 We're here today to talk about sort of the power and potential of bringing different types of capital together with blended finance approaches. And specifically, we're gonna go deep here today on the application of this concept in the workforce development space with work that Juké and everyone up here is leading. I think I'm most familiar with the concept of blended finance structures in the traditional international development sustainable finance sphere. And I think it's typically been thought of as using public and philanthropic dollars to leverage private sector capital to fund larger scale sustainable finance projects, sustainable development projects, excuse me. I think that's where we've seen the most activity leveraging this type of structure. Today we're gonna go deep on how it's starting to be used in the US domestically. I think across context, across geography, across sector, what's really exciting about this concept is the ability to leverage, to bring together much more capital than you might otherwise be able to bring together for a particular project or initiative and bring together investors who don't normally sit at the table together because they have divergent needs for LPs, impact objectives potentially, degree of impact that they're seeking. And I think what you'll hear more about today is how you can bring diverse investors together around a common purpose and achieve sort of diverse needs within one structure. So to dive into the topic, thrilled to introduce our panelists today, they've been collaborating together to achieve both financial returns and have some really transformational impact for low income individuals on their ability to enter the workforce at a much different place and have sort of transformational outcomes on their earning potential. So to dive in, and I'm not gonna go in order, but I will, you see the orders up here. First, I'm gonna introduce GK Su. GK is the CEO and co-founder of Pursuit, which is a social impact organization that's training low income adults to gain their first tech job, advance their career and become the next generation of leaders in tech. Pursuit graduates are hired as software engineers by leading companies. And to date, the organization is seeing really transformational outcomes where these individuals usually come into the program with average incomes of $18,000 a year and many are leaving with average incomes over 85,000. So truly life-changing work that they are doing. GK is an active leader in several organizations in New York City where he is based and he was selected in 2020 as a young global leader for the World Economic Forum and is a team member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Next at the end of the row, we have Katie Knight, who's the president and executive director of the Siegel Family Foundation, excuse me, Siegel Family Endowment, which is a foundation focused on the nexus of technology and society. Under Katie's leadership, equity, flexibility and grant making and holistic ecosystem approaches have been the key touchstones of the organization. And Katie's really pioneered an inquiry driven approach to philanthropy that focuses on learning and thinking alongside the grantees. Katie's been recognized for her leadership in a variety of capacities and Crane's notable black leaders in 2022 and CDN State's under 40 rising stars. She previously led community engagement at Two Sigma and was also in positions on Google's communications and public affairs teams. Finally, right next to me, we have Amy Wang, who's the head of private credit for Blue Earth Capital. An impact asset manager, which she was on the founding team and sits on the firm's executive committee. Prior to joining Blue Earth, Amy worked as an assistant vice president for Deutsche Bank's global social finance group. There she led clean energy and South Southeast Asian financial services investing activities. Amy's worked across Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and brings deep experience across both traditional and impact finance. So with that introduction of our panel of rock stars here, we will jump in. To start, Juki, I was hoping you could provide just a little bit more background on what you do at pursuit, the amazing work that your team is doing and I think just lay the foundation for what we'll dive into later. Talk a bit about sort of the insufficiency of funding that exists for financing alternative education in particular and those that's focused on low income learners. Great, thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for Eliza and thank you everyone for being here. Excited to talk about this topic and hopefully generate a lot of conversation from you all on questions and answers later as well. So as Eliza was sharing pursuit, we're focused on creating and enabling economic opportunity mobility and our work through that is really on individuals gaining better jobs and careers. So for us, we're focused on blue collar workers. So primarily blue collar workers but also other adults with other kind of, that have had mobility kind of issues. 65% of Americans don't have a four year college degree. That's your highest determined for income. And for example here, I guess, who has a four year college degree in this room, let's say? So this audience obviously is very different than what America looks like and what the opportunity map looks like, right? And so, what does that mean? What kind of job opportunities, live prospects do you have if you started college but dropped out for different reasons, you faced different barriers? And so for us, we're really trying to grapple with that issue of what that means to, from blue collar to white collar and then what that really translates to is obviously lifetime incomes and asset building. So our means of doing that is through thinking about workforce development. We think it's a complicated, really complicated problem. Multi, really think about as a labor market approach. So as Eliza was sharing, people coming in our program earn an average of $18,000. It's a four year process. There's a year of pre-job training, roughly. It's sometimes taken about a year and a half. After people get a job, they're earning down on average about $90,000. And then there's three years we wanna support people on the job, so there's on the job training but also working with employers for services. So that takes over four years and then why that's important is that that's how we really understand if people are not just trained, it's not just education, not just people get a job, but are you really successful in the job? Are you thriving your careers, et cetera? So that's multi-step, that's also costly. It's important, but costly. So what is the best way to enable this? What is the way to mobilize capital around obviously this enormity, this issue? I think it's very challenging. And so for us, after we've demonstrated these results, been working in the past seven years or so and thinking about what is the best way to finance this where it's tied to outcomes so that our