Tuesday’s plenary session, Managing Impact for the Long Term, explored the progress the impact investing industry has made over the past years and the goals we hope to achieve in the coming decade. Speakers discussed what a tipping point may look like and how the SOCAP community can help accelerate the good economy keeping in mind lessons learned thus far.
What are 3 take aways from this session?
1) Impact should be the driving focus of our efforts.
- Xavier Helgesen stressed that start-up companies and their investors should be patient to see profit and growth, but not proof of concept and proof of impact.
- Morgan Simon explained that with trillions of dollars expected to come into our industry in the next decade, we need to focus on creating an infrastructure now that will give us the sort of impact we hope to see. For example, her company, Transformative Finance Network, is working to engage the communities we serve more deeply in our work and ongoing conversations through their website transformfinance.org.
2) While impact investing has come a long way in the past 10 years, there is still much work to be done.
- Jean Case expressed that we must let urgency conquer fear. We must get mainstream investors to see this urgency so that the beautiful core that has been built to date and is representative at SOCAP can grow and achieve scale.
- Xavier and Morgan stressed we must not let fear of failure hold us back from taking risks.
3) Everyone at SOCAP can play a role in moving us towards the “mountain top” that is the good economy.
The speakers gave advice to the SOCAP community for how to understand and act upon this urgency:
- Jean encouraged the SOCAP community to be passionate ambassadors of this movement.
- Morgan explained “We are the ones we have been waiting for” and encouraged SOCAP volunteers to spend perhaps a little less time with old friends and a little more time inviting newbies into the conversations and encouraging people unfamiliar with our industry to attend future SOCAPs so that we broaden our audience.
- Xavier called the SOCAP community to learn by doing not speaking. Take chances!
- Lastly, Daryn dared SOCAP to engage more people under 20 and over 60 so that intergenerational conversation and knowledge sharing can occur in order to solidify a successful future for our industry.
Special guest post by SOCAP13 volunteer Noelle St.Clair
Photo credit: SOCAP13 Instagram.
