Initiative
Criterion Institute

About the Criterion Institute

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

WHAT WE BELIEVE

Addressing the key issues of our time –poverty, environmental threats, inequality, conflict, disease – requires that we not only work within existing markets to create change, but also that we approach social change by intentionally changing markets.

We constructed these systems. We made up the rules of finance, markets and systems. The relaxing thing? We can change them. It is vital today that we share an imagination that we can create a different market system.

With this imagination, Criterion has been leading initiatives that shape markets to create good for the past ten years – formally as Criterion Ventures. Read about our experience, our team, and what we’re up to now shaping markets for social change.

The core work of shifting what matters and who has authority in economic decisions intersects with two fields of work, gender lens investing and the church as an economic being. Our theory of change responds to these particular contexts and draws on our experience experimenting with field building and systems change efforts, and research efforts conducted within our former Leaders Shaping Markets initiative.

Cultural reframes

Change is cultural work. It demands the cultural work of shifting the imagination: the issue, the problem and the boundaries of the system. Our most significant impact over the past 13 years is grounded in a series of reframes. Reframes shift peoples’ imagination to see possibilities where they saw barriers. Reframes help build bridges by employing empathy to understand how people see the world and what lenses can shift to change the vision. A reframe is in itself an invitation to engage in a different conversation, but also to see yourself in the conversation in a new way.

In the methodology for 1k Churches we lead people through a set reframes, each of which shifts what they see as possible, important, and where they see themselves in the work of reinventing the economy. The primary reframe that drives 1K Churches is that relationships are at the core of reinventing the economy. How does our faith inform now we can be in economic relationships?

The reframes of (re)Value Gender require a careful navigation of not just our understanding about finance but of our assumptions about gender and potential biases around women and girls. One, particularly compelling reframe, is about how, in thinking about gender and investing, we need to move from counting to valuing.

Invitations to a simple action

We, as a society, have a tendency to de-personalize the economy as if it is a force of nature like a hurricane or an earthquake. We talk about economic forces as if there is no human agency. And, as a society, we privilege the expert knowledge of finance. Even those who know a good bit demur from claiming expertise. In this context, all but the most exquisitely credentialed require a compelling invitation to approach the finance table, especially when it’s set to rethink the rules. We need to hear we have permission to engage – even if we already have it – and to access safe spaces to practice financial language and analysis.

The 1K Bible study and self-guided process for (re)Value give access to the knowledge and language to participate, grounded in a familiar experience. The loan or investment at the end requires engagement but is relatively simple. We have learned to simplify the action so the focus can be on the reflection, both personal and societal.

A base of leaders equipped for this work

We are committed to building systems and structures that support and further human development to empower more people to create the future. We cannot simply innovate our way to a new future. We will welcome new people and populations to the table, and support them that they may both take their seats with greater confidence, and influence the mindsets of those already there.

The collective action behind each of the self-guided processes builds a base of ten and twenty thousand leaders who have engaged in a simple action. As we learn about this base of individuals and networks, we will share their stories with each other, identify potential for additional collective action and find ways to convene them regionally and at an annual national conference.

Design and demonstration of new possibilities

It is too easy to do the proscribed action and think we are done: to write our senators, to buy a different brand, to shift our investments as we are advised. We need leaders who don’t simply do what they are told but actively work to rewrite the rules of finance, the rules of investments, to change what matters.

Criterion will adapt our current Structure Lab to become Design Lab where we engage leaders in learning to use the components of finance and investments to build new solutions for their community, their institution, their cause. Here they can change what matters in the criteria, the valuation, the decisions within the tool.

In order to build the momentum and the credibility, we will do the research and design work to demonstrate (at increasingly sophisticated levels) what is possible, directly engaging with financial institutions to shape what matters in their financial decision making.

Institutional structures to sustain leadership

The women’s movement and the institutions of the church both have equipping leaders for change work at the core of their mission. The momentum and movement we are building through these simple actions and demonstrations of leaders reinventing the economy could be stewarded long term by these institutions, if they saw that as their role.

