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Watch Out, Wall Street: MBAs Design Sustainable Investment Funds
April 6, 2014 · No comments

The winning team in a business-school sustainable finance competition summoned a vision of groves of poplar trees on polluted industrial sites, delivering competitive returns to private investors while cleaning up toxics and boosting real estate values. Fresh Coast Capital, from...

Save the Oceans, Feed the World, Make a Profit?
March 18, 2014 · No comments

What’s good for the fish is good for the fishing communities — and for impact investors. That’s the thesis of three new vehicles for investing in sustainable fisheries that will be tested in the Philippines, Chile and Brazil over the...

Business Solutions to India’s Poverty
March 3, 2014 · No comments

Economists have it all wrong. The conventional definition of economic growth—increase in average per capita GDP—is irrelevant to people living in extreme poverty. If you’re one of 400 million people in India earning $400 a year or less and the...

D.Light Raises $11 Million to Light Up Developing World
February 26, 2014 · 1 comment

Like Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatApp, the announcement that d.light design has closed $11 million in new financing is a signal of Silicon Valley’s increasing interest in technology’s role in meeting the needs of emerging middle-class consumers in the...

Bloomberg Jumps Into the Ocean — and Impact Investing
February 14, 2014 · No comments

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a big splash in the oceans world recently with a $53 million commitment that put him among the top five funders of ocean restoration and sustainable seafood. No less significantly, the grant also...

Mainstreaming Impact Investment Products and Services
January 29, 2014 · No comments

Impact investing will struggle to gain scale and relevance without both the participation of mainstream capital markets and investment professionals and the expansion into more traditional and non-private financial products. A key step is to increase awareness by educating financial...

Direct Public Offering Finances Food Security, Jobs in Oakland
December 24, 2013 · No comments

The Bay Area has a remarkable example of how a new economic development strategy could work. People’s Community Market, the first full service grocery store in West Oakland in almost a decade, will be built in 2014 after the completion...

‘Lean’ Startups Set Sights on Climate Change, Hunger, Empowerment
December 20, 2013 · No comments

From Zipcar’s model of sharing transportation capacity to mobile apps coded by pre-teen and teen girls to help the homeless find food, “lean startups” are trying to tackle the world’s biggest problems. “Lean experimentation” emphasizes the need to pivot quickly...

Applying a New Lens To Measure Social Return
December 19, 2013 · No comments

We’ve been measuring and valuing negative externalities for a long time, with governments using taxes to realign incentives and costs. Now it’s time to measure and value positive externalities as well. Charging for negative externalities is sometimes referred to as...