This post was originally published on TriplePundit
By Marlena John
As a woman entering the finance world, the title of the session at the Slow Money National Gathering, Female Investors: The Most Important Change Agents on Earth, certainly sparked my interest.
Don Shaffer, President & CEO of RSF Social Finance started by telling the story of when he was a golf caddy in New Jersey, slinging golf clubs for Wall Street traders and bankers. Back then, women were not allowed on the golf course, which reflected the situation of most of Wall Street and the finance industry as a whole. The few women who did work in finance got paid a lot less than the men.
Fast-forward twenty or so years. There are a lot more females in the field, taking leadership in investment opportunities, and playing golf. The Equal Pay Act of 1963, signed by President Kennedy, prohibited pay differences based on sex. Great! But, if you think that everything is hunky dory, then you’d be wrong. As it turns out, women are still making less money than men on average, and this is particularly true on Wall Street. Shaffer claims that females on Wall Street make 55-62 percent as much as males do, though I’ve seen statistics that claim it is as high as 77 percent. Even if the 77 percent stat is accurate, women in finance are experiencing a significant, and unwarranted, pay gap.
So, women are getting paid less, and that’s not cool. We also have many more men than women investing and working in finance. But why should we care how many women investors there are? Don Shaffer laid it out well.
At this time last year, RSF investor Rosemary Feerick, brought her two sons to our office to open their very own Social Investment Fund accounts. Later, she decided to share the story of her experience that day.
This essay was originally published in the Harvest Time newsletter.
by Rosemary Feerick
When we arrived at RSF Social Finance, Ellie, the receptionist, asked if we wanted a cup of tea. It was the day after Easter, a day off from school for my sons. I told the boys that we were going to San Francisco to invest some of their college savings.
On the way to the city, we stopped at our credit union and withdrew money from a savings account I had set up for my eight year old son Ian. I gave Ian the check to hold in the car. He studied the piece of paper carefully. When we got to RSF Social Finance, he was still holding the check with care.
“I would like a cup of darjeeling, please,” Ian responded to the receptionist’s question.
“Darjeeling. Hmm. Let’s go see if we have some,” she offered, leading us into the kitchen.
Mark Herrera, RSF’s Client Development manager met us there. As Ian and Ellie focused on tea, Mark showed the composter to my 11 year old Roddy and explained what biodynamic sugar is. “These are some of the products made by the companies supported by the fund in which you’ll be investing,” Mark explained.
Next, he led us upstairs to the conference room overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. We felt very important.
In the conference room, Mark gave the boys samples of organic cookies. Together they read the ingredients, all of which actually sounded like food. Then, Mark told the boys about a company that employs people who are newly released from prison. Next, he described with excitement a sustainable fishery in Alaska that is allowing the Eskimo people to keep their way of life. “These are more of the companies the fund you are investing in supports.” The boys nodded.
Mark then sat down with Roddy and Ian and explained the mechanics of the investment, making sure they understood how it worked and what the rate of financial return would be. Together they did the math to figure out what that translated to in terms of the boys’ investments.
Rose with her sons Ian and Roddy.
When Mark was satisfied that Roddy and Ian understood what they were getting into, he had them each fill out an application and sign it. Their accounts were officially open.
On one level, this exchange felt like no big deal; it seemed like how making an investment should work. But as I watched, another part of me wanted to celebrate. I was aware that what I was witnessing was the result of years of my searching for a different way with money.
Twenty years ago, I received a gift of love that came in the form of a financial portfolio. At the time, I understood little of how investments worked. But as I learned about the mutual funds in my portfolio, I realized that I was invested in companies whose products and ways of doing business offended my conscience. I searched for other models of investing and discovered socially responsible mutual funds.
Initially, I felt good about moving my money into those funds. But as I read through the prospectuses and annual reports, I soon realized that in spite of a variety of social screens I was still invested in companies whose products I would not buy. The socially responsible mutual funds I had in my portfolio felt to me like the lesser of two evils.
A few years later, I was attending a conference on Sabbath Economics when Rob Baird of Progressive Investments (now Portfolio 21) got up to speak about investing. He did not have any fancy visuals, but as he spoke, I felt as if fireworks were going off. Listening to Rob, I saw for the first time a way that investments could do something good in the world.
