The Criterion Institute Podcast

This is the first of many episodes around knowledge and power.   In the first segment, Joy reflects on a story when she was fundraising for good capital and a VC put her and her knowledge in its place.  In the second segment Joy has a conversation with Dorothy Nyambi, Executive Director of MEDA, an international NGO that works in investing and shifting the north/south power dynamics...

In this episode, we explore imagining alternative futures and thinking through the contingencies in those futures.   The first segment broadly introduces the importance of imagining alternative futures for gender as investors. As investors, we constantly are imagining what might happen in the future, what might change, but around issues of gender and social structures, in general, most i...

In this episode, we’ll revisit a conversation Joy had with two amazing leaders in the field of sustainable finance back in September of 2021. They were simply recording a series of context sessions in advance of a conference on using finance to address gender-based violence with Daniella Jaramillo, who is at the time at HESTA, a superannuation fund or pension fund in Australia and Geeta Aiyer, one...

In this episode, we have two segments that we're going to weave together both focused on investment theses. At Criterion, one of the most important levers of change, in our opinion, is to look at shaping, reshaping and creating the investment theses that reflect how investors see the future and therefore how they make investments in the present. The first segment is a broad exploration of an inves...

In this episode, Joy has a conversation with a colleague, Pablo Freund, who spent several months looking in depth at economic sanctions and investments tied to the realities in Afghanistan at the end of 2021, into the early part of 2022. Human rights were challenged by the shift in power that happened in August of 2021, as the Taliban took control of Afghanistan again. How can we bring a financial...

In this episode, we’re going to look at some of the power dynamics in field building organizations. Think of the sociology, the medical profession or gender lens investing as fields. There are three ways to think about fields: a field of activities, a field of ideas and a field of people and organizations.  The first segment looks at the context around being a field building organization in w...

Show Notes:  In this episode, Joy weaves together three segments around one core idea: “how do we design investment vehicles that work for the context in which they're investing?”. In the first segment, we’ll look at a slogan that Criterion has been playing with for a while — “fix the capital, not the company”. This segment expands on the idea that the capital should be designed to meet the n...

We invite you to join us on a journey—an audio journey, to explore and expand how to use finance and investments as tools for transformative and equitable change in the world. Hosted by Criterion Institute’s founder Joy Anderson, episodes will include a variety of audio segments that can take many forms. Often these segments may comprise conversations with friends and co-workers or interviews with...