Initiatives
Brian Kaminer

One-Stop Site Paints A Clearer Picture For Impact Investors ... New Platform to aggregate the world's impact investing.

Burgess COMMENTARY
Impact Investing Forum ... 9,500 members Member

Mark Anthony Thomas

New Platform to aggregate the world's impact investing.

Mark Anthony Thomas
MIT Sloan Fellow in Innovation & Global Leadership | 2014 MBA Candidate

One-Stop Site Paints A Clearer Picture For Impact Investors forbes.com

The Money and Impact Investing Directory provides a one-stop information resource for impact investors.

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Comments Russell Dudek likes this 3 comments

The potential for impact investing is huge but the challenges of organizing the field looms large,me specially for community and small foundations. Every good tool we develop takes us a step closer to overcoming the barriers and unlocking more capital for good.

Like (1) Reply privately Flag as inappropriate 1 day ago Mark Anthony Thomas likes this

So right you are. Well put,

Like Reply privately Flag as inappropriate 8 hours ago

The good news is that there is a considerable amount of interest in impact investing, and this interest is growing.

The bad news is the information about the impact investing space is very weak. I am delighted that Brian Kaminer is making an effort to pull useful material together, but I am struck by the fact that the approach is pretty much the same approach I tried myself almost 20 years ago in the very early days of the Internet. Merely linking to the websites of different organizations is going to add the quantity of information easily accessible, but will not do much to improve the quality of the information ... and most important, help to get the sort of information that will improve the decision making relative to impact investing and the mobilization of capital into this segment of the capital market.

I would point people to initiatives like CSRHub which is using technology to help organize data to show which companies are making serious efforts to include CSR into their way of doing business.

My own initiative is further behind ... but I am working through the issues that will enable impact metrics to be linked to the organization's conventional money profit accounting. As a former corporate CFO I am not particularly impressed by reporting based on questionnaires and anecdotes ... but would rather see information that is linked to financial data that shows impact on people and planet with almost the same rigor that you get from the financial statements.

Nice to see Forbes publishing material about the impact investing space ... but the metrics to move the needle significantly is still to come.

Peter Burgess - TrueValueMetrics
Multi Dimension Impact Accounting
Peter Burgess

One-Stop Site Paints A Clearer Picture For Impact Investors

Sure, the impact investing and social enterprise world is thriving. But it’s also disjointed and often confusing, with a variety of groups, startups, investors, schools, conferences, and even basic terminology.

Brian Kaminer recently launched a directory of resources and organizations to make the picture a little clearer. Called The Money and Impact Investing Directory, Kaminer has accumulated in one place an array of information, from methods for measuring social impact to investor groups.

Specifically, the material is organized into 14 categories. Some examples: local banking, economies and business includes such organizations as Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE); schools and programs for impact investing, which lists everything from Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke and its i3 Initiative on Impact Investing to the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship: and articles and papers, with work from impact investing pioneer Rockefeller Foundation, the Huffington Post and other places.

“I wanted a directory that could give people one click access so they could dive deeper into the details,” he says. Brian Kaminer (Impact investor Brian Kaminer)

How did he decide to do this in the first place? Kaminer worked for his family’s boutique brokerage firm for 17 years before deciding it was time to do something that contributed more productively to society. (It’s now in Utah, but he was based in New York City at the time). So in 2007, he founded Talgra in New York City to do sustainable investment consulting.

Then, a few years later he heard Woody Tasch, founder of Slow Money, give a talk about what was then his fairly new investment philosophy—investing in local food businesses with the aim of strengthening local economies and creating a fundamentally different approach to business. He attended a national Slow Money conference—and he was hooked.

But Kaminer wanted to educate himself about what was happening out there. As he started wading through more and more information, he shared what he’d learned with friends and family. Then when he couldn’t find a site that “tied all this stuff together in a way that made sense,” he says, he created a pdf with everything he’d uncovered thus far. After that, he realized a web site would be a lot more useful. With support from seven sponsors, like the Calvert Foundation and Saiid Business School at the University of Oxford, he created his online resource directory, which he launched last May.

At the same time, Kaminer has been active as an investor himself. He became co-chair of the Slow Money NYC chapter in 2011 and, through that, formed an angel investment group called NYC LION. (The name recently was changed to Foodshed Investors NY). It uses the Slow Money approach, which involves a longer than usual time horizon and a return “somewhere in the mid to high single digits,” says Kaminer. The first investment, made in 2012 and which eventually totaled about $300,000, was in Egg, a farm to table restaurant in Brooklyn; that area, of course, is a hub for local and impact investing and all things social enterprise.

As for Kaminer’s plans for the site, he doesn’t see it becoming a big money maker. But he does want to cover his costs and keep expanding, adding more resources, for example, and a discussion forum.

“What I’m doing is financially less rewarding than what I did before,” says Kaminer. “But it’s much more rewarding in every other respect.”