Up until then, I felt I had to hold on to some of my investments in order to care for my family. But I felt horribly conflicted about doing so because it felt that my money was sitting inside of a global economic system that is causing harm. As Rob spoke about different models of investing, a door to a whole new world opened for me. I started to search for investments that could do good.
I learned about investing in microcredit; in affordable housing mutual funds; in community development banks; fair trade companies; and social investment funds. I worked with Andy Loving, an advisor who shares my faith and began to move some of my money into those kinds of investments. When the financial statements came each month, I noticed how differently I felt opening the ones that came from investments I had chosen. Instead of feeling guilty, I felt excited. It felt like a privilege to participate in the work of fair trade companies and local organic farms.
Shifting to alternative economic models required that I let go of the possibility of a high financial return. Having been raised to believe that receiving a high financial return was “good stewardship,” that was hard at first. Didn’t I have a responsibility to seek high returns for myself and for my children?
But as I learned about the impact many corporations are having on the ecosystem and the human family, I came to believe that that definition of good stewardship was inadequate. Good stewardship, for me, needed to take into account the world that I am passing on to my children as well as the money that will eventually change hands. I wanted any investments that I participated in to be part of creating a world full of life.
On one level, my visit to RSF Social Finance to invest a portion of my children’s college savings on Easter Monday was simply the next step in my process of shifting the investments I manage into such vehicles. But that day in the conference room I felt as if something else was happening too. There was something there that felt holy.
As a mother, I feel a responsibility to form my children in Easter hope. I try to do that by modeling and letting my children know about ways of living that respond to the crises of this historical moment with alternatives that bring life. My children will inherit this world. For me, it is not enough to bring them to church. I feel I also need to show them how to discern where God is moving in the world and teach them how to participate in that.
That is what it felt like was happening that day at RSF. In the conference room, I sensed that my boys and I were participating in a way of investing money that brings life to everyone it touches. In addition, Mark’s taking the time to teach the boys about how their investment would affect others was powerful. It was as if he understood that giving children life-giving possibilities when it comes to money is a radical investment in the future.
As I witnessed the exchange, I felt a sense of awe and gratitude. I felt a Holy Presence with us as we sipped tea, ate cookies, and filled out investment account forms on Easter Monday.
This is the second post in a series by Morgan Simon on the trends, challenges and opportunities of impact investment, focusing on an exploration of the mechanisms which allow affected communities to lead and shape investments.
In my first post of this series I explored an idea called Transformative Finance; which sets out basic principles for maximizing the social impact of an investment. In short, such investments:
are primarily designed, managed and owned by those affected by these projects;
build local assets that support long-term sustainable development on the community’s own terms;
are designed to add, rather than extract value from communities; and
balance risk and return between investors, entrepreneurs and communities.
I received a number of comments from investors and social entrepreneurs excited by the concept, and curious if they “qualified” as transformative in their work. In response, as a way to make the point more explicit, I would like to share examples of a social investment gone wrong, and one gone right, in the same community.
With this case in mind, I invite investors and entrepreneurs to take the “transformative challenge”. Ask yourselves: is the local community included in the design, governance and ownership of the enterprise? If not, what has been lost? Looking at the financial flows of the enterprise, how much is staying in the community vs. being exported out of the region or country?
The point of this framing is not to say that all projects must be alike; innovation is one of the sacred hallmarks of entrepreneurship that we want to embrace and support. It is to say: let us be intentional about our impact, and set some basic ground rules for what we want to promote as an industry. As Andy Lower, executive director of the Eleos Foundation and Toniic board member often says, “Making money off of ‘poor’ people is traditional investing – and investors are welcome to do that if they want. Investing where you receive increased financial returns in correlation with increased impact – now THAT’s impact investing.”
So without any further ado—here is the story of several indigenous communities in the southern state of Oaxaca, Mexico and their experience with two very different impact investment projects.
Impact investing gone wrong
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is one of the world’s greatest areas for wind energy, a fact not lost on energy companies that have invested over $550M in Latin America’s largest wind project. The project will offset several hundred thousand pounds of carbon, while offering attractive returns to investors and jobs for community members. What’s not to like?
As the Mexican press and numerous community organizations have reported, plenty.
