Giving Compass' Take:

• This is a Q&A with members of the Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium about the trends and tensions of the impact finance world. 

• Are you seeking out opportunities to participate in or improve your impact investing practices? 

• Learn more about impact investing in this content collection.

Interest and investment in impact and sustainable finance have soared in recent years, highlighting a continuing shift of the field from a niche practice of do-good investors to a mainstream response to significant social problems.

The dizzying pace of development has inspired the formation of many groups with the goal of understanding the field and identifying and sharing best practices within it. They include the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment (GRASFI), the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG), the Impact Management Project, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), and the Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium, where I am one of seven members of the steering committee.

For four years, our group of more than 190 professors around the world has researched, taught, questioned, and analyzed numerous issues related to impact investing and sustainable finance, from quantifying impact to understanding the role of philanthropy, financial markets, and public players. Each year, we gather this diverse faculty group at our home base at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University to share our insights.

With the prominence and importance of the field reaching new heights, and with much of our collective work generating new and useful insights, we felt a need to reach out to broader community of social change leaders. With that goal in mind, we launched the Impact Investment Today and Tomorrow series in conjunction with SSIR. With this series, we aim to guide and inspire practitioners, students, enterprises, and thought leaders who share our conviction that impact investing and sustainable finance can move markets and improve human and environmental outcomes.

Read the full article about impact finance by Megan Kashner at Stanford Social Innovation Review.