Impact(ed)
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<p><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5jJSsJS0drPzgbNWaWHkZh?si=e539023814254031" target="_blank">For its first two seasons</a>, <i>Impact(ed)</i> carved out space for practitioners of color to speak candidly about their work. It showcased the importance of diverse, creative perspectives and a non-traditional, non-linear path into the world of investing. It grounded the conversation in lived experience and real decision-making, not just frameworks and conference talking points. And importantly, it gave a platform to perspectives and voices that are too often pushed to the side.</p><p></p><p>This season, <i>Impact(ed)</i> will take conversations even deeper. Because there are things we all know–but don’t say out loud: We know most LPs are still optimizing for risk-adjusted returns, not impact. We know investment committees rarely behave the way their mission statements suggest they do. We know entire strategies get framed as “market opportunity” when they’re really a function of where capital feels comfortable flowing. And we know that when markets tighten, a lot of the courageous rhetoric gets silenced quickly.</p><p></p><p>Where our first two seasons -- importantly -- shone on a light on practitioners of color in the middle of their careers reflecting on how they got there, and the many pieces of the impact investing puzzle (from ESG-screening at some of the largest pensions, to impact VC, and employee ownership as an alternative to traditional buyouts) this season will be a deeper dive into the structural levers that control how capital is allocated. We started with a mission of showing the whole chessboard and widening the tent to including more voices and perspectives in the conversation, and now we're eager to dive deeper into honest discussions about the more granular barriers and genuine opportunities for scale within impact investing. This season we'll be covering topics like: </p><p></p><ul><li>Blackstone and Your Retirement</li><li>Impact Investing in the Built Environment</li><li>Are There Too Many VC's?</li><li>The Current State of Community Development</li><li>The Pro's and Con's of PE</li><li>The Business of Asset Management</li><li>How IC's Actually Work</li><li>What Went Wrong with Tricolor</li><li>Impact Investing & Public Policy</li><li>And a Retrospective Review of Past Episodes</li></ul>
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Publishing Since
11/7/2023
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Recent Episodes
July 6, 2026
Everything is Impact
<p>AI-generated wealth could unlock tens of billions in new annual philanthropic spending over the next decade. So why does Jed Emerson think the real question isn't how fast that money moves, but what it's actually for?</p><p></p><p>Jed Emerson is one of the longest-standing voices in impact investing and the originator of the "blended value" framework — but he didn't come up through a trading desk or a venture fund. He started in social work, ran the Larkin Street Youth Center in San Francisco, and helped launch REDF (now Redefine Alliance) with KKR co-founder George Roberts, making it one of the first venture philanthropy funds in the country.</p><p></p><p>Rodney and Lucas sat down with Jed for a wide-ranging conversation on where the field got stuck, and what decades of this work have actually taught him.</p><p></p><p>We talked about:</p><ul><li>Why "doing good vs. doing well" is a false choice, and what it costs the field to keep asking it</li><li>Why Jed stopped starting with structure — grant, debt, equity, hybrid — and started with purpose instead</li><li>Microfinance as a case study in how philanthropic capital gets mispriced as "risky" until it isn't</li><li>Whether a new wave of AI-driven philanthropic wealth will reproduce old patterns of concentrated ownership, or actually build shared agency</li><li>Jed's shift from "being the rock to being the river," and what that means for a field addicted to its own frameworks</li></ul><p></p><p>GLOSSARY:</p><p><b>Blended Value</b><br /><i>Technical:</i> The idea that all capital and all enterprises generate a mix of economic, social, and environmental value simultaneously — value isn't separable into a "financial" bucket and an "impact" bucket.</p><p><br /><i>In practice:</i> Jed's framework rejects the premise that you have to choose between a grant and an investment, or between mission and return. Every dollar deployed is already doing all three kinds of value-creation at once, whether or not anyone is tracking it.</p><p><br /><i>Why it matters:</i> Once you accept blended value, the question stops being "is this concessionary or market-rate?" and becomes "what value are we actually trying to create, and for whom?" That reframing is what lets the right tool — grant, equity, guarantee, hybrid — follow the purpose instead of the other way around.</p><p></p><p><b>Absorptive Capacity</b><br /><i>Technical:</i> The ability of a field, sector, or set of institutions to effectively deploy a given amount of capital — measured in things like grantmaking staff, due diligence capability, and institutional infrastructure.</p><p><br /><i>In practice:</i> If AI wealth adds tens of billions in new annual philanthropic spending, someone has to actually move that money well: more grants, more allocators, more operating talent, more institutions capable of doing it with speed and discipline.</p><p><br /><i>Why it matters:</i> Jed pushes back on treating this purely as a technical staffing problem. Capacity is also a power problem — plenty of organizations already have the ambition and trust built up in their communities, but lack flexible, patient capital. Asking "do we have enough capacity" without asking "whose capacity are we willing to see" risks building new infrastructure around the same old gatekeepers.</p>
June 18, 2026
How Do IC's Actually Work?