“The creation of the wind corridor in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, developed mainly by Spanish firms, has almost become the new conquest because the indigenous Zapoteco and Ikoot communities have been basically evicted from 12 thousand hectares through unfair and disadvantageous contracts, in order to generate electric energy with their wind and on their land, in the benefit of private initiative.”[1]
Transnationals out of the country! Completely against the wind corridor in the Isthmus”
Not only has land been taken from communities (for often as little as $50/month in “rent”), but it has been done in an aggressive and violent manner including unlawful detention and physical harm of local protesters speaking out against the project. On November 5th, the Indigenous Peoples’ Assembly of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec noted the following recent actions:
“They fired bullets and discharged pepper spray at women, youth and old people, beating several of those present, including pregnant women. The police detained 9 people, among these 2 women, without giving any information about the charges or where the prisoners would be taken…
No Windpower Project on the Tehuantepec Isthmus
Immediate Liberation of the Detained
Stop the Intimidation, Hostility and Violence Generated by the Wind Power Project[2]”
How did this happen? We are used to seeing this sort of thing happen in environmentally exploitative situations, but not from the clean energy community.
In short, it happened because a foreign company developed a project without thinking through its community engagement strategy or making any attempt to share financial returns fairly. In this instance the concept of “social impact” is undermined and distorted. If is fair to assume that investors in this type of circumstance were told that they were going to be a major force in spreading renewable energy in Latin America—a seemingly great impact story. This demonstrates the challenges associated with defining impact investing, as addressed in my last post: impact cannot simply be defined by investors and entrepreneurs, beneficiaries must be a part of the process.
Impact investing done right
In reaction to the trend of destructive development, community members on the Isthmus, declared that they were not against wind energy, but were against corporate control of their lands. They began to consider ways in which they could implement wind energy on their lands on their own terms. Working with Ashoka fellow Sergio Oceransky of Grupo Yansa, they have come up with a model for community-owned wind that will deliver strong returns to investors while equally benefiting the local community. The project plan explained below was approved in the pueblo’s general assembly, its forum for group decisions-making.
Grupo Yansa’s pilot project will take place in the indigenous Zapotec pueblo of Ixtepec, a large community with over 30,000 inhabitants, endowed with a very rich wind resource. The community maintains common ownership and management over their land and resources, dating back for centuries and codified into law after the Mexican revolution of 1917. The communal property status means that the community cannot use its land as collateral. It is therefore very difficult for them to obtain the magnitude of financing required to develop a wind farm.
However, the largest (and only) Mexican utility offers 20 year contracts to energy producers, locking in production at a fixed price. This means that as long as the community can secure the contract (and of course, execute), it will have guaranteed income for the energy it produces, significantly reducing risk to investors. The investment structure works similar to the practice of factoring—while accounts receivable are not directly purchased, they essentially serve as a guarantee on the investment. A debt structure is being offered to ensure community ownership over the project.
The profit that remains each year after debt servicing will be divided on a 50% basis between the Grupo Yansa and the community. The 50% of profits going to the community will be administered by a community trust devoted to strengthening quality of life, economic opportunities and environmental sustainability. One element of that, for instance, has been creating pension funds for elders—a way to prevent young people from having to migrate, and a benefit that can be equally shared by community members as all will eventually be eligible.
The 50% of profits going to Yansa will be used to finance further projects under the same scheme in other communities. Renewable energy projects will, therefore, finance a broad framework of integral and sustainable community development that is partly based on solidarity and sharing between different communities. Yansa’s financial participation in future projects will be the part of the investment most exposed to risk. This will ideally lower the risk profile of future investments and give Yansa access to a wider scope of institutional investors interested in safe returns and high social and environmental impact.
Closing the chasm
Globally, thousands of communities are deeply concerned about “land grabs” in the name of clean energy (see www.viacampesina.org for numerous examples, from Brazil to Japan). Regardless of the industry, basic questions must be considered: what is our responsibility as impact investors to make sure we are accountable to the communities in which we work? How do we, like Grupo Yansa, find ways to make communities front and center in the design, governance, and ownership of the work?
I do not have a single, simple answer to these questions—the same way that the impact investment community is still struggling to define impact assessment, market rate returns, and alternative deal structures. Let us just make sure that community accountability shares the pedestal as a key element of impact investment. These issues need to be debated, discussed and executed as the impact investing industry goes through its growing pains. We need to continue asking the hard questions and continue building effective frameworks and structures that will support the development of truly positive impact investments.
