 you're the ones who love that granola as much as I do and you show up right in time to hear the best speakers at Socap and to get this amazing book which I'll tell you about in a minute. I'm Lindsay Smalling I'm the producer and curator of Socap welcome to Thursday hopefully you've already had an amazing time networking on Tuesday and at that great first soiree that we hosted on Wednesday a full full day of content yesterday and I've really loved seeing all the energy as I walk through the pavilions and through outside my goal for today is to actually go to some of the content that I spend so long putting on so I'm looking forward to that maybe I'll see some of you in sessions so in the program book also in the 10-year anniversary book I've realized it's helpful for people to understand how this all comes together a little bit and because you're here you get to hear it so the way every year this conference comes together it starts brand new from scratch because this field is growing so so quickly that the conversation really does change in some ways we're having the same conversations that we had 10 years ago in planning for this 10- year anniversary we looked at the Socap cap 08 program book and it could have been the program book for this year I mean so many of those people are still the leaders in this field today but there are subtle differences and that's one of the fun parts of my job is really listening for how is the conversation changing and where sort of where's the energy in the room right now so last year for those of you who were here and those of you who weren't some of the themes last year around both the why of impact investing and the how of impact investing and that so often we sort of are getting deeper into the how the metrics conversations the innovative structuring sort of how are we getting this capital out but making sure that the why is still saying staying really central and a key piece of that conversation so had speakers last year that really dug into both of those and as I was listening this year 10 years in we're hearing a lot of great stories about what's happened in the last 10 years but what I was also hearing so much of was that we still have to do better and that there are still so many blind spots and there are so many ways that this field needs to continue to sort of hold itself accountable to be really rigorous about being clear about what the goals of impact investing are and not get caught up in sort of the glamour of feeling like this is better than the than the current system to really hold that rigor so that's what we're gonna explore throughout this plenary you get the the head start to know sort of how all of these pieces fit together today and I'm really excited to have our first speaker here today whose book is on your chair Morgan Simon I actually remember my first socap I was a volunteer and as I sat in one of those chairs Morgan was on a panel and she looked so young but she'd already been doing this work for five ten years because she started as a college student being a sort of a student activist at Horthmore she founded the responsible endowments coalition she had started tonic and you'll see all of those stories are in real impact but this is someone who really constantly has been holding herself accountable and continues to push the field in amazing ways to say we have to really get to the roots of this we have to be very intentional and I'm really excited for you all to hear from her so please welcome Morgan Simon thank you so much well thank you all for being here bright and early on a warm breezy Thursday morning and it's my real pleasure to be with you in that I've been in the field for about 17 years now influencing over 150 billion in capital and in my current work as managing director of Candid group alongside an Arab enemy over the last five years we've supported over 50 companies and funds in doing this work and it means that I have a lot of time and opportunity to really think deeply about this word impact and I really love the Merriam-Webster definition of the word to impinge upon especially forcefully right we think a lot about impact is this positive force in the world but it could be a positive or negative force depending on how we as imperfect human beings engage with the concept and that's the opportunity that we have to really see what the future of impact could be how do we make this as positive of a phenomena as possible and it's a especially critical time to be thinking about these questions because if JP Morgan is anywhere near right if we're going to get to 2 trillion in impact investment that would be 10 times as much as official development aid and that means that the way that social change is happening at a global and domestic level is rapidly shifting under our feet and one of the things that gives me a lot of encouragement is that the impact investment field overall is fantastic at organizing towards objectives that there's been many major questions we've had to answer over the last 10 years and I posit that they've largely been financial that we needed to prove that impact investment had merit as a financial industry in order to not get gobbled up by a financial industry that had often been very hostile towards the very concept so there's three questions I feel we've answered quite well over the last decade that we've shown that impact investing can be market rate that we've had studies from Deutsche Bank to Harvard Business Review showing that you can actually get superior returns through sustainable practices so check one is it an asset class or is it an approach that you can imply across an entire portfolio that too we've seen a number of asset owners prove that this is absolutely a cross-asset approach that you could have a hundred percent alliance between your money and your values and then finally the question of could impact investment scale was it just going to be a couple of pet projects or did it have the opportunity to really become much more widespread in society you know of one in every five dollars in some type of screen vehicle about eight point seven trillion and you've seen funds like TPG closing at two billion so regardless of asset level there's really been the opportunity to show this is an industry that can scale so this was phenomenal progress in terms of solving those financial questions but I'd argue for you know any weight lifters in the house right if you just do your bicep curls and you forget the tricep you're kind of missing the whole strength at the collective strength of having impact and investing equally strong and functional within your your system and that if we've managed in the last decade to focus and solve a lot of really important financial questions could this be the decade of impact could this be the opportunity to make sure that we are equally strong in our impact practices and that might mean needing to organize around and solve a very different set of questions or an additional set of questions so here's three that I've been thinking a lot about one is impact going to create gradual or systemic change and when we think about the fires in Northern California the hurricanes in Puerto Rico and around Central America and Caribbean of course how are we going to get the type of systemic transformative change that we need to really be able to move forward as a society to have a world that's there for our grandchildren and in order to do so can we balance our skill sets between finance and social justice that often to become investment professionals we do our seven years