<p>George Suttles is a longtime investment committee member and adviser to philanthropic institutions, with deep experience helping boards think differently about investment stewardship, fiduciary responsibility, and who belongs in the room. </p><p></p><p>Rini Banerjee is a pioneer in mission-aligned endowment strategy, having spent over a decade helping foundations use their investment policy statements as tools for values alignment—long before most advisors understood what she was asking for.</p><p></p><p>Together, they brought a rare combination of insider knowledge and strategic challenge to this conversation. George has sat on committees and helped build them. Rini has used the IPS as an organizing document to pull investment committees up from manager selection and into mission. Between them, they helped us understand what investment committees actually do, why they matter more than most people realize, and what it would take to change who sits at the table.</p><p></p><p></p><p><b>GLOSSARY:</b></p><p></p><p><b>Investment Policy Statement (IPS)</b></p><p></p><p><b>Technical:</b></p><p>A written document that establishes the goals, guidelines, and constraints for managing an organization’s investment portfolio. It typically covers asset allocation targets, risk tolerance, liquidity requirements, and sometimes values-based restrictions.</p><p></p><p><b>In practice:</b></p><p>Most foundations have one. Most board members have never read it. Rini has spent years treating the IPS not as a compliance document but as an organizing tool—a way to force the strategic and values conversation that should be happening at the investment committee level but rarely does. When a committee rewrites its IPS through a mission lens, it has to confront the question: what is this endowment actually for?</p><p></p><p><b>Why it matters:</b></p><p>The IPS is the rulebook. Change the rulebook, and you change what’s possible. A mission-aligned IPS can open the door to impact investments, ESG screens, and community capital strategies that a default document would never contemplate.</p><p></p><p><b>Fiduciary Duty</b></p><p></p><p><b>Technical:</b></p><p>A legal and ethical obligation to act in the best interest of the beneficiary—in this case, the foundation and its mission—rather than in one’s own interest or the interest of any third party.</p><p></p><p><b>In practice:</b></p><p>Investment committee members are fiduciaries. That means they can be held legally liable if they make decisions that benefit themselves rather than the institution. For a long time, fiduciary duty was used as an argument against mission-aligned investing: the duty, the argument went, was to maximize financial returns, full stop. That argument has been substantially challenged and largely discredited—but it still comes up, and it’s still used to resist change.</p><p></p><p><b>Why it matters:</b></p><p>Understanding fiduciary duty is essential to understanding both the power and the constraints of the investment committee role. It’s also useful for pushing back on the claim that pursuing mission alignment is somehow legally risky.</p>
June 3, 2026
Are There Too Many VC's?