Morgan Simon is the co-founder and CEO of Toniic, a global network of early-stage social investors. Toniic members share deal flow, due diligence and monitoring on global investments in this action-oriented community looking to move $100 million into global social enterprise. She is also the co-founder of Innovacion Investments, the first community development venture capital fund in Texas, and was the Founding Executive Director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, leveraging the $400B managed by US colleges and universities. In all her work, she emphasizes community empowerment, leadership and ownership.
RSF Social Finance is a proud sponsor and member of Toniic.
Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the authors alone and do not claim to represent the opinions of Toniic at large or any individual Toniic member.
[1] “The dark side of wind energy in Mexico” http://www.renewableenergymexico.com/?p=205
Earlier this year, Mark Finser, RSF Board Chair, had a lively conversation with Chris Mann, Guayaki CEO, and Matt Reynolds, Indigenous Designs President. Matt and Chris were energized about the RSF pricing meeting in which they had just participated and were enthused by the community spirit. They started asking several questions including: How can RSF borrowers better acknowledge their relationship with RSF? In what ways can the borrowers cross-promote their brands and support one another? How can the borrowers leverage their communities to raise more awareness about RSF and the Social Investment Fund, which allows individuals to make a return on their investment while providing loan funds to phenomenal social enterprises?
Chris and Matt’s spirited energy is something we always see following the RSF quarterly pricing meetings and community receptions.
There’s no question that RSF’s pricing meetings are unique. The three stakeholder groups in the RSF Social Investment Fund—investors, borrowers and RSF staff—come together to discuss the interest rate for the upcoming calendar quarter. As far as we know, this process is unprecedented in the world of financial services. What bank is out there asking investors what rate they should receive or inquiring of borrowers what a fair loan rate would be? But, it’s not just the discussion of price that makes the pricing meetings so revolutionary. It’s what happens during the meetings while the participants are sharing their needs and motivations. It’s the stories they tell about what led them to become an RSF investor or, as a borrower, what the RSF loan has allowed their social enterprise to accomplish. It’s community building around financial transactions. Through our expanding and engaged community, amplified by the impact of our borrowers, we’re building the next economy—one that considers everyone’s needs and restores trust in financial relationships.
After several discussions and brainstorms following up on Mark, Chris, and Matt’s enthusiastic conversation, we launched a Facebook campaign: Impact Investing for All. Along with Guayaki and Indigenous Designs, we’ve been joined by additional RSF borrowers: gDiapers, Happy Family, Late July, Mary’s Gone Crackers, and Nutiva.
Impact Investing for All highlights the RSF Social Investment Fund (SIF), in which anyone can become an impact investor with a minimum of $1000. All of the money in SIF is loaned to path-breaking social enterprises. If you open an account, you know where your money is working while you receive a financial return! (And, you’ll be invited to participate in the quarterly pricing meetings.) For the duration of the campaign, the borrowers will be promoting each other and highlighting this incredible community of social enterprises.
These participating social enterprises are passionate, inspiring, dedicated, and making a world of difference. We are honored to have them as part of our borrower community and we are all lucky to have such committed, mission-driven businesses in the marketplace.
Wondering if you should participate in the Impact Investing for All campaign by opening an SIF account?
Are you a mom or dad in love with the Happy Family lines which offer delicious and nutritious food for your kids? Or, are you a gMum or gDad, committed to your baby’s comfort and a healthier environment by going with disposable gDiapers?
Perhaps you’re gluten free and can’t get enough of Mary’s Gone Crackers? Or are superfoods your thing and Nutiva products a dietary staple? Do you appreciate delicious organic snacks and reach for Late July when you need a treat?
Maybe you’re a Guayaki yerba mate aficionado (we have a few on staff!)?
Is fair trade fashion a passion and Indigenous Designs a trusted purveyor?
If you’re interested in participating in building the next economy and know that direct, transparent and personal transactions are necessary for a resilient financial system, become an investor at RSF. All of the participating borrowers have offered generous discounts, so we have gift packages for those who open a Social Investment Fund account before Dec 31, 2012. The gift includes a $50 Indigenous Designs gift card, a $25 Happy Family basket, and much more! The gifts are limited – get yours today!
