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 mainstream media defines and talks about impact investing in terms of “ESG“, i.e. Environmental, Social, and Governance. Those measures help ensure a company is well managed, but those measures alone don’t explain whether a company is impactful or not. Nor a fund. “Impact” measures whether the investee makes a positive contribution to solving real problems. And...
Realize Impact invested $60,000 into Steward Technologies, a company promoting environmental and economic stewardship through regenerative agriculture. They do this by providing flexible loans to human-scale farms, ranches, fisheries, and food producers looking to propel their operations forward.
Investments are always open into their fund:
Realize Impact invested $100,000 into Starlight Cardiovascular 15 months ago. Starlight Cardiovascular is developing a portfolio of devices to treat babies born with congenital heart defects. From their website:The company is developing much needed tools and devices to treat pediatric congenital heart defects (CHDs). Approximately 1.3 million babies are born each year with a CHD. Most of the...
UbiQD is an advanced materials company powering product innovations in agriculture, clean energy, and security. Our quantum dots enable industry leaders to harness the power of light and our first product, UbiGro®, is a layer of light that helps plants get more from the sun. At UbiQD, we know that great technologies depend on great materials. Our patented quantum dots hold the key to unlocking...
R.I.S.E. Artisan Fund has invested in Fuchsia Shoes, a sustainable fashion brand manufacturing handcrafted shoes based on the traditional Pakistani khussas. We deliver high quality, ethically made and environmentally responsible shoes to the American consumer directly. Our customers’ purchase of Fuchsia Shoes genuinely benefits the artisans who make them.” R.I.S.E. Artisan Fund, an initiative of...
ImpactAlpha, October 4 – On Last week’s Agents of Impact Call, we heard from first-time, women managers of small impact funds in emerging markets. The takeaway: Write the check. Investment policies that exclude first-time managers exclude deep talent that may find value where other investors don’t know to look. Funds on this month’s edition of The LiiST, prepared with Realize Impact, include...
DAF = Donor Advised Fund = a private fund administered by a third party and created for the purpose of managing charitable donations on behalf of an organization, a family, or an individual. How does philanthropic investing scale up? It could be from DAF sponsors telling their donors that they can invest, but it is far more likely from the fund raisers adding just one line to their pitch. What...
In the first 30 months Realize Impact’s philanthropic investment grants service has seen: over 200 donor-investors from dozens of community foundations, DAF sponsors, and family foundations donating $18 million… recommending that capital be deployed in 68 unique impact investments. See our blog for details on many of these investments… and if you are looking for ideas on where you can make...
ImpactAlpha, September 2 – Get off the sidelines. For Agents of Impact, helping impact fund managers – and especially first-time, diverse and emerging managers – to spend less time raising money, and more time helping companies succeed, is another way to accelerate impact. Welcome to our second edition of The LiiST, an initiative of ImpactAlpha and Realize Impact to highlight impact funds...
ImpactAlpha, August 2022 – Between the launch and the close is the raise. Even impact fund managers with a compelling thesis, a solid pipeline and sometimes an enviable track record spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising. Every day spent pitching or presenting slide decks is a day not spent helping portfolio companies get the resources they need to scale their impact. For Agents of...