<p>Are There Too Many VCs in Impact Investing? The Real Answer Is More Complicated than a Yes or No.</p><p></p><p>Ben Thornley is co-founder and managing partner of Tideline, one of the field’s leading research and advisory firms on impact investing. He’s not an investor—he’s the person that the largest limited partners in the world, institutions managing hundreds of billions in assets, call when they’re trying to make sense of a market they don’t fully understand yet.</p><p></p><p>His answer: the problem isn’t too much VC. It’s not enough of everything else. The capital stack in impact investing is barbelling—institutions piling into later-stage, more proven strategies while early-stage impact sits overcrowded and without much liquidity</p><p></p><p><b>EPISODE GLOSSARY:</b></p><p></p><p><b>Barbelling</b></p><p>Technical: A distribution pattern in which capital concentrates at two extremes of a spectrum, leaving the middle relatively underfunded.</p><p>In practice: In impact investing, institutional capital is flowing heavily into later-stage, more proven strategies (large private equity funds, public equities with ESG screens) and into very early-stage philanthropic work—while the middle (growth-stage impact, fund II and III managers) goes undercapitalized.</p><p>Why it matters: The companies most ready to scale—past proof of concept but not yet large enough to attract big institutional mandates—are exactly where the gap sits. Barbelling explains why the field can feel both overcrowded and underfunded at the same time.</p><p></p><p><b>Secondary Markets</b></p><p>Technical: Markets where investors buy and sell existing stakes in private funds or companies, rather than investing directly into new deals.</p><p>In practice: If you’re an LP in a private equity fund and you need liquidity before the fund winds down, you sell your stake to another investor on the secondary market. In conventional private equity, this market is large and well-developed. In impact investing, it barely exists—Ben noted you can count impact secondary funds on one hand.</p><p>Why it matters: Without a secondary market, every impact investment is effectively locked up until exit. That illiquidity premium makes impact structurally more expensive to hold than conventional alternatives, which rational institutions will price accordingly.</p><p></p><p><b>Concessionary Capital</b></p><p>Technical: Capital that accepts below-market financial returns in exchange for social or environmental impact.</p><p>In practice: Think of a foundation that invests in an affordable housing fund knowing the returns will be lower than a comparable market-rate fund—because the goal is to produce housing, not just profit. The ‘concession’ is the financial return the investor foregoes.</p><p>Why it matters: The field debates how much concession is appropriate—or required—for genuine impact. Ben’s view is that the impact investing community has sometimes made this debate more binary than it needs to be, excluding strategies that produce real impact but don’t meet a specific return threshold.</p><p></p><p><b>Lacking Liquidity</b></p><p>Technical: A state in which a market or asset class lacks sufficient liquidity mechanisms (secondary markets, structured exits, revolving credit facilities) to meet investor demand. In practice: An impact fund manager trying to return capital to LPs who need liquidity has very few options compared to a conventional PE manager. There’s no robust secondary market to sell into, fewer structured products to access bridge capital, and fewer exit pathways in general.</p><p></p><p>Why it matters: A lack of liquidity compounds over time. It makes the asset class less attractive to institutions that need to manage liquidity risk—which restricts the pool of potential LPs, which limits fund size, which limits what managers can do</p>
22 total episodes available
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Alicia DeLia
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Smit Naik
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- What is Impact(ed)?
<p><a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://open.spotify.com/show/5jJSsJS0drPzgbNWaWHkZh?si=e539023814254031" target="_blank">For its first two seasons</a>, <i>Impact(ed)</i> carved out space for practitioners of color to speak candidly about their work. It showcased the importance of diverse, creative perspectives and a non-traditional, non-linear path into the world of investing. It grounded the conversation in lived experience and real decision-making, not just frameworks and conference talking points. And importantly, it gave a platform to perspectives and voices that are too often pushed to the side.</p><p></p><p>This season, <i>Impact(ed)</i> will take conversations even deeper. Because there are things we all know–but don’t say out loud: We know most LPs are still optimizing for risk-adjusted returns, not impact. We know investment committees rarely behave the way their mission statements suggest they do. We know entire strategies get framed as “market opportunity” when they’re really a function of where capital feels comfortable flowing. And we know that when markets tighten, a lot of the courageous rhetoric gets silenced quickly.</p><p></p><p>Where our first two seasons -- importantly -- shone on a light on practitioners of color in the middle of their careers reflecting on how they got there, and the many pieces of the impact investing puzzle (from ESG-screening at some of the largest pensions, to impact VC, and employee ownership as an alternative to traditional buyouts) this season will be a deeper dive into the structural levers that control how capital is allocated. We started with a mission of showing the whole chessboard and widening the tent to including more voices and perspectives in the conversation, and now we're eager to dive deeper into honest discussions about the more granular barriers and genuine opportunities for scale within impact investing. This season we'll be covering topics like: </p><p></p><ul><li>Blackstone and Your Retirement</li><li>Impact Investing in the Built Environment</li><li>Are There Too Many VC's?</li><li>The Current State of Community Development</li><li>The Pro's and Con's of PE</li><li>The Business of Asset Management</li><li>How IC's Actually Work</li><li>What Went Wrong with Tricolor</li><li>Impact Investing & Public Policy</li><li>And a Retrospective Review of Past Episodes</li></ul> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates weekly.
- Where can I listen to this podcast?
This podcast is available on 6 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
- Does this podcast accept guests?
Information about guest appearances is not available.
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