Endowments & Investing

This guide is intended to help bring newcomers into the game. It helps high net worth individuals, family offices, and others to know some of the questions, if not the answers, to determine what’s right for them and what to do next to move toward meaningful, measurable impact.

This flow chart was designed by the Community Foundation of Louisville to describe the procedures for evaluating, processing, and making impact investments in their community. It follows a similar model developed by the Greater Cincinnati Community Foundation, which is discussed in the Community…

Article published by Adler & Colvin summarizing the key differences between Mission-Related and Program-Related Investments for Private Foundations. The article also lays out many of the necessary legal and regulatory questions when determining if an impact investing strategy is appropriate for…

From Mission Investors Exchange, this is a three part blog series on corporate philanthropy and mission investing. Corporate Philanthropy and Mission Investing Corporate Foundations: Challenges in Adopting Mission Investing Mission Investing: How the Financial Services Industry is Different

This issue brief from the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) details the motivations, benefits, considerations, and suitable scenarios behind the use of catalytic first-loss capital in impact investing transactions. Catalytic first-loss capital refers to socially- and environmentally-driven…

The Impact Investor Project was established in 2012 as a two-year research partnership between InSight at Pacific Community Ventures, CASE at Duke University, and ImpactAssets. The goal was simple: supplant the guesswork and conjecture in impact investing with solid evidence of high performance and…

In this report, the World Economic Forum Investors Industries consulted the senior decision-makers and portfolio managers of the largest and most innovative investors in the world to facilitate a more realistic vantage point on the challenges in scaling the sector. 

In summer 2011, the Maine Community Foundation, New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, and the Vermont Community Foundation came together, with the help of GPS Capital Partners and TPI, to jointly evaluate the potential for expanding impact investing as a program strategy and donor service. This case…

From the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship, this handbook on responsible investing provides the blueprint for foundation asset managers interested in multiplying their organization’s impact on society. 

Prepared by the Southern New Hampshire University's School of Community Economic Development and available through Mission Investors Exchange, this case study explores the details of the F.B. Heron Foundation's rationale, exploration, and implementation of its mission-related investment strategy,…

This report by FSG Social Impact Advisors provides the first comprehensive analysis of mission investing by U.S. foundations and analyzes the activity of 92 U.S. foundations, which have made a combined total of $2.3 billion of mission investments.

From the New Economics Foundation, Mission Possible considers how foundations might more effectively use a proportion of their endowment in support of the change they set out to create – their mission. Starting from the premise that paths are made by walking, it explores the potential of ‘mission-…