To learn more about the participating borrowers, check out the campaign page: here
Let’s recognize the historic opportunity we have to change the current culture of money!
We know, for example, that big banks like Barclays pushed the adoption of Libor over another benchmark—a comparatively simple cost-of-funds index that many observers now say was better for borrowers and much less volatile. The switch was made for one reason: to increase short-term profits for the banks. The foundation of trust in Wall Street has been completely undermined as a result of this and other recent scandals.
Based on our core principles, RSF is taking small steps to create a fundamental transformation in the way the world works with money. A great example is RSF Prime. We developed RSF Prime to create community among the participants in our flagship loan fund, the RSF Social Investment Fund.
For many years, we based our investors’ return rate on the 13-week U.S. Treasury Bill. Each quarter we recalibrated the rate based on this well-publicized benchmark. In 2006, we shifted to Libor because it represented the most commonly accepted barometer for short-term interest rates worldwide.
But as the first wave of the financial crisis unfolded in 2008, we became increasingly uncomfortable with this approach. We realized that pricing to meet the needs of our stakeholders could most productively be determined by the community of stakeholders itself. So we began hosting face-to-face meetings at our offices in San Francisco with representatives of the three stakeholder groups of our RSF Social Investment Fund: investors, borrowers and RSF staff. In October 2009, we adopted a customized interest rate collaboratively recommended by these stakeholders each quarter. We dubbed this new base rate for borrowers “RSF Prime”.
We believe this is the first time that a lending institution has facilitated meetings between investors and borrowers to determine loan pricing. With RSF staff at the table facilitating the conversations, all three stakeholders are visible to each other and engage in a direct and transparent exchange to understand intentions, motivations, and needs. We feel that other financial institutions such as community banks and credit unions have similar stakeholder groups that could be engaged in this way.
The loan-pricing meeting is one step towards modeling a more resilient financial system. At its heart is building community, which RSF also holds in how it works with borrowers by bringing them together to share wisdom and resources, and in its innovative grantmaking through Shared Gifting. A web of trusting relationships and a spirit of collaboration are foundational to a resilient economy. We have observed that by bringing all the stakeholders together, there is more engagement, fulfillment, and accountability.
Just as an organic or biodynamic farm relies on far fewer external inputs than a conventional farm, we are eliminating our reliance on Wall Street rate-setting, going “off-the-grid” as much as possible, so that we can be more resilient based on the strength of our investor-borrower community.
We invite you to share other ideas with us—either suggestions for what we can do at RSF, or ways you think other institutions can change to make our financial system more transparent and trustworthy. You can ask your bank about how they set their interest rates, for example.
Ultimately, we have to “be the change”, as Gandhi said. In our view, energy spent modeling a new way of working with money will have much more positive, transformative, and long-term effects than trying to change the existing system from within through regulation.
Let us know what you think!
Don Shaffer is President & CEO at RSF Social Finance.
This is the first post in a series by Morgan Simon on the trends, challenges and opportunities of impact investment, focusing on an exploration of the mechanisms which allow affected communities to lead and shape investments.
The concept of impact investment that has the explicit purpose of supporting economic and community development is receiving a growing amount of attention from an increasingly diverse set of financial players. This emerging trend is one of the most exciting, and potentially problematic, trends I’ve seen over the last decade. As with any new field, impact investing raises consequential questions and issues with the answers and intended results remaining up for grabs. Let’s consider the following questions to start:
1. How is impact being defined, and by whom?
2. How are strategic opportunities being identified and defined, and by whom? How will impact capital be deployed, with what objectives, and toward what ends?
3. Under what conditions shall profits be made from impact investment? Who should govern the agreements about use and distribution of the profits?
I am concerned that in a drive for global scale in impact investment, we will lose the voices that should matter the most—the billions of people who will be affected by social enterprises funded by our investments. I am advocating for the establishment of effective mechanisms to empower “beneficiaries” to be actively involved in the planning, execution, governance, and ownership of enterprises, and in the flows of capital connected with them. This is a topic we recently covered in a panel at SoCap called “Creative Financing for Community Wealth,” the main points of which I’d love to share for you in this post.