of education we take those internships we take the time and attention that it needs to learn those skills how do we equally make sure that we're training this next generation in industry to be equally skilled on impact and that means not just reading the New York Times it means how do we really make sure to be keeping in touch in a much more proactive way with civil society and retaining accountability as we do so and then finally how do we build a more inclusive industry that if we know the majority of the world is women and people of color how do we make sure that we have more people in decision-making positions within this industry and I'll note that that's not just about diversity or representation which are of course important but in really thinking about that social justice adage nothing about us without us that if we want to be effective as a movement we need to make sure that we have accountability to the people who we presumably are all here to support and I want to note that this leads to me the one of central questions that I'd say we have at this moment at this juncture in the impact field of who's going to set the agenda for impact investment because even if we have impact or social in front of the work we do it doesn't mean that we have a social license to operate right that that is something we have to continuously gain over time and that there's financial risk implicit in losing that social right to operate so I want to give a couple examples of impact investment gone right and impact investment gone wrong to give a sense of how important that community buy-in is and what do we need to do to really shift leadership in the industry as we scale so I want to start off taking us on a journey to the south of Mexico to the state of Oaxaca which has some of the best wind energy reserves on the planet and the Mexican government alongside some development banks and impact investors saw this incredible opportunity to build Latin America's largest wind farm 550 million dollar project the opportunity to bring economic development and jobs to an indigenous region while also creating a fantastic renewable energy source for country historically very dependent on fossil fuels so this sounded like a great idea great impact investment and it absolutely was to everyone except for the people who lived there who started putting up roadblocks and carrying signs saying trans nationals get out of the country we are completely against the wind corridor because they were being asked to sign contracts in Spanish instead of their indigenous language of Zacoteco that they were getting compensated $50 a hectare and found themselves collectively getting 12,000 hectares taken from out under them and in the context of this community protests they started to have a number of clashes with authorities nine people were shot including women and children to the point where you had the indigenous commission putting out statements like stop the intimidation hostility and violence associated not with terrorism not with oil and gas but with wind energy and these are three words that I never want associated with impact investment I don't want associated with anyone in this movement or anyone in this room but it shows what happens if we're not really thoughtful about community perspectives if we don't put those front and center we can lose our social license to operate and we can wind up really getting derailed from what our purpose was in the industry and this story to me kind of epitomizes some of the challenges that we've been seeing in the sector over the last decade that investors and entrepreneurs at times are profiting not alongside communities but at the expense of communities and in part because the impact gets defined by the investors and the entrepreneurs as opposed to the communities themselves and part of why this is is that it's often very challenging for people who don't have friends and family with financial resources as much love and support as they may provide or don't have access to business plan competitions how do we make sure that a much broader group of people get to really participate in this movement so these are some major questions and what I feel really great about going back to what I mentioned of the financial questions we've solved over the last decade we as a community are great at organizing and solving problems and that's what I would invite everyone in this room to be a part of doing and the way that I've been trying to do so is as co-founder in my volunteer time of a nonprofit called transform finance supporting executive director and co-founder on Dray or many where we've been building a bridge between finance and social justice and to build a bridge you have to do it from both sides so in terms of the financial community we built an investor network about two billion strong at launched at the White House in 2014 when it was a much more hospitable place and that has brought together investors who have an explicit social justice focus to their practice and recognize that we need consistent inquiry to continue building that and then in terms of building bridges to communities we run trainings for social activists community leaders nonprofits who are interested in impact investment but may not have much of an introduction to finance who want to learn how they can think about earn revenue for social movements or how to keep impact investment accountable as it scales and this is just one of many organizations that have been working to really try to center impact in the next decade so how do we do that in practical nature and that transform finance we think about three main principles that we try to invoke an investment work and that we use as well in my practice that can be a group so I want to just share those three principles and an example of each to give you a strong sense of how this can work in the world so going back to that community in Oaxaca and a great example of a project engaging communities and design governance and ownership it turned out that the indigenous community came together and said we get that wind energy isn't the problem the problem is not getting the economic benefit of wind energy what if we started a community owned wind farm and this is one of the opportunities that's been getting launched that's on its way but showing that you can have a different way of really engaging the second of adding more value than we extract and in this case this is new era it's a 17 member worker owned co-op in Illinois that was financed by the working world which is a fund that really pioneered that practice of non extractive finance of how do you make sure that when you have a group of owners worker owners that you're making sure they receive the primary economic benefit by having different investment structures that really serve their needs and then finally balancing risk and return between investors entrepreneurs and communities uncommon cacao is a company that has been working with farmers around the globe rather than just paying the two cents a kilo additional that fair trade provides for cacao of really looking to provide the majority of the benefit to farmers recognizing the risks they take on so these are just three of the stories that are highlighted in real impact the book that I'm so excited to share with you today and the purpose of this book isn't to provide answers to how we're going to do impact over the next decade but the idea is to really highlight the questions that we can all take on together so I hope that you'll join me in that journey and thank you so much.