For its first two seasons , Impact(ed) carved out space for practitioners of color to speak candidly about their work. It showcased the importance of diverse, creative perspectives and a non-traditional, non-linear path into the world of investing. It grounded the conversation in lived experience and real decision-making, not just frameworks and conference talking points. And importantly, it gave a platform to perspectives and voices that are too often pushed to the side. This season, Impact(ed) will take conversations even deeper. Because there are things we all know–but don’t say out loud: We know most LPs are still optimizing for risk-adjusted returns, not impact. We know investment committees rarely behave the way their mission statements suggest they do. We know entire strategies get framed as “market opportunity” when they’re really a function of where capital feels comfortable flowing. And we know that when markets tighten, a lot of the courageous rhetoric gets silenced quickly. Where our first two seasons -- importantly -- shone on a light on practitioners of color in the middle of their careers reflecting on how they got there, and the many pieces of the impact investing puzzle (from ESG-screening at some of the largest pensions, to impact VC, and employee ownership as an alternative to traditional buyouts) this season will be a deeper dive into the structural levers that control how capital is allocated. We started with a mission of showing the whole chessboard and widening the tent to including more voices and perspectives in the conversation, and now we're eager to dive deeper into honest discussions about the more granular barriers and genuine opportunities for scale within impact investing. This season we'll be covering topics like: Blackstone and Your Retirement Impact Investing in the Built Environment Are There Too Many VC's? The Current State of Community Development The Pro's and Con's of PE The Business of Asset Management How IC's Actually Work What Went Wrong with Tricolor Impact Investing & Public Policy And a Retrospective Review of Past Episodes
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August 17, 2026Episode 655 min
Impact(ed): Live - Nontraditional Talent & the Unclear Path to a Career in Impact Investing
Impact(ed) co-host Lucas Turner-Owens sat down with Eric Horvath and Shuvam Rizal to unpack their first-of-its-kind research: analyzing broad-based demand for impact-first investing careers from candidates who do not come from MBA programs and traditional financial institutions. Eric and Shuvam shared findings and observations based on more than 250 respondents, including analysis and trends on who's interested in these jobs, how much experience they have, and what they feel are major blockers to employment. This was the first of two sessions exploring this topic. The second -- to be hosted in September -- will focus on ways employers and field-builders can think about expanding career pathways for this abundance of talent. Be sure to follow Impact(ed) on Substack for more. This exploration is supported by Tufts' Certificate in Impact and Sustainable Investing (CISI) and Untapped Capital Consulting.
July 21, 2026Episode 547 min
The Pros and Cons of Private Equity
Private equity can feel as though it has always existed—a permanent villain of the investment industry. But it hasn’t. The modern industry is only a few decades old, younger than some of the people now sitting on pension and endowment committees deciding how much of it to hold. PE grew around a specific thesis: that patient, controlling ownership could counter the short-termism of public markets and create genuine value, not merely generate financial returns. Today, that thesis is being tested from two directions at once. A multitrillion-dollar asset class must demonstrate that enough real opportunity remains to justify its enormous scale. At the same time, a higher-cost-of-capital environment is stripping away the cheap debt that helped make many of its past returns possible. So what happens when financial engineering is no longer enough? What does PE look like when returns must come from actually building better businesses? And as private ownership reaches further into the institutions that shape our daily lives, who gets to decide what those businesses are ultimately designed to produce—and for whom? Smitha Das is Senior Director of Investments at World Education Services (WES), where she leads the investment practice and is helping steer the organization’s full balance sheet toward mission alignment. She is an unusually credible voice on this topic because she has sat on nearly every side of the table. She began her career at an infrastructure PE fund, later worked as an intermediary, and now allocates capital as an asset owner. Rodney and Eric sat down with her for a conversation that resists the easy version of the PE debate and instead examines the mechanics through which value—or harm—is actually created. We talked about: Daycare centers, nursing