Forty years ago, RSF was founded with a single goal – to pool funds from willing investors to support a school that had lost their building in a fire. Since we made our first loan to the Pine Hill Waldorf School in 1984, that modest goal has grown into a great movement.
Over the past 40 years, our community of thousands of donors and investors has channeled more than $1 billion dollars to hundreds of nonprofits and mission-driven businesses. Together, we’ve proven that it’s possible to humanize finance and use money as a tool for regeneration.
To honor our fortieth year of impact, we wanted to refresh our look and feel to better represent the work we do and the meaning behind it. So we partnered with Allegiance and BBMG to build a new website, craft new messaging, and create a new visual design that more effectively communicated our mission to change finance and finance change.
What’s changing? What’s staying the same?
We remain 100% committed to our work of activating money for good. Our dedication to that effort – and to you, the community of investors, donors, and social enterprise leaders that makes it possible – remains unchanged!
What is changing is how we articulate that work. We felt that we could be doing a better job of telling people how we use money as a tool for regeneration, what our impact looks like, and how they can get involved. So we made some changes!
- We’re elevating the work of the social enterprises our loans support – through images they’ve captured, testimonials from their leaders, and impact stories placed more prominently throughout the site.
- We’re clarifying the different ways that people can partner with us to activate their money. Investors that want to achieve an impact can purchase a Social Investment Fund note. Donors can open a donor-advised fund or directly support RSF’s operations. And social enterprise leaders can apply for a loan that amplifies their impact.
- We’re articulating the areas we focus on most intentionally in our lending – including food and agriculture, climate and energy, education, and community impact.
- We’re leaning further into the unifying concept of regeneration as our North Star. Each relationship we make, community we invest in, and connection we foster is in service to a regenerative economy and a world that is healed and whole.
Our brand story
Visual design
For us, the brand story really starts with the logo. Our new logo incorporates everything that RSF has valued since the beginning – community, nature, people working together in relationship. Drawing inspiration from the Japanese kanji character for “human,” our logo weaves these interlocking shapes together with colors representing the natural world.
From there, we worked with Allegiance to build a visual language rooted in this single image. We selected colors alluding to the heavens and the earth. We leaned into organic curves that represented the ebbs and flows of the natural world. And, perhaps most importantly, we created space for real images of real people and places from the social enterprises we support and the communities we serve.
Messaging
In partnership with BBMG, we reinvigorated the way we describe our work by leaning into the concept of regeneration. Throughout our new website, we explore how money flows through RSF and circulates throughout our community to regenerate people and planet — especially through our core focus areas of food and agriculture, climate and energy, education, and community impact.
What do we mean by regeneration and regenerative social finance? Learn more about our philosophy in Seize the Way: Five Principles to Revolutionize the Meaning of Money.
When we work together, in harmony with nature and in relationship with each other, we can create something cohesive and powerful.
Thank you for being part of our 40-year story. Here’s to the next 40 years, and beyond!
