Impact Investing

Stacey Faella and Kathleen Simpson show the ways that impact investing has been a powerful tool at their foundations and offer advice to funders who want to explore new paths to support their grantees in light of  funding gaps and significant need in the nonprofit sector.  In 2025, many of…

Impact investing has the potential to enable every foundation, regardless of size, to pursue its philanthropic mission more effectively. It can help individual donors, families, foundations with few or no staff, and all sorts of giving entities put more and different types of capital to work for social good. Even better, it can deliver philanthropic…

This primer provides family enterprises with clear explanations of the “why,” “how,” and “what” of impact investing, while illuminating the diversity of the impact investing marketplace as it exists today, and providing families with a basic understanding of how they can start making more impact investments more effectively.

Impact investing is a powerful tool to align and maximize assets for good. The practice is growing increasingly common, yet many families are in search of guidance on how to begin or accelerate their impact investing pursuits. Join us to explore the fundamentals of impact investing, and learn more about…

This paper offers a synopsis of the evolution from community development and ESG investing to the emergence of investing explicitly with a racial equity lens, proposes a definition for racial equity investing, and presents emerging opportunities across asset classes for investors.

Impact Investing: Mapping Families’ Interests and Activities is part of a multi-year effort to study a problem that many ultra high net worth (UNHW) families have identified as critical, timely, and important: the existing impact investing opportunity set does not fully match their specific investment interests. The 2020 version of…

In 2018, Mary Ann Weiss wrote a post for NCFP about program-related investments (PRIs), their advantages, and the barriers to using them. Since then, the philanthropic landscape has shifted and Mary Ann has built her own experience with PRIs. Learn more about use cases for PRIs and how to get…

This new case study of the Russell Family Foundation outlines key learnings from the foundation’s comprehensive journey in impact investing, including the 4-year path it took from 7% to almost 75% mission-aligned investments. 

In partnership with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, NYU Wagner Social Innovation & Investment Initiative analyzed more than 40 foundation-related investments, and together developed a MISSION framework to document its impact investing strategy.

When The John Merck Fund embarked on a 10-year spendout of its assets in 2012, the board aimed to maximize its grantmaking clout across four core program areas. The board also set another challenge: to finance the effort as much as possible with sustainable investments consistent with the Fund's philanthropic…