What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
The right response to Charlottesville is to do what you can, with what you have, from where you are. If you’re in impact investing, it means you likely have education, influence over where capital goes, and a certain level of privilege — which gives you the privilege to do something about systemic biases in our economy and our country.
Our current economic model has created a highly unequal society that exacerbates racism and inequality. Torches and hate speech are explicit racism, but the way we pick new ideas can contribute to — or reduce — implicit and systemic racism.
As impact investors, we are a self-selected group that has chosen to be concerned with the greater good. But we still have so much room to improve. Like any burgeoning movement, impact investors have borrowed best practices from the industry we are working to improve. In the process, we’ve accidentally borrowed a lot of shortcuts and biases from mainstream, Silicon Valley-style investing.
Tracking social impact metrics is important; but if we want to take the most expansive definition of “impact”, we need to improve on HOW we invest as well as WHAT we invest in. The changes involve both people and process.