homes, local newspapers, and youth sports leagues—the everyday institutions now owned by PE that many people assume are still locally controlled. The two versions of PE WES holds at once: a “current-state” portfolio, where the organization pushes incrementally for better incentives, governance, and structures within the existing playbook; and a “catalytic portfolio,” where it is testing entirely new models of ownership and governance. PE as a tool and a set of design choices, rather than an inherently good or bad asset class—and why incentives, governance, and investment structure are the three levers that most directly shape outcomes. Glossary Private Equity Definition: An investment model in which a firm raises capital from institutional investors to acquire controlling stakes in companies—usually private companies, though sometimes publicly traded companies that are taken private—with the intention of holding, improving, and eventually selling them for a return. Why it matters: Much of the public debate treats PE as either a monolithic villain or an unqualified engine of growth. But because the ownership model is so flexible, “Is private equity good or bad?” is the wrong question. The more useful question is: what are a particular firm’s incentives, governance, and investment structure designed to produce? Roll-Up / Consolidation Definition: A strategy in which a firm acquires multiple companies within the same industry or geographic region and combines them under shared ownership, often to gain scale, reduce costs, or control a larger share of a market. Why it matters: Roll-ups can be difficult to detect. A consolidated daycare chain may continue operating under its original, locally recognizable name even after ownership has changed. That opacity makes the resulting loss of competition—and the decisions that follow—harder for affected communities to trace back to the actual owner.
July 6, 2026Episode 443 min
Everything is Impact
AI-generated wealth could unlock tens of billions in new annual philanthropic spending over the next decade. So why does Jed Emerson think the real question isn't how fast that money moves, but what it's actually for? Jed Emerson is one of the longest-standing voices in impact investing and the originator of the "blended value" framework — but he didn't come up through a trading desk or a venture fund. He started in social work, ran the Larkin Street Youth Center in San Francisco, and helped launch REDF (now Redefine Alliance) with KKR co-founder George Roberts, making it one of the first venture philanthropy funds in the country. Rodney and Lucas sat down with Jed for a wide-ranging conversation on where the field got stuck, and what decades of this work have actually taught him. We talked about: Why "doing good vs. doing well" is a false choice, and what it costs the field to keep asking it Why Jed stopped starting with structure — grant, debt, equity, hybrid — and started with purpose instead Microfinance as a case study in how philanthropic capital gets mispriced as "risky" until it isn't Whether a new wave of AI-driven philanthropic wealth will reproduce old patterns of concentrated ownership, or actually build shared agency Jed's shift from "being the rock to being the river," and what that means for a field addicted to its own frameworks GLOSSARY: Blended Value Technical: The idea that all capital and all enterprises generate a mix of economic, social, and environmental value simultaneously — value isn't separable into a "financial" bucket and an "impact" bucket. In practice: Jed's framework rejects the premise that you have to choose between a grant and an investment, or between mission and return. Every dollar deployed is already doing all three kinds of value-creation at once, whether or not anyone is tracking it. Why it matters: Once you accept blended value, the question stops being "is this concessionary or market-rate?" and becomes "what value are we actually trying to create, and for whom?" That reframing is what lets the right tool — grant, equity, guarantee, hybrid — follow the purpose instead of the other way around. Absorptive Capacity Technical: The ability of a field, sector, or set of institutions to effectively deploy a given amount of capital — measured in things like grantmaking staff, due diligence capability, and institutional infrastructure. In practice: If AI wealth adds tens of billions in new annual philanthropic spending, someone has to actually move that money well: more grants, more allocators, more operating talent, more institutions capable of doing it with speed and discipline. Why it matters: Jed pushes back on treating this purely as a technical staffing problem. Capacity is also a power problem — plenty of organizations already have the ambition and trust built up in their communities, but lack flexible, patient capital. Asking "do we have enough capacity" without asking "whose capacity are we willing to see" risks building new infrastructure around the same old gatekeepers.
