Giving Compass' Take:

• Liesel Pritker Simmons, co-founder of Blue Haven Initiative, discusses the intersection of impact investing and philanthropy. 

• Why are more philanthropists turning to impact investing? How can social investments help change the landscape of philanthropy?

• Read how women and men approach impact investing.

For Liesel Pritzker Simmons, there’s no shortcut to raising the bar on impact investment performance. As Principal of Blue Haven Initiative, a family office she co-founded in 2012 with her husband Ian Simmons, this millennial is showing how investors of all ages can maximize the positive social and environmental impact of their investments while generating financial returns through the practice of impact investing.

As one of the first family offices created with impact investing as its mission and focus, Pritzker Simmons and the Blue Haven team are careful to ensure that philanthropic efforts and investment efforts are coordinated and complementary.

We recently caught up with Pritzker Simmons. An excerpt of our interview follows:

Amy Bennett: Liesel, thanks again for your time. Let’s jump right in. How do you define impact investing?

At Blue Haven Initiative, we start from the premise that every investment has an impact — good, bad, social, environmental and financial. From there, we do extensive research and seek to maximize the positive social and environmental impact of our investments while earning a market return. As a result, impact investing requires us to ask a lot more questions and do more rigorous due diligence in assessing the long-term risks and returns of our investments.

How does your philanthropic giving fit into your impact investment strategy?

Blue Haven takes a Total Portfolio Management approach to impact investing. That means looking across asset classes and capital types. Our philanthropic capital is an important resource that we use as effectively as possible. We look for opportunities that markets really cannot address — civic engagement in voting... research and education — things that traditional investing typically doesn’t value as much as we think it should. We prioritize our philanthropic spending for those kinds of opportunities.

Read the full article about impact investing from ImpactAssets at Medium.