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:
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 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.
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.
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...
Gigawatt Global provides renewable electricity to some of the most challenging countries in Africa — geared to offering strong potential returns on investment while supporting humanitarian and social causes including clean energy, women's empowerment, health, education, access to clean water and food security.
Pacific Northwest leaders who are wielding tech for good causes are doing great things — and Geekwire annually celebrates those efforts. This year there are three winners: Black Boardroom Initiative, Coding Dojo and CovidWA.com, the last of those being a project of Realize Impact. CovidWA.com When COVID-19 vaccines began widely rolling out in early 2021, it unleashed an anxious scramble to find...
Realize Impact has invested to support VertueLab’s new Climate Impact Fund. VertueLab knows that clean technology is a critical key to solving the climate crisis. With the Climate Impact Fund, they are creating the conditions for innovation, shared economic prosperity, and environmental change by accelerating climate solutions to reach global scale. The Climate Impact Fund invests in...
Our latest investment is to C-Motive, a startup with ultra-high efficiency and high torque motors using a novel approach based on electrostatic physics, instead of magnets. This investment was made, in-part, through our Decarbon8 fund along with two philanthropic co-investors. Most the investments we make would love additional investors. Contact us if you see any in our blog that catch your eye...