The growth of impact investing has been nurtured by leaders who build infrastructure, support peers and create a sense of community along the way.
For their commitment to high-impact, high-return investments and for their field-building contributions, Daniel Pianko of Achieve Partners, Noelle Laing of Builders Vision, and Emma Sissman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management were recognized this week by Impact Capital Managers.
“The field has gone from non-existent to 2% of LP committed capital,” Achieve Partners’ Pianko, a founding board member of ICM, told ImpactAlpha. ICM’s first meetings less than a decade ago barely filled a conference room; this week the group is hosting a gala that fills a hotel ballroom.
The New York-based buyout firm helps its healthcare and tech portfolio companies fill critical skills gaps through workforce training (for background, see, “Finding the alpha in apprenticeships”). Last year, the firm trained 271 people, mostly from underrepresented or disadvantaged communities, Pianko says.
The impact field, he adds, is “growing up fast and figuring out how to define impact, how to invest and achieve top-quartile returns, and how to tell our stories to a broader audience.”
LP leader
With its LP award, ICM is honoring the family office of Walmart heir Lukas Walton, which ICM’s Marieke Spence says “has led by example.” With Laing as chief investment officer, Builders Vision has aligned nearly all of its $3 billion endowment with its mission, deploying high-impact, and sometimes high-risk, investments in sustainable food and agriculture, energy and oceans.
Builders provided a $70 million credit-risk guarantee, collateralized by its own assets, to facilitate a $124 million debt-for-nature swap for The Bahamas.
“Family offices have a powerful opportunity to influence markets and drive long-term value creation,” says Laing. Builders Vision leverages the flexibility family offices have to “take a holistic view of the ecosystem, identify gaps and provide the right type of capital that will help solutions – and the markets around them – grow and mature,” she said. Builders also collaborates with other family offices, she says, “helping more of them move off the sidelines to make sustainable investments.”
Sissman, a vice president in Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Sustainable Investing Group who began her career at SJF Ventures, is this year’s Emerging Leader Award recipient.
Spence points to Sissman’s pioneering work in portfolio acceleration, “going deep with portfolio companies, being their partner, and maximizing impact during the hold period,” as well as her support of peers via ICM’s Emerging Leaders committee.
Says Sissman, “Being acknowledged by the industry is a powerful reminder of the role we each play in building a stronger impact investing ecosystem – one that promotes collaboration and cultivates emerging talent.”
