Mission, Money & Markets
The Kresge Foundation's Social Investment Practice team — and its partners and colleagues — shares lessons learned and the newest thinking on impact investing each month.
Mission, Money & Markets: Back office lessons from the impact investing front lines
By Amy Robinson
A foundation doesn’t decide to begin using its dollars in new ways lightly. That includes the decision to try impact investing alongside a grant making strategy.
Mission, Money & Markets: 6 takeaways from Opportunity Zones LOIs
By Rip Rapson
Editor's note: A version of this blog first ran in Impact Alpha. Read it here.
Mission, Money & Markets: Kresge supports the efforts of Native Hawaiians to topple barriers to home ownership
The path to home ownership in Hawaii is riddled with obstacles that many families just can’t overcome. Some Native Hawaiians will resort to building shacks of corrugated steel, for instance, on their parents’ or grandparents’ property, as they wait to receive the land the government has declared should be their birthright.
Mission, Money & Markets: Q and A with Kresge and Rockefeller on partnering in Opportunity Zones
Mission, Money & Markets: A needed piece of community development infrastructure, the 'Guarantee Bank'
By Kimberlee Cornett
Unfunded guarantees have helped Kresge leverage its balance sheet, make financial commitments to reduce or mitigate risk, and drive social impact, all while keeping funds fully invested in our corpus earning an average of 7.5 percent each year.
Mission, Money & Markets: Making 'cents' of guarantees, the view from a CIO
The balance sheet is one of the most underutilized assets foundations have to support their missions. Why can a balance sheet be so powerful? If foundations used just 3 percent of the $900 billion of assets in their collective endowments for guarantees, the amount of support could grow by $27 billion. This could provide a real boost in a time when increased philanthropic support is truly needed, says Kresge Foundation Chief Investment Officer Rob Manilla.
Mission, Money & Markets: Strong community development finance system key to building urban opportunity, from newly designated ‘Zones’ and beyond
Kresge's President & CEO Rip Rapson writes that the community development finance system is the backbone of strong cities and communities. Communities such as Detroit have affordable housing, health centers, school facilities, and community colleges because of them. If the system flounders, all the work of Kresge and its partners do to increase opportunity for low-income people and communities will, too.
Mission, Money & Markets: How impact investing and creative financing are playing a role in conserving public lands
The ability to tap into a market, or create a market, can help solutions scale to the size of the problem. This month, we looked at how The Conservation Fund is retrofitting a financial structure to help preserve valuable forest land across the United States. In this interview, Kimberlee Cornett asks Larry Selzer, President and CEO of The Conservation Fund, to share some insights into how the decades-old nonprofit had to rethink its model for how it obtains and preserves public forest lands and how impact investing became central to its way of working.