work can grow but also other workforce organizations can also grow and really aligning incentives, immobilizing capital around that. Thanks, and just quickly to add on to that, what are some of the challenges you see in what exists for financing for programs like yours or other programs that learners from diverse backgrounds, low income backgrounds wish to pursue? What's, where are the gaps in this space that are falling short? Absolutely, so opportunity seekers, organizations that train them or work with them. Philanthropy is essential, we couldn't do our work without it, but obviously in terms of capital pools, it's relatively modest compared to obviously all different venture capital, debt, all these kind of markets around capital. Now if you think about that, six, five certain Americans, we need massive amounts of capital to actually effectively do that. So with opportunities, if grants are limited in New York City, it's, we kind of, this number is changing is hard to size for adults and adults in Flint to be defined by old and 24. So there are a lot of folks on young adults, 16, 24 year olds, the 24 is not very old, so for adults about $28 million of direct philanthropic funding to direct job training in New York City, that's not very much. And that's like, think about across the country, what that means, so that's a huge challenge. So Flint to be alone may not be able to solve that, what are the other options? Well, mostly people pay, let's say for training or education, well, if we're focused on those who may lack opportunity or are poor, obviously you can't pay directly. There's also student loans, what issues with student loans, it can be really great if you have great success by what's the challenge of student loans, if you're poor, you probably don't have credit, by definition have low income, you have less educational attainment, right? Among all these other things around characters around how things are financed, that creates challenges, so by definition, working with the audience, you may not have access credit and student loans are not tied to outcomes. So you might have more debt without more success and that creates bad incentives for institutions that train and bad for individuals, bad for everyone. So those are, I think, just different tools that exist. How do we really shift that? Where it's really focused on job success and long-term success. Awesome, thank you. Katie, can you share a bit more about your work at the Segal Foundation, specifically as it relates to your interest in workforce development and how you all have thought about exploring blended finance structures as a tool? Yeah, so at Segal, we're focused on the impact of technology on society and when we were founded over a decade ago, that seemed like a much smaller problem than it is now in 2023, so we focus on almost everything but we try to operationalize that through thinking about learning and education, workforce and economic development and infrastructure sort of broadly defined and in our workforce work, we're really thinking about both, across all of our work, we're thinking about both leveraging tech for good, so yes, I'm always excited to see computers and classrooms and so on and so forth but really, really invested in the notion of mitigating the risk and harm of pervasive technology and what it looks like to live in a world where everything is tech enabled and so on the workforce front, we're really thinking about the opportunity that exists inside of these large companies that are spreading across the country, opening satellite offices and hiring, all sorts of talent but also about the potential for entrepreneurship, the potential for the sort of neighborhoods and community ecosystems that exist around these companies, the opportunities for people to thrive more broadly so pursuit and their work on training and getting individuals into well-paid jobs is one piece of a strategy that's really trying to look holistically at what it takes to make the gains in wealth creation that we've seen through the rise of technology, tech companies as an industry and tech services across the board to make those gains more equitably distributed across communities so that it's not just the .001% that have founded these big companies that are seeing the money from them but the communities that they're in are also seeing that rising tide really lift all boats for us, the innovative finance piece, it started from the very beginning of trying to support workforce training as an organization that really considers philanthropy to have its best and highest purpose as risk capital so what does that really mean? For me, it means that there are two kinds of problems in the world, I call them way problems and will problems way problems are the kind where we don't know how to solve something will problems are the kind where we do know how to solve it but we don't have the will to do it usually political one example that's really easy for me is there's no real reason anyone should be hungry in the world we don't have the will to solve that we know the way when it comes to way problems around technology and the way that it's impacting the world how we can finance workforce training for people who don't have access to the traditional sort of opportunities to fund it that UK was talking about is a really important way problem that we need to solve and thinking about the potential to bet on people and the opportunity that they are sort of seizing for themselves and their potential outcomes and to see both a non-profit organization and its constituency be key stakeholders alongside the investors was really really important to us when we started thinking about what can we do in this Wild West of training programs and different models of paying for them. Great, thank you. Amy, so Blue Earth very recently closed a new credit fund, impact credit funds that brought assets under management for the firm over the $1 billion threshold, which is awesome. Congratulations. Congratulations. But yeah, it's huge. But just wanted to highlight that for the audience to have a sense of who's up here and what kind of assets they're managing and the scale of the work that Blue Earth is doing. So with that context, could you talk a bit about Blue Earth where you sit in sort of the spectrum of thinking about financial and impact returns, how you balance that and what your approach is to looking at blended finance structures? Of course, and thank you for inviting to this really interesting, innovative discussion. So I'm with Blue Earth and thank you. We have indeed just closed our second credit fund which has now finally pushed our AUM to a billion and it's really nice to be able to change the little M's to a B. They say they're for, it was a slog. So all of you looking for capital out there, I hear you, I feel you. But what we represent Blue Earth Capital is we are an independent asset manager that is 110% focused on delivering two things, outsized impact and impact means for social underserved people as well as the environment, hence the