Current problematic trends in impact investment
There are several dynamics at play in the current impact investment market:
Investors and entrepreneurs profit at the expense of communities.
The goal of impact investment for many is to have a social impact while being able to make the same kind of investment returns that conventional markets have provided. If that remains the case, and if the ownership of social enterprises remains limited to the privileged, then it is difficult to imagine that impact investments will ultimately benefit communities, or facilitate any sort of resource transfer from the global north to the global south (or in the US context, from the rich to poor). If ownership structures are not addressed, then by definition, these investments must then be extracting value, thus repeating the cycle of exploitation that we have seen under so many different names over the decades. This is particularly apparent in the context of projects that see poor communities singularly as consumers rather than as participants in all aspects of the economy. There is an implicit, yet often unacknowledged, tension in impact investment between how producers are paid, how steeply consumers pay for products, and how much entrepreneurs and investors can make or expect to make over time.
Impact is being defined by investors and entrepreneurs instead of beneficiaries.
Some of the large financial institutions jumping on the impact bandwagon have made public statements defining impact as simply any investment made in a developing country. The many communities who have suffered from natural resource extraction, displacement and poor labor conditions know this is not the case, but they are not being consulted in the process of defining goals for impact investment projects. Similarly, well-meaning entrepreneurs tend to define community involvement as product research, such as holding marketing-based focus groups, rather than creating infrastructure for long-term engagement and community leadership development. This is largely due to the fact that impact investment has evolved as a “top down” industry—with investors setting the criteria for impact and returns with the consequences filtered down from social entrepreneurs to communities. In this approach there is no room for letting community needs guide the field.
There is a major “capital gap” for community-run projects.
Although many investment projects are executed in the global south, they are generally run by the privileged—these entrepreneurs and their investors are the ones who will receive the $183-$667 billion in profit that J.P. Morgan projects. It is, at this point, exceptionally rare to impossible for communities, organizations or individuals from the global south to receive access to funds if they do not speak English and have advanced degrees. Communities are simply the resource base for projects; or, moreover, their involvement is generally limited to the consumption of specific products like solar lanterns.
Capacity-building is lacking.
Capacity building programs for social entrepreneurs to receive training and access to funding are plentiful, but similarly limited to a global elite. Further, there has been no effort to engage these programs in a broader conversation about the structuring of opportunities that would create access for people without a university education. Additionally, there is a need to explore methodologies that will respect and fit community leadership models already in place, rather than asking communities more accustomed to these collective structures to adopt Western business models. Finally, there is an urgent need for capacity-building programs working in developed countries to integrate a broader understanding of community organizing in their work in order to balance out the traditional business education social entrepreneurs tend to receive with a deep understanding of what community engagement looks like. The social entrepreneur indeed has a crucial role to play, but ideally would do more leading from behind than carrying the torch his or herself.
Signs of hope—innovative impact investment that ensures assets stay in communities.
At the same time that I see the potential greenwashing in the impact investment industry, I am deeply encouraged by the emerging group of entrepreneurs and investors that is finding ways of placing community needs first. Reflecting broader trends in the establishment of the solidarity economy globally, I see the emergence of what I call transformative finance, or what Marjorie Kelly refers to as stakeholder finance in her recent (and highly recommended) book, Owning our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution.
Transformative Finance provides resources to projects that:
are primarily designed, managed and owned by those affected by these projects
build local assets that support long-term sustainable development on the community’s own terms
are designed to add, rather than extract value from communities; and
balance risk and return between investors, entrepreneurs and communities.
Transformative finance projects are thoughtful about how to engage communities not just as producers or consumers, but as leaders and change agents. They create explicit ownership structures that reflect this appreciation and intention. In their structural makeup, they create mechanisms of direct accountability to the communities they serve. They also ensure that productive assets remain community-owned and that the use of those assets is determined by the community for continued community development. These enterprises are still often led by dynamic social entrepreneurs, but in these cases they see their role as community organizers rather than top-down leaders.
