In the last few years, foundations have been discovering that they can create social good beyond the comfort of just nonprofit grantmaking, and investors have been developing strategies to generate significant financial and social impact.

Thus, the term impact investing was launched into the financial and social innovation sectors.

Essentially, impact investing describes an emerging asset class focused on channeling large-scale private funding to social entrepreneurs and social enterprises dedicated to solving the world’s biggest problems.
 
Echoing Green has partnered with The Rockefeller Foundation to explore key challenges in routing capital to early-stage social ventures serving the needs of poor or vulnerable populations around the world. With better and more robust data and insights, we believe that Echoing Green can contribute to overcoming structural barriers in this critical sector and help to significantly increase the rate of expansion of the overall marketplace and the corresponding social impact.

We’re excited about this emerging trend, and the feed below features our recent thinking (like the rise of hybrid social enterprises) and ideas (like recoverable grants) around the impact investing marketplace. What do you think?

Social Innovation News from the White House

This week President Obama announced the appointment of Cecilia Muñoz as Director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House. Ms. Muñoz, in her new role, will oversee policy-making on a range of domestic issues, including education, energy and health care. "Over the past three years, Cecilia has been a trusted adviser who has demonstrated sound judgment day in and day out," Mr. Obama said in a statement. "Cecilia has done an extraordinary job working on behalf of middle-class families, and I'm confident she'll bring the same unwavering dedication to her new position."

Making Money While Making a Difference

Unlike traditional investing, which, at its core, primarily seeks to employ financial capital to generate a financial return, impact investing strives to create “blended value”—positive and simultaneous social, environmental, and financial value creation.

SOCAP 2011 – Digging Deeper into Impact Investing

The Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP) is heading into its fourth year. Attendance is booming and investors and social entrepreneurs alike, from nearly 75 countries, are clamoring to attend the meeting of money and meaning.

Collaborative Deal Activity

One of the tools that informs venture and private equity investors most about how to approach investment opportunities from a valuation and structure perspective is comparison analysis: the task of comparing historical deals that relate to the deal at hand.

A Financing Gap

Raising capital can be the hardest, most drawn-out and frustrating experience in creating any venture, perhaps especially so with a social venture.

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