More Impact Investors Are Going "All In"

If you want to keep up with the latest buzzwords in impact investing, here’s an important one starting to hit its stride:  “all in.”  It means placing your whole portfolio into assets with a positive social and/or environmental impact. Putting your money–all of it–where your mouth is.

Recently technology executive, entrepreneur and investor Charly  Kleissner started a network of  super high net worth individuals  aiming to do just that, called the 100%IMPACT Network.

For Kleissner and his wife Lisa—she is president of the KL Felicitas Foundation, a 14-year-old family foundation based in San Francisco supporting social entrepreneurs the two formed—it started back around 2004 when they  began  to get serious about completely aligning all their investments with their values. It was easier said than done. “There weren’t that many products in different asset classes,” says Kleissner. That led to the founding of Toniic, a global group of impact investors  aggregating  their capital and investing in early stage social enterprises. Then more recently they got the idea to start a network for compatriots who were similarly interested in going all in.

They wouldn’t pool their investments, but they would compare investments, results, and, perhaps most important, impact measurements. Also they would serve as a model for other investors. According to Kleissner, there are now 35 participants with $3 million to $650 million in assets and a total of $3.5 billion in commitments.  That includes 25 family offices and about six foundations. Over the next three years, Kleissner says he’s hoping to prove that the bigger the portfolio, the better the return. So a triple digit portfolio could have triple digit profits, and so on. Further, Kleissner says that there are at least 10 million Americans with $1 million or more in investable assets–“if we show over the next couple of years you can build million dollar portfolios that are all in–it could release a movement.”

Click here to read more.