One such leader is Brendan Martin, who shared the stage with me at SoCap. He is the founder of The Working World, an organization based in Argentina, Nicaragua, and New York. The Working World provides innovative financing for worker-owned co-ops based on a co-determined business plan and revenue share that ensures value created stays primarily within the community. Over the past five years they have recycled $3M over 80 times into 600 investments, with a 98% repayment rate. Recently, The Working World raised capital from a number of investors (including a Toniic member) to finance a sustainable green windows cooperative in Chicago. More information can be found here: http://www.theworkingworld.org/us/
I look forward to sharing with you a number of models on community-centered financing models from within and beyond the Toniic network through the next few posts, and further exploring some of the questions and challenges articulated above.
What are your views on these topics? How do you achieve community accountability in your investment activity? Feel free to post any comments here, or to reach me at morgan.simon@toniic.com.
Morgan Simon is the co-founder and CEO of Toniic, a global network of early-stage social investors. Toniic members share deal flow, due diligence and monitoring on global investments in this action-oriented community looking to move $100 million into global social enterprise. She is also the co-founder of Innovacion Investments, the first community development venture capital fund in Texas, and was the Founding Executive Director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, leveraging the $400B managed by US colleges and universities. In all her work, she emphasizes community empowerment, leadership and ownership.
RSF Social Finance is a proud sponsor and member of Toniic.
Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the authors alone and do not claim to represent the opinions of Toniic at large or any individual Toniic member.
You’ve probably heard of the “new economy,” which often refers to social media, sharing-based businesses, and sometimes socially responsible businesses. RSF Social Finance is working to build the next economy: one that’s rooted in community, considers everyone’s needs, and restores trust in financial relationships through transactions that are direct, transparent and personal.
Through our innovative investing, lending, and giving programs, RSF provides critical access to capital for path-breaking social enterprises working in Food & Agriculture, Education & the Arts, and Ecological Stewardship. We collaborate with like-minded organizations to create a financial infrastructure that will support the next economy. And we’ve democratized impact investing with our Social Investment Fund (SIF), which allows anyone with a $1,000 minimum investment to participate in building the next economy.
This is incredibly ambitious. We’re asking you to help spread the word as we promote our “building the next economy” stories on our website, Facebook, Twitter (#nexteconomy) and elsewhere. We’re focusing on these points:
RSF provides critical access to capital for path-breaking social enterprises.
RSF collaborates with like-minded organizations to create a financial infrastructure for the next economy.
RSF has democratized impact investing with the Social Investment Fund, which allows anyone with a $1,000 minimum investment to participate in building the next economy. More information on opening an account: here
Read our latest borrower stories on the Reimagine Money Blog:
When Tatiana Garcia-Granados and her husband, Haile Johnston, moved to North Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in 2002, they found themselves in a fresh-food desert.
“Most of our neighbors were getting their food from corner stores. You walk into these stores and there’ll be all these different flavors of potato chips and Twinkies, but no fruits or vegetables,” says Garcia-Granados. The couple started working to bring a farmers market to the neighborhood and discovered a much bigger problem. “It wasn’t just neighborhoods like ours that didn’t have a link to the farmers right around us; it was also hospitals, universities and schools.”
Working with other local farm and food advocates, they created Common Market in 2008 to forge a distribution link between threatened farms and fresh food-deprived urban communities. Today, with a crucial assist from the RSF PRI Fund, Common Market supplies about 200 customers—institutional kitchens, retailers, restaurants and buying clubs—with produce, dairy and meat from about 100 sustainably run regional farms.
INSPIRATION
“Fifty years ago there were deep connections between the farmland right around Philadelphia and city residents,” notes Garcia-Granados. “With the rise of global commodity agriculture, that has changed—we’re more likely to find peaches from California than peaches from New Jersey.”
“When we started planning this, the distribution void was not on people’s radar,” she says. “We got blank looks when we talked about what we were working on. People didn’t realize this was a problem.”
What drove them forward was making the connection between health problems in the city and the loss of farmland. “We were seeing the health disparities that exist in our neighborhood and realizing what a huge role food plays in people’s lives and their ability to pursue opportunity. And every time we went to Lancaster County we would see more farmland being turned into housing developments.”
INNOVATION
Common Market’s key insight—the big step forward in solving the farm-to-city problem—was the value of cultivating institutional customers.
“With the amount of food an institution like a hospital is purchasing, we could have an immediate impact on the farms,” says Garcia-Granados. “We also targeted institutions that serve a cross-section of the population. That allows us to reach people who didn’t already have access to fresh food through farmers’ markets and high-end retail.”