June 18, 2026Episode 343 min
How Do IC's Actually Work?
George Suttles is a longtime investment committee member and adviser to philanthropic institutions, with deep experience helping boards think differently about investment stewardship, fiduciary responsibility, and who belongs in the room. Rini Banerjee is a pioneer in mission-aligned endowment strategy, having spent over a decade helping foundations use their investment policy statements as tools for values alignment—long before most advisors understood what she was asking for. Together, they brought a rare combination of insider knowledge and strategic challenge to this conversation. George has sat on committees and helped build them. Rini has used the IPS as an organizing document to pull investment committees up from manager selection and into mission. Between them, they helped us understand what investment committees actually do, why they matter more than most people realize, and what it would take to change who sits at the table. GLOSSARY: Investment Policy Statement (IPS) Technical: A written document that establishes the goals, guidelines, and constraints for managing an organization’s investment portfolio. It typically covers asset allocation targets, risk tolerance, liquidity requirements, and sometimes values-based restrictions. In practice: Most foundations have one. Most board members have never read it. Rini has spent years treating the IPS not as a compliance document but as an organizing tool—a way to force the strategic and values conversation that should be happening at the investment committee level but rarely does. When a committee rewrites its IPS through a mission lens, it has to confront the question: what is this endowment actually for? Why it matters: The IPS is the rulebook. Change the rulebook, and you change what’s possible. A mission-aligned IPS can open the door to impact investments, ESG screens, and community capital strategies that a default document would never contemplate. Fiduciary Duty Technical: A legal and ethical obligation to act in the best interest of the beneficiary—in this case, the foundation and its mission—rather than in one’s own interest or the interest of any third party. In practice: Investment committee members are fiduciaries. That means they can be held legally liable if they make decisions that benefit themselves rather than the institution. For a long time, fiduciary duty was used as an argument against mission-aligned investing: the duty, the argument went, was to maximize financial returns, full stop. That argument has been substantially challenged and largely discredited—but it still comes up, and it’s still used to resist change. Why it matters: Understanding fiduciary duty is essential to understanding both the power and the constraints of the investment committee role. It’s also useful for pushing back on the claim that pursuing mission alignment is somehow legally risky.
June 3, 2026Episode 248 min
Are There Too Many VC's?
Are There Too Many VCs in Impact Investing? The Real Answer Is More Complicated than a Yes or No. Ben Thornley is co-founder and managing partner of Tideline, one of the field’s leading research and advisory firms on impact investing. He’s not an investor—he’s the person that the largest limited partners in the world, institutions managing hundreds of billions in assets, call when they’re trying to make sense of a market they don’t fully understand yet. His answer: the problem isn’t too much VC. It’s not enough of everything else. The capital stack in impact investing is barbelling—institutions piling into later-stage, more proven strategies while early-stage impact sits overcrowded and without much liquidity EPISODE GLOSSARY: Barbelling Technical: A distribution pattern in which capital concentrates at two extremes of a spectrum, leaving the middle relatively underfunded. In practice: In impact investing, institutional capital is flowing heavily into later-stage, more proven strategies (large private equity funds, public equities with ESG screens) and into very early-stage philanthropic work—while the middle (growth-stage impact, fund II and III managers) goes undercapitalized. Why it matters: The companies most ready to scale—past proof of concept but not yet large enough to attract big institutional mandates—are exactly where the gap sits. Barbelling explains why the field can feel both overcrowded and underfunded at the same time. Secondary Markets Technical: Markets where investors buy and sell existing stakes in private funds or companies, rather than investing directly into new deals. In practice: If you’re an LP in a private equity fund and you need liquidity before the fund winds down, you sell your stake to another investor on the secondary market. In conventional private equity, this market is large and well-developed. In impact investing, it barely exists—Ben noted you can count impact secondary funds on one hand. Why it matters: Without a secondary market, every impact investment is effectively locked up until exit. That illiquidity premium makes impact structurally more expensive to hold than conventional alternatives, which rational