You find the donor-investors and the investment opportunities. In short, you do the “front end” work of operating a partnership, while Realize Impact operates the “back end”.

We receive the grants or donations from one or more donor-investors. We diligence the investments you recommend to ensure they’re sufficiently impactful and prudent. We make and administer one or more investments.

When returns are generated, we handle them per donor-investor recommendations, whether sending to a DAF or foundation, or recycling into a new impact investment. We also track and report on these activities.

No, the investment partnerships are all projects of Realize Impact, a Washington State 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

No LPs or LLCs are required. All the capital in these investment partnerships is provided as donations to Realize Impact. We are a public charity that makes impact investments, and either donates 99% of the returns to other 501(c)(3) organizations or recycles them into new impact investments.

Realize Impact is the investor of record for investments made from these investment partnerships.

Yes, Realize Impact is an accredited investor.

An entity is considered an accredited investor if it is an organization with assets exceeding $5 million, not formed with the sole purpose of purchasing specific securities.

Managing small partnerships requires a lot of overhead, especially if each pool of capital is an LP or LLC. We don’t use complex structures and are able to operate investment partnerships cost-effectively and efficiently.

We have deep expertise making impact investments globally. For organizations that don’t have this experience in-house, our investment partnerships make it easy for them to galvanize and help deploy capital for impact.

Realize Impact was founded in 2013. Our team brings deep experience in impact investing, startups, and nonprofit management.

No. DAF sponsors allow donors to donate to individual accounts and decide later where to deploy the money. Any donation to Realize Impact must come with a recommendation of where to invest at the time of the donation.

Yes. While most of our hundreds of investments are in the United States, dozens are in emerging markets. We’ve made more than several dozen investments in sub-Saharan Africa.

In most cases, Realize Impact doesn’t pick the investments. Instead, our partners recommend them and we conduct diligence. In a few cases, we work side-by-side with a partner to screen, diligence, and select investees.

If the investment fails, the value of the investment is lost and nothing is returned to Realize Impact or the donor’s DAF or foundation.

Any time you make a charitable donation, you never receive any of those funds back for your personal use. The worst case scenario for a Philanthropic Investment Grant is that you’ve made a charitable donation for impact.

Our societal and planetary challenges are urgent and vast. Philanthropic capital can be used to take risks to address the world’s most pressing problems, while more conventional financing cannot. Sometimes these risks result in losses — if they didn’t, we probably wouldn’t be taking enough risks.

99% of the investment returns (principal, interest, gains, dividends, etc.) are donated back to your DAF, foundation, or a recommended 501(c)(3) organization. For details on how this works, read our distribution FAQ.

You can also recommend that we use the returns to make another impact investment. We hope you choose this route, to create even more impact from the same capital.