Winning impact
One of my favorite parts of impact investing is that you can win the game when your org has no more role to play.
The first time I took part in this pattern is when Bainbridge Graduate Institute shut down. It was the first business school to teach how to do good in the world using the tools taught in business school. How to do good by doing well. It’s programs ended less than 20 years after they started, but along the way it changed the accreditation rules of all American business schools, which now require teaching at least some of those ideas to MBA students, rather than the common myth of shareholder value supremacy.
I’ve seen this pattern a few more times since, and then again today from a former partner of my nonprofit, Realize Impact. I never do anything normal, and the nonprofit I co-founded is no exception. It’s primary service is turning philanthropic capital into impact investments.
The very first fund we did this for just informed us it no longer needs our service. That for-profit impact fund now has a 501(c)(3) nonprofit of its own to manage its philanthropists.
Wonderful! Truly. Realize Impact succeeds if someday it too shuts down because the world realizes the existing nonprofits could what mine is doing. The 2,000 donor advised funds could have been doing it already for decades. Hopefully someday they will. Either way, we win.