institutions will price accordingly. Concessionary Capital Technical: Capital that accepts below-market financial returns in exchange for social or environmental impact. In practice: Think of a foundation that invests in an affordable housing fund knowing the returns will be lower than a comparable market-rate fund—because the goal is to produce housing, not just profit. The ‘concession’ is the financial return the investor foregoes. Why it matters: The field debates how much concession is appropriate—or required—for genuine impact. Ben’s view is that the impact investing community has sometimes made this debate more binary than it needs to be, excluding strategies that produce real impact but don’t meet a specific return threshold. Lacking Liquidity Technical: A state in which a market or asset class lacks sufficient liquidity mechanisms (secondary markets, structured exits, revolving credit facilities) to meet investor demand. In practice: An impact fund manager trying to return capital to LPs who need liquidity has very few options compared to a conventional PE manager. There’s no robust secondary market to sell into, fewer structured products to access bridge capital, and fewer exit pathways in general. Why it matters: A lack of liquidity compounds over time. It makes the asset class less attractive to institutions that need to manage liquidity risk—which restricts the pool of potential LPs, which limits fund size, which limits what managers can do
May 22, 2026Episode 144 min
Blackstone & Your Retirement
Only 10% of retail investors say they want expanded access to private markets. So why is the entire industry pushing for it? On the latest episode of Impact(ed), we sat down with Ian Fuller (Westfuller Advisors) and Ben Schiffrin (Better Markets) to unpack what’s actually happening as firms like Blackstone, Apollo, and KKR make their push into 401(k) accounts. We talked about: The new Department of Labor guidance creating a ‘safe harbor’ for private market investing in retirement plans—and why removing fiduciary liability changes everything Why the democratization framing deserves real scrutiny—and who’s doing the framing What the fee math actually looks like when you put 2-and-20 next to a Vanguard index fund The liquidity trap: what happens when everyday investors can’t get their money out GLOSSARY Accredited Investor Technical: A person or entity that meets the SEC’s wealth or income thresholds—currently $1M net worth (excluding your home) or $200K annual income ($300K for couples). In practice: The legal standard used to determine who can access private market investments. The idea is that accredited investors are sophisticated enough to fend for themselves without the protections that apply to public offerings. The thresholds haven’t kept pace with wealth concentration, which means a lot more people technically qualify now than the rule originally imagined. 2-and-20 Technical: The standard fee structure for private market funds: a 2% annual management fee on assets under management, plus 20% of profits (called ‘carry’ or ‘carried interest’). In practice: Compare that to a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund, which charges roughly 0.03%. For every $100,000 invested, you’re paying $2,000/year in management fees before the fund has done anything—plus a fifth of any gains. Ian was direct: funds with this fee structure don't consistently produce better outcomes than passive investing. Liquidity / Illiquid Technical: Liquidity refers to how quickly and easily you can convert an investment into cash. Illiquid investments can’t be sold quickly—you may need to wait months, years, or until a specific exit event. In practice: Index funds and ETFs in your 401(k) are highly liquid—you can sell them and get your money in days. Most private market funds are illiquid. Some ‘semi-liquid’ private credit funds cap redemptions at 5% per quarter, meaning if you need your money and others do too, you may simply be told to wait. Ben noted that redemption requests at some private credit funds are currently exceeding that 5% limit. Why it matters: Retirement accounts aren’t always held until retirement. People dip in for emergencies. Illiquid assets in a retirement account mean you may not be able to get your money when you need it. Safe Harbor Technical: A legal provision that protects a party from liability if they’ve followed a specific set of rules or procedures, even if the outcome is bad. In practice: The Department of Labor’s proposed rule would create a safe harbor for 401(k) plan managers who follow certain steps before investing in private markets. If they follow the process, they’re shielded from lawsuits—even if the investment performs poorly. Ben’s concern: the guardrails in the safe harbor may not be sufficient to actually protect retail investors, especially those who don’t have access to a sophisticated advisor to ask the right questions on their behalf. Why it matters: Safe harbors can be appropriate policy tools. But they can also shift the risk from institutions (who can absorb it) to individuals (who often can’t). That’s the core tension this episode kept returning to.
