Giving Compass' Take:

• Matt Onek explains how foundations are coming together to lead a movement towards impact investing and racial equity. 

• Is your organization ready to join this movement? How have you benefited and/or suffered from racial inequity? 

• Learn how donors can support racial equity. 

It has been inspiring to be part of the rapidly growing impact investing movement over the last several years, as foundations and their partners have committed more of their assets to social and environmental change. In the midst of this growth, Mission Investors Exchange (MIE) and our 250 members have taken a leadership role in keeping “impact” at the heart of the movement. But one critical element of “impact” has received insufficient attention: racial equity.

By 2020, median white American households are projected to own 86 times more wealth than African-American households and 68 times more than Latinx households. Significant racial disparities also exist in employment, educational attainment, access to healthcare, incarceration rates, and many other aspects of American life.

It is therefore crucial that racial equity become a central part of the impact investing movement. That’s why MIE recently started on its own journey in pursuit of racial equity, working both to evolve our internal practices and to surface best practices in the philanthropic community at MIE’s 2018 National Conference and as part of the Racial Equity track at SOCAP 2018. These and other collective efforts led up to this series, launched with a companion essay by La June Montgomery Tabron, president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

In a field in which a disproportionate number of leaders, like me, are white men, this series aims to present a diverse set of philanthropic voices. Together, MIE, Tabron, and the nine other foundation presidents will lay out the moral and economic imperative for action, as well as concrete ways philanthropy can ensure that racial equity is at the center of the impact investing movement as it continues to scale.

Read the full article about leading the way towards impact investing and racial equity by Matt Onek at Stanford Social Innovation Review.