Sure, the impact investing and social enterprise world is thriving. But it's also disjointed and often confusing, with a variety of groups, startups, investors, schools, conferences, and even basic terminology.
Brian Kaminer recently launched a directory of resources and organizations to make the picture a little clearer. Called The Money and Impact Investing Directory, Kaminer has accumulated in one place an array of information, from methods for measuring social impact to investor groups.
Specifically, the material is organized into 14 categories. Some examples: local banking, economies and business includes such organizations as Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE); schools and programs for impact investing, which lists everything from Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke and its i3 Initiative on Impact Investing to the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship: and articles and papers, with work from impact investing pioneer Rockefeller Foundation, the Huffington Post and other places.
“I wanted a directory that could give people one click access so they could dive deeper into the details,” he says.
(Impact investor Brian Kaminer)
The site began life as a labor of love, what Kaminer calls a “pay it forward gesture.” He paid for the development by himself. “I thought it might serve as a tool to accelerate the efforts of other people,” he says. In particular, he wanted to help financial advisors explain the area to newbies interested in the field.
How did he decide to do this in the first place? Kaminer worked for his family's boutique brokerage firm for 17 years before deciding it was time to do something that contributed more productively to society. (It’s now in Utah, but he was based in New York City at the time). So in 2007, he founded Talgra in New York City to do sustainable investment consulting.
Then, a few years later he heard Woody Tasch, founder of Slow Money, give a talk about what was then his fairly new investment philosophy—investing in local food businesses with the aim of strengthening local economies and creating a fundamentally different approach to business. He attended a national Slow Money conference—and he was hooked.
But Kaminer wanted to educate himself about what was happening out there. As he started wading through more and more information, he shared what he’d learned with friends and family. Then when he couldn’t find a site that “tied all this stuff together in a way that made sense,” he says, he created a pdf with everything he’d uncovered thus far. After that, he realized a web site would be a lot more useful. With support from seven sponsors, like the Calvert Foundation and Saiid Business School at the University of Oxford, he created his online resource directory, which he launched last May.
At the same time, Kaminer has been active as an investor himself. He became co-chair of the Slow Money NYC chapter in 2011 and, through that, formed an angel investment group called NYC LION. (The name recently was changed to Foodshed Investors NY). It uses the Slow Money approach, which involves a longer than usual time horizon and a return “somewhere in the mid to high single digits,” says Kaminer. The first investment, made in 2012 and which eventually totaled about $300,000, was in Egg, a farm to table restaurant in Brooklyn; that area, of course, is a hub for local and impact investing and all things social enterprise.
As for Kaminer’s plans for the site, he doesn’t see it becoming a big money maker. But he does want to cover his costs and keep expanding, adding more resources, for example, and a discussion forum.
"What I'm doing is financially less rewarding than what I did before," says Kaminer. "But it's much more rewarding in every other respect."
