Impact investing is complicated. How do you balance impact and investment returns, local vs. global impact, 17 Sustainable Development Goals, debt, equity, and revenue-sharing? All while 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 easy. We know how to make impact investments, create impact, and then harvest the investment returns. What we are looking for are your recommendations for impactful investments, and the capital to make those investments.
All it takes are three simple steps:
Make a grant from your donor-advised fund, foundation, or your own funds, recommending an impact investment
Realize Impact does the diligence, reviews the terms, and makes the debt, equity or revenue-based investment.
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 for investments
of $10,000 or more.
* There is no fee for investments under $10,000, but the investment returns will not be re-donated.
See the details on the Philanthropic Investment Grant or fill out our PHIG Recommendation form 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 Problem Most drug candidates (>70%) are poorly soluble resulting in poor bioavailability. Many technologies (e.g. spray dry dispersion, hot melt extrusion, liposomal, nano emulsion, nano crystals, etc.) have been developed to address this solubility concerns in NCE. However, all of these methods use chemicals that become a part of the drug. This can lead to potential drug product toxicity...
2021 continues the rapid pace of donations, recommendations, and investments through Realize Impact’s philanthropic investment service. $1.5 million so far, not yet five months into the new year. We announced the 100th investor only 45 days ago, barely a year after launching the service. Where is all this money going? Either directly into impactful companies or indirectly to them via impact...
“The Sunday Family and I are forever grateful for the 86Fund, the work they do, and the opportunity they’ve given us. With their grant money, our team has been able to keep regular working hours and we were even able to bring two team members back to work. In these difficult times, it is grant and emergency fund programs like the 86Fund that are helping keep restaurants like ours alive, and we...
One year and a few weeks after launching our philanthropic investment service, the 100th investor has made a donation and recommended an investment. And before we could tout that milestone, the 101st donation arrived as a gift of appreciated shares. The 100th investor recommended an opportunity managed by Mission Driven Finance, to be invested in Nano PharmaSolutions. The 99th investor...
What can a few dozen Microsoft alumni do over a weekend to help end the pandemic? They can and did create a website to track where residents of Washington State can schedule their vaccine appointments, www.COVIDWA.com From their FAQ: We are a rapidly-growing volunteer group with over 70 members from WA State and around the world. We were frustrated at how long it took to try each vaccination...
February 2020, just before the pandemic was daily news, Realize Impact launched it’s philanthropic investment service. At the time we had just one signed partner, Seattle Foundation. In February we quietly launched, informing just a few people in the impact investing industry. By June, over $1.1 million of capital had flowed through the service from a few dozen donor/investors into five...
Ada Developers Academy and Community Credit Lab partnered to focus on increasing equity in tech. Ada Developers Academy is a non-profit, tuition-free coding school for women and gender diverse adults. Ada focuses on serving low income people, underrepresented minorities, and members of the LGBTQIA+ community in Seattle and the surrounding region. Community Credit Lab provides community-funded, 0%...
The 86Fund is an emergency fund that aids independent restaurants—with priority given to those owned by women and minorities—facing unprecedented hardship during the global pandemic. Support Restaurants According to Yelp, as reported in ReBusinessonline in September, 61 percent of San Francisco restaurants that closed due to COVID will not reopen. A gift through the 86Fund will provide vital...
In addition to our off-the-shelf service that lets anyone turn philanthropic capital into an impact investment, this year Realize Impact now also operates three philanthropic investment funds for three partners. The Decarbon8-US fund is for those who believe in the power of entrepreneurship and technology and wonder what more they can do to mitigate climate change. Created in partnership...
Back in May, at the start of the pandemic, the U.S. SBA rolled out the Paycheck Protection Program (a.k.a. the PPP). It was big news. What we also learned then was that most of this money wasn’t going into the hands of the small, Main Street businesses due to a host of systemic issues. One unspoken issue was that lenders could only lend the money they had in their reserves. The government...