Realize Impact – Making impact investing easy

Impact Investing is complicated. How do you balance impact and investment returns, local vs. global impact, 17 sustainable development goals, debt, equity, and revenue-share? All this while also deciding whether to invest from your savings, your family office, or your foundation or donor advised fund?

Realize Impact is here to help make impact investing simple. We know how to make impact investments, create impact, and then harvest the investment returns. What we looking for are your recommendations for impactful impact investments, and the capital to make those investments.

Realize Impact can help you in three simple steps:

1.

Make a grant from your donor-advised fund, foundation, or your own funds, recommending an impact investment

2.

Realize Impact does the diligence, reviews the terms, and makes the debt, equity or revenue-based investment.

3.

We donate 99% of the investment returns to your recommended DAF, foundation or other 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Or in other words, you do the easy parts and we’ll do the complicated parts. When you find a good impact investment, tell us about it. We’ll spread the word so that others can join in too, helping catalyze your capital into yet-more impact. Later, if the investment turns out to be fruitful, we’ll put almost all of those returns into a donor advised fund, foundation, or charity, so it can do even more good for the world, or give us a new suggestion and we’ll invest that capital again and again and again.

We do this for one low flat fee:

$500

$500 for investments
of $10,000 or more.

$0

* There is no fee for investments under $10,000, but the investment returns will not be re-donated.

Philanthropic Investment Grant

A preview of the online PHIG form

See the details on the Philanthropic Investment Grant or contact us to get started.

See the FAQ to answer the most frequently asked questions about this service.

And yes, the service is as simple as it sounds, by design.

 

The Liist

Impact investors often ask the question…

Where can I invest, today?” To help answer that question, Realize Impact and ImpactAlpha have partnered to publish The Liist, a monthly list of impact funds and impactful companies actively raising capital.

Latest stories

$1+ million per month

$

Realize Impact launched the philanthropic investment grants service in February 2020 and by the end of 2023 averaged over $1 million per month in donations, more than $37 million in total since launch, processing more than 400 individual donations. Please help us continue this growth. Make a philanthropic investment today. In what? Check our our blog for our investments and check out The Liist...

TerraFund 2023/2024 is Africa Trees

T

Realize Impact partnered with WRI in 2022 to launch the TerraFund, investing in for-profit companies restoring land in Africa. In 2023, we’ve created Africa Trees Ltd. as a for-profit company to organize those investments. The initial cohort of investments have been made. Over a dozen companies based in Kenya, DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ghana: Emfed Farms is an agribusiness that makes cocoa...

Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) from your IRA

Q

If you are over age 70½ (or know someone who is) you can reduce your taxes, even if you don’t itemize deductions on your tax return, by making a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) from your IRA.  How does this work?These transfers, known as qualified charitable distributions or QCDs, offer eligible older Americans a great way to easily give to charity before the end of the year...

Fiscally Sponsoring: gDiapers

F

In 2002, pregnant with their first child, Jason & Kim Graham-Nye learned 300,000 disposable diapers are thrown away every minute around the world! Before they new it, dirty diapers; the waste they create; and how to fix them, became their life’s work. gDiapers launched the “hybrid diaper” in 2005 with the world’s first Cradle to Cradle Certified disposable insert that tucked inside soft...

Fiscally Sponsoring: Baraka Impact Finance

F

ba·ra·ka: Swahili, Hebrew & Arabic for a blessing Baraka Impact Finance aims to connect impact investors, donors, and experts to global health innovators. barakaimpact.com Realize Impact is Baraka’s “fiscal sponsor“, a service where donors can provide donations to organizations that do work similar to a 501c3 nonprofit, but which themselves are not organized as a 501c3...

The Care Access Real Estate (CARE) Investment Trust

T
MDF logo

The Care Access Real Estate (CARE) Investment Trust is a unique child care investment strategy in a $100M+ diversified, risk-mitigated real estate portfolio of commercial and residential properties. Within 10 years, CARE intends to IPO into a public REIT and drive massive investment capital into the child care system. Child care in America has been largely neglected and severely undercapitalized...

Fiscally Sponsoring the Kokua Market

F

Established in 1971, Kokua Market is the first natural foods cooperative in Hawaii, and the only one in Honolulu. Its mission is: “to promote the economic welfare and nutritional well-being of our patrons by providing information, group activities, and auxiliary services for mutual advantage, and to accomplish the foregoing in accordance with the Rochdale Cooperative Principles of voluntary and...

Natural Provisions

N

Natural Provisions is an all-natural, pre-packaged / ready-to-eat food manufacturer and direct-store-delivery (DSD) distribution business serving the entire Northern California region, from as far north as Sacramento and Santa Rosa to as far south as Santa Cruz.  On a daily basis, we prepare fresh salads, sandwiches, wraps, burritos, and dips that feature nutritious, wholesome ingredients with...

Fiscally Sponsoring: Bags

F

Bags is unlocking access to credit for the fastest-growing segments of the small business economy: Minority and Women-owned businesses. They do it by ensuring every business has tools to assess financial health and financing eligibility, and we provide hands-on technical support pre- and post-financing to increase success rates, economic impact, and total available credit over time. The Bags...

Farm Link Hawaii

F

Farm Link Hawaii markets itself as Hawaiʻi’s premier online local food marketplace, connecting statewide farmers, ranchers, and food makers with the state’s largest retail consumer market on Oʻahu. Established to address Hawaiʻi’s broken food system and food deserts, FLH has evolved from B2B to B2C to meet growing consumer demand for fresh and “only found here” Hawaiʻi foods. Its operations...