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: 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.
Mission, Money and Markets: Looking back on 2017
As 2017 comes to an end, our Social Investment Practice team members look back at what deals or impact investment advancements they saw launch into the market – both from Kresge and in the field beyond – that had them excited about seeing capital deployed in new, innovative ways toward social issues from the environment to neighborhood revitalization.
Mission, Money & Markets: The power of the guarantee
Kresge has used guarantees in its social investing practice for years. With a $350 million commitment to social investments by 2020, we set a goal of issuing $150 million of guarantees. While we look for opportunities to use guarantees to accelerate the foundation’s programmatic work and leverage capital to create opportunity in America’s cities, we are also trying to build broader adoption of this tool by impact investors.
Mission, Money & Markets: Investment in Cincinnati authority supports mirco commercial redevelopment
In 2016, Kresge made its first investment into a Development Finance Agency, with a $5 million program-related investment to the Greater Cincinnati Redevelopment Authority. Kresge Social Investment Managing Director Kimberlee Cornett interviewed GCRA’s President and CEO Laura Brunner to find out how this unique organization became a recipient of an impact investment and how it views its role as both an industrial and business developer as well as a neighborhood developer in Cincinnati.
Mission, Money & Markets: Gnarly problems like generational poverty require new approaches
Social Investment Officer Aaron Seybert spent a month traveling through Europe as a German Marshall Memorial Fellow, looking for relevant takeaways to bring back to Kresge and specifically to his work on the Social Investment Practice.