Both sets of institutions tend to stand stalwart and guard themselves against the economic systems that lead to oppression, exclusion, and inequality. This stance positions them outside of and often suspicious of work that actively engages in change through the economic tools. The programs are developing strategies to engage leaders in these institutions so that finance can be seen as a tool of social change.

Amplification of the work

We will expand the reach and normalize the cultural shift by broadcasting narratives, and images that reinforce the identities and the authority of the individuals and institutions who are engaged in the work. It is not enough to give individuals experience; those experiences must echo broadly and continue to invite others and give others permission to believe that each of us can change the rules of the economy.

Core Team

JOY ANDERSON, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER

Joy Anderson is a prominent national leader at the intersection of business and social change. She began as a high school teacher in New York City Public Schools. She went to New York to understand how power works in big systems and stayed for eight years because she fell in love with the students. Joy played leadership roles in the teachers union and managed federally funded programs for the school and the district.

After leaving New York, Joy transitioned from a school teacher to an entrepreneur, founding Criterion Ventures in 2002, co-founding Good Capital with Tim Freundlich and Kevin Jones in 2006 and leading the development of Rockefeller-funded Healthcare_Uncovered from 2006 until 2009.

Literally hundreds of ventures have been shaped by Joy’s insights and experience. As faculty on the leading social innovation award programs, including Unreasonable Institute and Echoing Green, she advises the next generation of leaders. As chair of the board of directors of Village Capital and through involvement in Investor’s Circle, she is actively involved in shaping early stage social investments. And through her role in developing and leading Structure Lab© workshops she has helped over 300 organizations think through their legal and financial structures.

A serial entrepreneur and consummate networker, Joy’s leadership and expertise have been at the forefront of the development of the social capital markets over the last 10 years. Her interest in the role of finance in changing the world was sparked during her eight year consulting relationship with the General Board of Pensions of the United Methodist Church. She was instrumental in her board position at Lutheran Community Foundation in their recent $10 million allocation to social investment. As a recognition of her business leadership, in 2011, Joy was ranked 51st in Fast Company’s annual of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.

Currently, she leads Criterion Institute which serves as a think tank around shaping markets to create social and environmental good. Criterion houses three field building initiatives, Structure Lab, Women Effect Investments and Church as an Economic Being. Her speaking and thought leadership is focused on the practices of shaping markets, whether that is focused on how the church is both an actor and implicated in the economy, on how legal structures shape the possibilities of enterprises, or a gender lens on investing.

Joy’s intellectual interests draw on her research for her Ph.D. in American History from New York University. Her dissertation examined prison reform in the 1830’s and how individuals and organizations in democracies claim expertise in order to shape public institutions.

Dr. Anderson lives with her husband and daughter in a Connecticut apple orchard, and can be found in the fall pressing cider and boiling apple syrup.

PHYLLIS ANDERSON, 1K CHURCHES DIRECTOR

Phyllis Anderson joined Criterion Institute in January 2014 to lead and support the 1K Churches movement, which seeks to engage 1000 churches of all denominations across the country in a process of reflecting on the relationship between their faith and the economy through Bible study and the experience of investing in a micro-business in their community.

She lives now in Sonoma, California, having recently retired as President of Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley. She served for nine years as the first president of a Lutheran seminary in the United States. She is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) who has served as pastor of a rural parish in Iowa, as assistant to the Lutheran Bishop in Iowa, as Director of Pastoral Studies and Assistant Professor of Theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and as Director for Theological Education in the Churchwide Organization of the ELCA. She worked with many denominations as the Associate Dean and Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies at the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University, an ecumenical theological school within a Jesuit Catholic university.

She holds a B.A. from Sacramento State University; an M.Div. from Wartburg Theological Seminary; and a Ph.D. from Aquinas Institute of Theology. Her areas of specialty are ecclesiology and ecumenics. She is married to the Rev. Dr. Herbert Anderson, Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and Research Professor of Practical Theology at the Graduate Theological Uniion in Berkeley. They have two children: Joy Anderson of Haddam, Connecticut, and Joel Anderson of Leiden, the Netherlands.

