Why is it that private foundations spend so little of their endowment on mission investing? Is there an opportunity to make it bigger?

In this paper, written by CHIP Senior Fellow and former Gates Foundation CFO Dick Henriques, you will find an explanation of the barriers to mission investing (also known as Program Related Investment and Mission Related Investment) and a concluding hypothesis about what it will take to help remove the barriers.

Educating foundation leadership, building foundation staff expertise, improving data quality and lowering the cost of making a mission investment are all issues to understand and address.

If our hypothesis is correct, the time is now to build the necessary data, education and support capabilities to help private foundations better access private sector investment tools to advance their mission.

Read the full report on program-related investments by Richard Henriques, Arjun Nath, Carra Cote-Ackah, and Katherina Rosqueta at the Center for High Impact Philanthropy.