It was clear that no individual, however charismatic, would be able to create these transformations alone. In the book Impact Investing, he and his co-author Jed Emerson describe what they saw at the time: the need to set the rules and create a worldwide playing field, which would necessitate transformation across capital markets, performance measurement, and public policy.
This fragmentation struck Antony Bugg-Levine when he joined The Rockefeller Foundation in 2007 and was asked by the Foundation’s President, Judith Rodin, to evaluate its impact investing portfolio. And while there was a great deal of effort to develop various niche models, there was no infrastructure that would enable the market to grow as a whole.
And as is typical for a field in its formative stage, there was a range of terms to describe this activity, each with its own meaning and nuance: socially responsible investing, blended value, mission-driven investing, and so on. These and many other organizations offered a wide range of avenues for satisfying the growing demand for investment that sought some combination of financial and social outcomes. Willy Foote founded the nonprofit Root Capital to lend to farmer cooperatives throughout Latin America and Africa. Muhammad Yunus had established the Grameen Bank to lend to lower-income women in Bangladesh. For instance, Jacqueline Novogratz started the nonprofit Acumen Fund to invest in social enterprises in East Africa and South Asia. By 2007, a variety of financial innovators had developed approaches to socially-conscious investment and were paving the way for new avenues to direct capital for social good. That was exactly the situation with the concept of impact investing. A network can be a powerful way to give a new idea traction as it moves to gain widespread support.
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