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.
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...
Three more impact investments in October 2021: TechSoup, Beta Boom, and PlusMedia. TechSoup TechSoup provides discounts for nonprofits to technology solutions. The company ran a debt crowdfunding campaign for expansion of their service, and Realize Impact helped finish off that fundraising with a $75,000 investment. Beta Boom Beta Boom invests in under-the-radar founders building the future for...
It’s not a class. It’s not a club. It’s not a case study. The University Growth Fund is a full-fledged investment firm, investing real money into companies, and entirely accountable to our investors. As students, they work extra hard to make the best investment decisions possible. Realize Impact invested in this fund not only because it helps teach venture capital to the next generation, but also...
Please meet the 2021 Decarbon8-US investees! We invite investors, donors of all sizes and types, and climate champions to join us in accelerating the climatetech revolution, to hopefully realize outsized gains and impact along the way. C-Motive Disruptive ultra-high efficiency and high torque motors for e-mobility, industry, renewables generation and more. Why we’re...
Realize Impact added another $92,000 investment to the Truss Fund today. This fund makes loans to social enterprises addressing poverty in the developing world, specifically for pandemic-mitigation. This additional funding came from three donor/investors, bringing the total number of donor/investors recommending this investment to 23. The only more popular investment is the Decarbon-8 fund...