I sat down with Maja Beckstrom of the Pioneer Press to talk about impact investing. Check out our conversation:
Though it’s a new buzzword, impact investing is an old concept.
“If you really trace this movement of aligning investments with your values, you need to go back to the Quakers and the 17th century,” says Susan Hammel, executive in residence for impact investing at the Minnesota Council on Foundations. As abolitionists, most Quakers wouldn’t invest in the slave trade and as pacifists they didn’t invest in war.
Over the last month we have received 45 ideas for improving the impact investing ecosystem from over 33 innovative thinkers. Some of the ideas came from stakeholders of the ecosystem but many came from local supporters of the ecosystem who are not directly involved in impact investing or impact investing practitioners who work outside of Minnesota.
The next step in this project is narrowing down the 45 ideas to the 10 ideas we would like to be workshopped and presented at the second convening. Many of the ideas overlap in solutions or issues they are addressing but we aim to narrow them down to the 10 that represent a diversity in issue area, viability, and idea creator.
Over the next two weeks we will be speaking with the creators of the most interesting ideas to workshop their idea for the convening. Some ideas have been fully fleshed out while others are still nascent. The goal of the workshops is to have a clear enough vision of the idea such that a 5 minute presentation could answer the following questions:
The main programming for the second convening will consist of five minute presentations of the ideas that come out of the refining and workshopping process. The presentations will be informal and structured by the three questions listed above. After the presentations, attendees can approach the speakers and build upon the ideas in unstructured “Yes and—” exercises.
The convening will take place on November 10th from 8am–11am in the Impact Hub’s Skyline room.
Here is the agenda:
8:00 – Networking & Breakfast
8:30 – Welcome
8:45 – Phase I Review
9:00 – Bold Ideas
10:00 – Discussion
10:45 – Send off