having founded and sold her first company, Partpic, to Amazon in her mid-20s, Jewel has made a career out of investing in and helping to mentor traditionally underrepresented founders. Having experienced some challenging investor conversations while growing Partpic, Jewel set out to design...

On this week’s episode, Alex is joined by Dr. Angela Jackson, the Managing Partner of New Profit’s Future of Work initiatives. New Profit is a venture philanthropy that has provided over $325mm in support to social entrepreneurs since its founding in 1998. Their Future of Work initiatives seek to equip workers with the skills necessary to find livable wage jobs. This work took on a new urgency in...

As demand for impact investments grow, more and more organizations are creating investment products labeled as ‘impact’. However, without any regulatory body or industry-wide standards, there are significant concerns about impact washing, the practice of branding products as ‘impact’ more for marketing reasons than any social or environmental substance. Tideline, an impact investing consulting com...

On this week’s episode, Alex is joined by George Ashton III, Managing Director of Strategic Investments at Local Initiatives Support Corporation or LISC. George recently helped launch LISC's Black Economic Development Fund. Targeting up to $250mm and initially seeded by $25mm investments from both Netflix and Costco, the Black Economic Development Fund will work to close the racial wealth gap thro...

On this episode, host Alex Kravitz is joined by Margret Trilli, the CEO & Chief Investment Officer of ImpactAssets, a nonprofit impact investing firm with over $1.2B in assets under management. They discuss ImpactAssets’ flagship donor-advised fund and the surge in both charitable giving and impact investments they have seen in 2020. They also discuss the partnership between ImpactAssets and the n...

Last year, MIT Solve launched Solve Innovation Future, a first-of-its-kind donor-advised venture fund. The philanthropic venture fund is structured as an evergreen vehicle where proceeds are paid forward into future social entrepreneurs. The evergreen nature allows the fund to provide appropriate forms of capital tailored to each entrepreneur's unique situation. Leading Solve Innovation Future is...

“It needed to be easier, faster, more dynamic, and more value-add to everybody involved to understand impact. It just doesn't make any sense; people are committing decades of their lives to trying to make a change in the world and the act of figuring out whether or not that’s happening is an exceptional activity.” In this episode, Alex Kravitz is joined by Sasha Dichter, the Co-Founder of 60 Decib...

“Finance at some fundamental level is about making bets on the future. Nobody makes money in the present - we only make money because we were right about the future that we bet on. So one really important way to think about investing with a gender lens is to question your assumptions about the future." - Joy Anderson On this episode we are joined by Joy Anderson, Founder and President of the Crite...

“It is a privilege to have any investable assets for savings or retirement but if you do, in any amount, you have power. You have the power to invest in companies, in funds, in a financial system and an economy that supports your values. You don’t need to have 6 or 7 figures. Anybody can do it and can do it today.” - Beth Bafford, VP of Syndications and Strategy at Calvert Impact Capital In this e...

For our 50th episode, we take it back to the basics. What is impact investing? What does it look like across asset classes and impact areas? Is impact investing inherently concessionary? And, mostly importantly, is it working? Joining us for this conversation is impact investing thought-leader Rehana Nathoo, Founder and CEO of Spectrum Impact, a strategy consulting firm that supports a range of or...

This week’s guest is Antony Bugg-Levine, impact investing pioneer and CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF). Founded in 1980, NFF is a community development finance institution that provides financing and consulting to nonprofits across the country. In his role at NFF, Antony recently helped launch a $75mm Covid-19 response fund to support NYC nonprofit organizations most affected by the pandemi...

“Our board and our team believe that you can define any societal problem as either a climate change problem or an inequality problem…so our thesis has evolved over the years to bring our resources to bear against those two large challenges.” The Autodesk Foundation is a private foundation that focuses on how design and engineering solutions can solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges. I...

MORTAR is a Cincinnati-based accelerator working to help historically marginalized entrepreneurs get the resources they need to start and run successful businesses. Whereas most accelerators pull from as large a pool of entrepreneurs as possible, MORTAR has taken the opposite approach, starting with one specific neighborhood in Cincinnati, Over-the-Rhine, and designing a curriculum to be both rele...

Entrepreneurship is a leading driver of economic growth, job creation, and wealth building yet 83% of entrepreneurs do not have access to either bank lending or venture capital. To reduce this barrier to starting or growing a business, the Kauffman Foundation recently launched the Capital Access Lab. In this episode, Alex sits down with Philip Gaskin, Vice President of Entrepreneurship at the Kauf...

“About a month ago, we asked ourselves at CASE, ‘what can we do really quickly to help entrepreneurs through this crisis?’ We had already seen some very significant businesses in our local area shut down in the first week and that scared me.” -Cathy Clark, Faculty Director of CASE at Duke Realizing there was a need for a centralized database of emergency funding sources for entrepreneurs strugglin...

“I encourage all of us who are the dreamers to continuously put forth new visions for what is possible - particularly in this moment - because, if we can’t do it right now, when can we do it?” - Rodney Foxworth, CEO of Common Future Common Future, formerly BALLE, is an organization dedicated to shifting capital into local communities, uplifting local leaders, and accelerating the development of lo...

In his plenary address at SOCAP17 Jed Emerson said, “We need to understand the purpose of capital is not simply the absence of evil from our pursuit of wealth, something hard enough and potentially impossible for us to achieve, but the active pursuit of healing, wholeness, and love in this world.” In this episode, Lindsay sits down with Emerson, a personal mentor and longtime pillar of the SOCAP c...

"The global water challenge is really about balancing the micro and the macro. People, industry, agriculture–everybody needs water in the right place, in the right quantity, at the right quality, and at the right time. Doing that is unbelievably hard.” –Tom Ferguson Imagine H2O is an organization with a mission to empower people to develop and deploy innovations to solve water challenges globally....

How can technology help extend access to financial services to the 1.7 billion unbanked people in the world? In the latest episode of Money and Meaning, Lindsay Smalling interviews Kiva’s Chief Strategy Officer, Matthew Davie, about some of their new solutions to the challenges of financial exclusion. Davie talks about Kiva Protocol and other new ways they are working to change the underlying syst...

Blended finance deals have the potential to drive trillions of dollars of institutional capital into high impact projects in emerging markets and could lead to massive progress towards achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. In this episode, Joan Larrea, CEO of Convergence, explains how blended finance can accelerate solutions to poverty, hunger, and the other SDGs. She also talks about...

TechSoup was the first nonprofit in the US to launch a national direct public offering (DPO). In the year since the launch of this growth capital campaign, they have raised over $8 million, with individual investments ranging from $50 to $1 million. In this episode, Alex Kravitz has a conversation with Rebecca Masisak and Ken Tsunoda about their unique approach to fundraising, lessons they have le...