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?