Yes. Fill out our online form recommending an investment, then make a donation from your donor-advised fund (DAF), family foundation, or your own funds.

Realize Impact does the diligence, reviews the terms, and makes the investment.

We donate 99% of any investment returns to your recommended DAF, foundation, or other 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

For $10,000+ donations, a $500 fee applies. Realize Impact also retains 1% of investment returns for our operations. For donations under $10k, there is no fee, but we retain 100% of returns. There are no AUM, annual, or maintenance fees.

Investments must be both prudent and impactful. Realize Impact’s Investment Committee (IC) screens all recommended investments for alignment with these criteria.

Prudent is a standard for certain investments made by a public charity. Impactful is Realize Impact’s higher requirement to better ensure our work is making a positive impact on the world.

We use the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework when thinking about impact.

We perform diligence on all recommended investments. However, we encourage you to do your own diligence before recommending the investment to us, to ensure it is within your risk tolerance and aligned with your impact goals.

Realize Impact’s diligence focuses first and foremost on the impact of the investment, then on the prudence of the opportunity, such as track record, strength of team, business model, investment structure, and terms.

We are generally agnostic about rates of return. Some of the investments we make offer market-rate returns. Most offer below-market returns, a return of only the original investment amount, or a return of less than $1 for every $1 invested.

No, as Realize Impact is neither an investment research company nor an investment advisor.

Realize Impact is an accredited investor, as per the U.S. Securities Act, and a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in Washington State.

We invest like any other investor. Realize Impact signs the same investment documents. Our debt looks like any other private debt. Our equity is just one more row on the capitalization table.

For example: We’ve invested using convertible notes and SAFEs. We’ve invested as limited partners in impact venture capital funds alongside other investors.

For a small minority of investees, our investment is made as a recoverable grant. While recoverable grants are not technically an investment structure, we keep track of them to understand how much we’ve deployed and what repayments we’ve received.

Most likely. Since the PHIG service launched in 2020, we’ve invested in everything from reforestation and green energy to poverty and disability justice. You can read about our investments on our blog.

We work with hundreds of DAF sponsors, both large (like Fidelity Charitable and ImpactAssets) and small (like local community foundations and Daffy).

No. DAF sponsors allow donors to donate to individual accounts and decide later where to deploy the money. Any donation to Realize Impact must come with a recommendation of where to invest at the time of the donation.

No, Realize Impact makes investments all over the world.

If the investment fails, the value of the investment is lost and nothing is returned to Realize Impact or the donor’s DAF or foundation.

Any time you make a charitable donation, you never receive any of those funds back for your personal use. The worst case scenario for a Philanthropic Investment Grant is that you’ve made a charitable donation for impact.

Our societal and planetary challenges are urgent and vast. Philanthropic capital can be used to take risks to address the world’s most pressing problems, while more conventional financing cannot. Sometimes these risks result in losses — if they didn’t, we probably wouldn’t be taking enough risks.

99% of the investment returns (principal, interest, gains, dividends, etc.) are donated back to your DAF, foundation, or a recommended 501(c)(3) organization. For details on how this works, read our Distribution FAQ.

You can also recommend that we use the returns to make another impact investment. We hope you choose this route, to create even more impact from the same capital.