SARAH MUNFORD, ASSOCIATE

Sarah_Munford_01_DASarah joined Criterion Institute after a year-long fellowship in organizational management and social change in Boston through New Sector Alliance’s Residency in Social Enterprise. While at New Sector, she worked with Interise, a non-profit that provides training and networks for small business owners, to expand programming to new geographies in Massachusetts. Sarah’s interest in market systems change grew while studying at the University of Virginia, where she received a B.A. in Global Development Studies and Foreign Affairs and was a Jefferson Scholar. As an Associate at Criterion, she supports programs and fundraising.

Board of Directors

JOY ANDERSON

Joy is a prominent national leader at the intersection of business and social change. After leaving her career as a high school teacher in New York, Joy transitioned to an entrepreneur, founding Criterion Ventures in 2002, co-founding Good Capital in 2006. A serial entrepreneur and consummate networker, Joy’s leadership and expertise have been at the forefront of the development of the social capital markets over the last 10 years. As a recognition of her business leadership, in 2011, Joy was ranked 51st in Fast Company’s annual of the 100 Most Creative People in Business

CHERYL DAHLE

Cheryl Dahle is a journalist, entrepreneur and thought leader who has spent more than ten years working at the intersection of business and social innovation. Most recently, she was a director at Ashoka, where she created a consulting practice that distilled knowledge from the organization’s network of 2,500 social entrepreneurs to provide philanthropic guidance to foundations and companies. Prior to that, she was part of the incubation and start-up team to launch the VC-funded online environmental magazine, Blue Egg. She also founded and led Fast Company magazine’s Social Capitalist awards, a competition to surface top social entrepreneurs. As the project manager for four years, she helped design an evaluation methodology and sifted through hundreds of non-profit applications each year to find top performers with compelling models for change. She has written extensively on capital markets for non-profits, sustainability, and social entrepreneurs in the U.S. and abroad. As a consultant, she has served leading organizations in the space of hybrid business/social solutions, including Humanity United, Nike, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University. Her first book, No Horizon is So Far, the story of the first two women in history to cross Antarctica on foot, was published in 2003 by Da Capo Press.

MICHELE KAHANE

Michele Kahane (MBA and MIA, Columbia University) is a professor of professional practice at Milano The New School for Management and Urban Policy. She has more than 20 years of experience in the global business, nonprofit, and philanthropy sectors. Kahane was a banker in emerging markets corporate finance and later practiced social investment at the Ford Foundation for a decade. Subsequently, as a senior executive at the Clinton Global Initiative and at the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, she worked with companies, social entrepreneurs, and the public sector to forge innovative, market-based approaches to global development. She is co-author of the award-winning book Untapped: Creating Value in Underserved Markets (Berrett-Koehler, June 2006), which provides advice to managers on how companies can both implement profitable business strategies and improve conditions in poor communities. In addition to sitting on the Criterion Institute Board, Kahane serves on the board of the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future, the steering committee of the Institute for Responsible Investment, the NY Regional Association of Grantmakers Task Force on Hurricane Katrina, and the Fast Forward Fund.

Advisors and Partners

SUZANNE BIEGEL, ADVISOR

Suzanne is the founder of Catalyst at Large Consulting and is a catalyst in impact investing, philanthropy, and early stage social impact business. She serves principally as a Senior Adviser for ClearlySo in the UK and runs its Clearly Social Angels, a UK angel group focused on social impact business and enterprise. She also co-founded and runs Women in Social Finance, in the UK. She is Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of Confluence Philanthropy, and she’s on the Advisory Board of Investors’ Circle in the US (where she was most recently CEO). She brings more than 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, investor, board member, and hands-on operational manager to her work. In the 1990s, Suzanne was the CEO of IEC, an e-learning and communications firm, during which she and her business partner received the Entrepreneur of the Year and Women of the Year awards. Since selling IEC, Suzanne has been an active angel investor, philanthropist, and board member, and has played leadership roles in a variety of companies and projects. Suzanne is a Fellow at the Aspen Institute, and she is co-chair of the Values Led Investing circle within Women Donors Network. She also serves on the investment committee of the Patient Capital Collaborative, a collaborative angel investment fund which she helped to found. Suzanne is a frequent speaker, facilitator, and moderator on topics of impact investing, philanthropy and mission related investing, and investor readiness for impact businesses. She is passionate about engaging more women in social impact investing, and investing with a gender lens. Suzanne is a native New Yorker, now based in London.