Common Market had ready suppliers and buyers; the big challenge was cash flow—institutions are used to paying in 60-100 days. “But supporting farmers requires paying them quickly, as close to 15 days as possible,” says Garcia-Granados. “As we grew we realized we were facing a huge cash flow gap. That’s where RSF came in.”
The founders made the rounds of commercial banks and state and municipal development lenders, “but no one understood our business model or the sustainable agriculture piece and why what we were doing was meaningful,” says Garcia-Granados. “Common Market is a nonprofit social enterprise—it runs like a business but will invest any profits in expanding access to markets for farmers and to fresh food for urban communities. “The people at RSF were the only ones who understood.”
In 2010 RSF provided a $150,000 credit line (it’s now $350,000) through the RSF PRI Fund, which supports non-profit and for-profit social enterprises addressing key issues in food production, food access, value-added processing, distribution, retail and waste management.
“We had the customers and the infrastructure, but it was that access capital that allowed us to increase our sales and have an impact,” says Garcia-Granados.
IMPACT
Common Market nearly doubled its sales from 2010 to 2011 and its customers include more than 50 public and charter schools in Philadelphia and New Jersey. That’s a key audience given the enterprise’s big goal: changing what people eat and how they get their food.
Achieving that goal will require many more Common Markets, and the enterprise increasingly serves as a model. “Every other week we get a call from an enterprise or development agency,” says Garcia-Granados. “We share our business plan and feasibility study widely and invite people to come see our operation.”
The benefits accrue widely, she says. “For our farmers it’s giving them the ability to differentiate their product and take it out of the global commodity chain. For entrepreneurs, it’s allowing them to serve and sell local produce. For people who wouldn’t otherwise have access to local produce, it’s changing the food they are eating.”
VITALS
Company name Common Market Philadelphia Impact area Food & Agriculture RSF relationship PRI Fund HQ Philadelphia Revenue $1.6 million in 2012 (projected) Employees 12 Community served Delaware Valley (New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware)
RSF has elected to lower the interest rate by 25 basis points (0.25%) for the third quarter of 2012. RSF Prime will now be 4.75% and investors will earn an interest rate of 0.75%.
RSF’s most recent pricing meeting was held in Sebastopol, CA earlier this month. This was the twelfth such meeting we’ve had since RSF made the decision to change how our quarterly interest rate is determined. Prior to October 2009, we used the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) as a benchmark to determine our rate of return. Since then we’ve been using this customized rate established by our Social Investment Fund (SIF) stakeholders — RSF staff, SIF investors, and borrowers in our Social Enterprise Lending program. The SIF investor rate is then added to a 4% spread (for RSF’s operations) and the resulting rate, named RSF Prime, is the base rate for borrowers.
This pricing mechanism is more deeply aligned with our values to make financial transactions as direct, transparent, and personal as possible. Further, we’ve been able to offer a significantly higher interest rate to investors than if we had continued using LIBOR. Important to note: with this change in pricing, investors will continue to earn a rate several times that of a conventional bank CD.
Following the meeting we reflected on an important conversation that took place: would lowering RSF Prime make us more competitive in attracting high impact social enterprises in need of financing? Ultimately the answer was yes.
With that said, we are aware that the average RSF investor, for this next period, will experience a lower return (a decrease of $125 annually for the average $50,000 SIF Investment Note). For borrowers the impact is greater, as their average loan size is over $900,000, and their annual costs will be lowered by $2,000 to $2,500 annually.
We believe that lowering RSF Prime to 4.75% will help us retain and attract worthy projects to support through our Social Enterprise Lending program. To learn more about the projects we fund, visit the RSF Impact Map.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. In a spirit of transparency, we are happy to talk with you about our decision directly.
Current investors can contact Mark Herrera, Senior Manager, Client Development at mark.herrera@rsfsocialfinance.org or 415.561.6160.
Morgan Simon is the co-founder and CEO of 
You’ve probably heard of the “new economy,” which often refers to social media, sharing-based businesses, and sometimes socially responsible businesses. RSF Social Finance is working to build the next economy: one that’s rooted in community, considers everyone’s needs, and restores trust in financial relationships through transactions that are direct, transparent and personal.