May 1, 2025Episode 11 min
Season 2 Trailer
Season 2 of Impact(ed) is coming soon. Here's what to expect!
May 30, 2024Episode 532 min
Investment Advisory with Ellen Chiu (Westfuller Advisors)
The investment advisory industry manages trillions and trillions of client assets, for individuals and institutions, to support their financial objectives. Increasingly, thanks to the rise of sustainable finance, impact investing and the great generational wealth transfer, more and more clients are adding social impact goals alongside their financial ones. Join us and guest Ellen Chiu ( Westfuller Advisors ) to learn about how her progressive values brought her to her current role in the investment advisory industry, the relationship and reciprocity firms like hers have with their clients, and why impact measurement’s something she’s so excited about. Brief primer on the size, scale and scope of the investment advisory industry [1:06] Ellen shares how her upbringing and immigrant parents sparked her interest in finance [7:01] How Ellen first got exposed to the investment advisory industry [9:34] An introduction to Ellen’s firm, Westfuller Advisors and who they work with [11:30] How Westfuller works with institutional clients to support their investment needs and mission goals [14:42] Matchmaking for mission [22:00] One of the project’s Ellen’s most excited about currently [24:06] Advice Ellen would give her younger self [27:57] All views expressed by our guest are her own and do not necessarily express the views of Westfuller Advisors. Demystifying Industry Jargon: RIA , CFA , portfolio management , OCIO , impact measurement , IPS Impact(ed) is written, recorded and produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Horvath and Lucas Turner-Owens . Please connect with us on Linkedin, we’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, your recommendations for future topics and guests, and be in community with you. Original Music by Lucas Turner-Owens.
June 18, 2025Episode 732 min
Raising Impact Capital with Alicia DeLia (Delia Impact Advisors)
Alicia DeLia of DeLia Impact Advisors joins the pod this week to talk about raising both grants and impact-first investments. Alicia shares why she’s passionate about getting capital to communities; how she supports leaders from diverse backgrounds to create authentic relationships with wealth holders, so fundraising doesn’t feel so transactional; and the importance of being an optimist. Timestamps: 00:00 Breaking Down Silos in Impact Investing 01:04 Understanding Fundraising in Impact Investing 03:54 The Role of Investor Relations 04:59 Alicia DeLea's Journey into Fundraising 09:00 Resource Mobilization in Impact Investing 11:58 Mindset and Self-Belief in Fundraising 15:57 The Importance of Asking for More 17:01 Defining Grants vs. Impact Investing 20:09 A Week in the Life of a Fundraiser 22:00 Transferable Skills in Fundraising 25:58 The Power of Convening 29:10 Advice for Future Fundraisers Links: Alicia’s Linkedin DeLia Impact Advisor’s website Eric’s Linkedin Lucas’ Linkedin
June 2, 2025Episode 438 min
Measuring Impact with Joanna Kuang & Leila Mengesha (Illumen Capital)
Joanna Kuang and Leila Mengesha of Illumen Capital join the pod this week to talk about how their lived experiences brought them to investing and impact measurement, the risks that could come from not managing impact, and how these types of roles barely existed a few years ago. Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction to Impact Measurement and Management 06:37 The Evolution of Impact Measurement and Management 12:09 Personal Journeys into Impact Investing 20:47 Illumen Capital's Approach to Impact Investing 28:41 Challenges and Opportunities in Impact Measurement 36:57 Advice for Aspiring Impact Investors Links: Joanna’s Linkedin Leila’s Linkedin Illumen Capital’s website Eric’s Linkedin Lucas’ Linkedin
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