DEBORAH CHAY, ADVISOR

For over a decade, Deborah Chay has helped colleges, universities and cultural organizations develop and diversify their leadership, constituencies and financial resources. She has launched and managed successful fund raising programs and initiatives on behalf of institutions including Occidental College, Yale University, Duke University, and New York’s Japan Society; and created platforms effectively to engage donors, investors and advisors from academic, arts, financial and policy sectors around shared social purpose priorities. A former professor, Chay brings perspectives and techniques from her academic career in literary and cultural criticism, and race and gender theory to her current work as a philanthropy advisor and development consultant.

KATHERINE COLLINS, ADVISOR

Katherine Collins is Founder and CEO of Honeybee Capital, dedicated to the belief that pollinating ideas across varied fields leads to optimal investment decision making. After a long and successful career as portfolio manager and head of equity research at Fidelity, Katherine set out to re-integrate her investment philosophy with the broader world, traveling as a pilgrim and volunteer, earning her MTS degree at Harvard Divinity School, and following lessons from the natural world to resume investing as a valued and integrated profession, beneficial to our communities and our planet.

SARAH KAPLAN, ADVISOR

KaplanSarah Kaplan is Associate Professor of Strategic Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Previously, she was on the faculty of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where she remains a Senior Fellow. She is co-author of the bestselling business book, Creative Destruction. Her research explores how framing processes of managers and entrepreneurial actors affect the evolution of technologies and fields, organizational response to change, and strategy making inside organizations. Her studies examine the biotechnology, fiber optics, personal digital assistant, financial services and nanotechnology fields. Her interest in gender lens investing is in understanding how whole new ecosystems can be built. She received a BA in Political Science from UCLA, an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a PhD. from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

JIM KUCHER, 1K CHURCHES REGIONAL COORDINATOR

JKucherJ. Howard “Jim” Kucher is a nationally recognized thought leader in Social Entrepreneurship. As President and CEO of Kittery Social Ventures, Inc., Jim is currently working with area leaders to develop innovative solutions to systemic problems in health care. Prior to his current role, he was the executive director of the Entrepreneurial Opportunity Center at The University of Baltimore, where he led the Baltimore Social Enterprise Collaborative. This program has helped over 60 area nonprofits develop new models for meeting the needs of their constituents while increasing the sustainability of their organizations, and garnered national acclaim for innovation in curriculum Kucher holds a B.A. from Kean University and an M.B.A. from the University of Baltimore. He also holds certificates as a project management professional and a new product development professional. Kucher has taught entrepreneurship, marketing, management, sales, project management and product development as a faculty member at The University of Baltimore’s Merrick School of Business and has taught at various area schools. Among his many honors, he has been recognized as a Baltimore Renaissance Seed Scholar and an Unsung Hero of Small Business. A proud urbanite and an ordained Elder in the Presbyterian Church, he and his wife Cindy reside in Baltimore.

FROM CRITERION VENTURES TO CRITERION INSTITUTE

Criterion has been leading initiatives that shape markets to create good for the past ten years.

Ventures

As one of the founders of Good Capital we had an outsized impact on the social capital markets in relationship to the specific investments in companies through the fund.

As the leaders of Rockefeller-funded Healthcare_Uncovered, an initiative that sought to rationalize the cash market in healthcare, we introduced new mechanisms for financial management.

Other Ventures

Like every serial entrepreneur, we’ve had experiences that taught us – but that were successful only in terms of how much we learned. And again in each of these ventures, what we learned the most was about how to shape market systems.

Consulting

Criterion has enjoyed ten years of consulting, with over 100 clients, including the Packard Foundation and AARP Foundations. We’ll continue this consulting work through our Structure Labs, where we’ve worked with over 600 entrepreneurs through public workshops and private labs.

Today

Our track record in leading innovative initiatives positions us as a leader in the conversation about shaping markets.

To learn more about where this path has taken us, read about our current initiatives.