II Market
The definition of impact investing
What is Investments made into companies, organizations, and funds with the intention to generate social or environmental impact alongside a financial return?
The five dimensions of impact
What are: What, Who, How Much, Contribution and Risk?
The definition of an efficient impact frontier
True or False: Asset owners only care about positive impacts
What is false, as many care about reducing harm as well as benefitting stakeholders or contributing to impact? Remember your ABC's!
Your favorite guest speaker in the class, and why
Who is: Luba Shabal of Ember, Laura Mixter of Calvert Impact, David Kirkpatrick of SJF Ventures, Doug Kauffman formerly of Transloc, Sarah Gelfand of BlueMark, Meredith Heimburger of GEM, Erika Seth Davies of Rhia Assets, Jesse Simmons of Capshift, or Ishita Shah formerly of Align?
According to the GIIN, the current size of the impact investing market
What is $1.57 trillion?
What are counterfactuals?
Key lessons of SJF's exit from Transloc
What is an impact fund cannot always control exit success along financial and impact factors?
The name of the standards that BlueMark uses as the basis for its over $419B of fund verifications
What are the Operating Principles of Impact Management?
Which matters more to GEM when evaluating impact: manager intensions or portfolio holdings?
What is both?
This percentage of USSIF survey respondents in 2025 expected the sustainable investment market to grow significantly over the next 1-2 years.
What is 73%?
The 4 universal steps of IMM
What are set strategy, integrate, optimize and reinforce?
The two most important dimensions for Climate United when impact rating a potential investment
What are Who Benefits and GHGs saved?
True or False: Most asset owners invest for ESG or for impact, but never both.
What is false? We saw both ESG and impact screens in Ember, BlueMark, GEM and Capshift's work.
One of the three advantages of engaging an OCIO like GEM vs. investing in-house, according to Meredith Heimburger
What is 1) global access to deals 2) ability to compete for capacity-strained investments, or 3) the skill and experience of working across and within many funds and asset classes.
This term is used to describe a fund that focuses on specific industry or industries that is/are likely to have impact AND generates market rate returns
What is thematic?
The golden rule of IMM
What is... always define outcomes from the perspective of the stakeholder who experiences them?
Two things that MUST be aligned for a new asset management fund working to create impact
What are its impact thesis and investment thesis?
The most important impact investing regulation in Europe right now, mentioned by several of our guests.
What is SFDR? The Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation characterizes funds by 3 levels of intention around sustainability. Higher levels require higher accountability in reporting.
The difference between ESG and Impact Investing
What is investing to reduce financial risks by stakeholders (ESG) for investing for stakeholder outcomes (impact)?
The percentage of GIIN survey respondents that said in 2025 they target market rate returns
What is 58%?
The actual definition of impact
What is a change due to an intervention that is different (with statistical significance) that what would have happened anyway?
Root capital's rationale for rating its loans and then correlating them to financial return
What is to justify its ongoing need for subsidy?
The largest percentage of C-type investments you could get in one of GEM's three portfolios.
What is 30%?
The reason Erika Seth Davies said that racism isn't the shark, but is the water, and how that relates to diversity issues in impact investing.
What is because racism is a system of structural inequity, where opportunities are assigned value based on a social interpretation of how we look. It will be changed only when outcomes are no longer different by race. Currently, multiple studies show there is racial bias in asset owners selecting asset managers, even among those dedicated to racial equity.