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.
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...
A recent investment from Realize Impact’s philanthropic investment service is to Mission Driven Finance‘s new Regenerative Harvest Fund. In their words: The companies “in the ecosystem” that this fund might invest in include: Cairnspring Mills is one of those companies, and in a small world moment, coincidentally, Cairnspring Mills also received recently received an...
Since launching in February 2020, in the first 25 months Realize Impact’s philanthropic investment grants service has seen: 139 donor-investors from 12 community foundations, 12 DAF sponsors, 12 family foundations… totaling $14 million… 167 transactions in total… 43 different impact investments.
Six years ago, African leaders recognized that the degradation of 65 percent of the continent’s agricultural land threatens economic and environmental ruin for millions of farmers. They realized this just as the effects of climate change – lower crop yields, erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts – are making life harder for millions of farmers, herders, and city dwellers. That’s why African...
2021 was a busy year for Realize Impact’s philanthropic investing service. 26 new investments, bringing the total since launch (a week before the pandemic lockdowns of 2020) to 41 investments. All of this capital was provided from what we call donor/investors. Donors, as Realize Impact is a 501(c)3, accepting donations from donor advised funds, family foundations, and directly from...
The fortieth investment of Realize Impact is rePlant Capital, a new investment fund focused on regenerative agriculture. Interest in regenerative agriculture is rising… quickly, as is corporate commitments supporting regenerative agricultural practices. That is leading to more organic farming in the US, expected to grow from 1% of U.S. farming acreage to 8%-10% by 2030. Realize Impact...
In venture capital, a “zombie” investment is an investment into a perfectly good company, one that earns revenues and pays it payroll and bills, but which isn’t growing quickly and thus isn’t worth more than the investment capital. Some loans to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) can be zombies too, if the company is breaking even, earning enough to pay the payroll, rent...