Alliance in collaboration with WINGS has been commissioned by Propel Philanthropy to conduct a 10-part interview series on the work of Social Impact Infrastructure Organisations (SIIOs) and the benefits they bring to the sector. This interview series aims to collectively galvanize a significant change in how funders and others think and feel about building infrastructure, unlocking global resources, and establishing robust ecosystems.

These interviews will being published here. In this installment of the series of conversations with the representatives of SIIOs, Andrew Milner talks to Marina Feffer Oelsner of Generation Pledge.

Generation Pledge is a growing community of inheritors who have pledged to commit 10 percent of their inheritance to effective causes within five years of their inheritance. In this interview, Alliance features editor Andrew Milner sits down with Generation Pledge co-founder Marina Feffer Oelsner to discuss how she brings inheritors together to mobilise their capital for the greatest good.

Andrew Milner: Just to start off, can you tell me a little bit about Generation Pledge? I know you’re one of the co-founders, how and why did it come about?

Marina Feffer Oelsner: Generation Pledge was created five years ago by Sid [Efromovich] and myself. Before that we had started a for-profit consultancy company for families of wealth who wanted to deploy capital with effectiveness. We both bring a lot of experience in the fields of behavioural sciences, psychology, and impact, and we were originally really excited about the consultancy but then we started to see that there was a demographic that was really neglected: inheritors. This was really surprising given the power and influence they may have today or in the future. We asked ourselves, ‘why are we not working in a structured way with this demographic?’ and so we hibernated the consultancy company and started something that was focused exclusively on inheritors.

Over time, we learned that not only do inheritors have financial capital, they also have many other different types of capital, and we have to learn how to use that to make sure that we capitalise on the opportunities, as inheritors could truly hold the solutions to our world’s biggest problems. But there is still a lot of work to be done, as the impact ecosystem doesn’t generally focus on inheritors, and if it does, it does so in a very siloed way – either philanthropy, impact investing or through businesses, but not something that looks at the totality of their assets, and how to go about, what we call, the polycapital approach. This is why we decided to work with inheritors, because we believe that this is the most important demographic to activate. We also decided that we wanted to create a community for inheritors, because at the end of the day, we’re looking for a strategy that will shift culture, so it has to be a movement. We have to have enough scale so that we are moving many billions, and even trillions of dollars, which is ultimately a change in the culture of multi-generational wealth.

Read the full article about Generation Pledge by Andrew Milner at Alliance Magazine.