After shifting their foundations’ assets to align with their missions and catalyzing more than a dozen private foundations in the Philadelphia to do the same, Laura Kind McKenna and Elizabeth Killough are taking their message to a broader — and bigger — set of foundations.
To do so, they’re revising their strategy of working through local impact advisors to directly persuade the board members of large foundations to buy into the concept. “A lot of big foundations have people consulting them that are so tied to the traditional,” says Kind McKenna of the Patricia Kind Family Foundation.
Killough, co-CEO of the UnTours Foundation, has launched Paradigm Shifters, a monthly newsletter that highlights the mission-aligned investing journeys of foundations, from the Stupski Foundation to the Jessie Ball duPont Fund.
More US foundations are carving out a portion of their endowments for mission-aligned investing. Kind McKenna and Killough want them to go all in. “If you want to have more impact, use more money,” Kind McKenna tells ImpactAlpha.
Reimagining philanthropy
Kind McKenna, a nurse practitioner, took over her family’s foundation in 1998 from her late mother Patricia Kind, who had launched it just two years earlier with a gift from Kind McKenna’s grandparents’ estate. She led the foundation to invest all of its $35 million endowment in line with its mission of supporting the health and wellbeing of low-income Philadelphians.
“With the wealth that’s being hoarded in foundations and donor-advised funds, the mattresses are overflowing and the world is burning,” says Kind McKenna, who spends most of her time these days looking after her grandchildren and volunteering as a nurse at a free medical clinic in North Philadelphia. “I’m passionate about getting this money out of those foundations and into communities.”
Shifting paradigms
Killough met Kind McKenna met over a decade ago at a B Corp party and learned from her that “most foundations do nothing with 95% of their assets, and in fact invest them in ways that often harm their mission,” she recalls. “I was hooked to try to change that paradigm.”
Since 2002 Killough has led the endowment of the UnTours Foundation, launched in 1992 by Hal and Norma Taussig through their UnTours travel company, the first certified B Corp. The Taussigs were keen on mission-aligned investing well before the term was coined.
“People thought Hal was crazy for using the endowment as a revolving loan fund,” says Killough.
UnTours has deployed $11 million via low-interest loans and equity in businesses solving social, economic and environmental challenges.
“Elizabeth’s a wonderful human being and really committed to the values,” Kind McKenna says. “I’m much more the bully pulpit and much more direct.”