name Blue Earth. And secondly, equally important is by providing financial return that is consummate to what investors inspect. And this is because we have the thesis of being able to help solve or at least address, have the will and some of the way to address some of the world's most pressing problems by being able to encourage and invite and bring along the traditional capital markets. Because as UK mentioned, $20 million for workforce development, not nearly enough, not a drop in the bucket, but we're talking about trillions of dollars in the student loan system which is broken. We need to be able to really bring together forces around traditional markets to help solve these issues. So that's our thesis. The impact and the financial return must be intertwined and linked in in any of our investments in our products. The way that we do this is we run a series of different funds that actually historically had been more focused on emerging markets. And this is because when we had launched seven years ago, the world was a very different place and we had thought that the greatest relative value of impact and almost highest return was in emerging markets, which at that point honestly was true. But lots of things happened, COVID happened. You saw people in our own streets weren't able to get PPE in it. You saw people, just persistent issue of education in our just backyard, what's happening with the world or the climate. All of these have now started to trickle down into our investment thesis and recognize that the intersection of impact needs to be here as well. So we've been increasingly looking at how we can develop solutions for closer to home in the US. Maybe just for additional context on Blue Earth as a platform, I represent the private credit arm of the business, meaning we provide loans to companies and for the structured product, this plentiful finance product. As a platform, we recognize that this is not the only solution to issues in the world. Debt can do a lot of things, but it can't do it all. So as a platform, we also offer fund investments and we can be a LP and investor and other fund managers as well as be an equity investor. And this holistic and complimentary suite of assets, classes allows us to really go in and say, okay, what is needed at this point in time? Education, not workforce, but education, for instance, ed tech, they don't need debt. They need equity. So we think about the world in that lens, but it always comes down ultimately to trying to optimize for that impact and financial return, which is what makes the pursuit bond and what we're going to talk about so fascinating because it's in my nearly 20 years of doing this, it's one of the first and only times where you really see that outcome alignment actually fully linked, not just in the business model, not just in the structure, but in both the fact that we're able to work with students and fellows and ensure that our financial return, the financial return to our investors, which is what we consider a marker thanks to the structure is completely aligned with the social outcomes. Great. All right, so now we have a better sense of who's up here and the amazing work that these organizations do. Jukie, would you walk us through sort of how the three of you and your organizations came together and a preliminary look at sort of the pursuit bond structure? And I think we have a few slides and I can heat them up here, I think. Absolutely, so pursuit, I helped start pursuit about 12 years ago, so we've been on this journey. And as I was saying before, to really understand career mobility or lifetime mobility, it takes multiple years. Even though we work in tech or work with tech companies, people are not software, it doesn't take this kind of change. So to understand, we've tried to be very deliberate about demonstrating our outcomes over time. So have known Katie and Amy in various kind of contexts over the years. Katie and Segal family endowment has been a longtime supporter of our work. I think initially it was a $50,000 grant, then it became I think a couple $100,000 grant, then a million, then three million. And I think each point, it's not just about more capital, I think as we try to demonstrate different aspects of our work, Dave and Katie and Segal family endowment has a really important thought partner with us, helping shape our last strategic plan and other things around, what are we solving for? Obviously we want to make sure we demonstrate impact, but also how does it affect the field? How does it affect these kind of systems? And particularly on this blended kind of finance structure, because the philanthropy is still really important in how we kind of demonstrate that. I'll talk about kind of this in a moment. So in the form of a class from 2013 to 2016, those kind of few early years in stages we realized this problem around financing this, and especially one side outcomes. So very simple in 2016 we thought, what we're really creating these, this step-wise change in incomes, right? At the time it was 18 to 85 roughly, is there a way where it's not debt, where it's not tied to outcomes for individuals? Is there another way of doing this where we can demonstrate like a fully aligned model? So very simple you can see there, we structure something, what we call pursuit bond or kind of a job bond. It's an ISA type structure that we don't consider an ISA, we can talk about why later, et cetera, where it's a very simple concept, coming in, there's no upfront cost. If you get a job of certain income, we can design that where we can demonstrate that you're only better off and that's the principle, you pay a percent of your income for a limited amount of time. And with that projected outcome and cash flows, let's say, we can kind of finance that. And so how do we build a model in which we can raise capital, deploy it in training and base off people's success, that becomes a full loop cycle. So in some ways, very simple concept, obviously very, very hard to do. And so that's what you see up here. Maybe there's a next slide. And so in- What's that? Yeah, this is great. And then so in 2016, had a small pilot around this, we call bond 1.0, and you can kind of see how this demonstrated. At the time, Siegel family endowment was a supporter of our work philanthropically. And that's really important. We need the philanthropy to demonstrate this, to demonstrate that. And the structure, this is $750,000 at the time, that did not pay for the full cost, right? That was somewhere between about 20% of the cost, right? But for us, it was an important proof of concept to just see, can this work, right? How do we demonstrate that? And we work with two foundations that gave us PRIs, program-lead investments, 6.6% expected return. And you can see on the chart, very simple on the left, what do we expect to do, and then what happened? Obviously, there's lots of learning, some things went well, some things didn't go well, and then we had to turn around and fix it, and lots of challenges, so many challenges. But at the end of it, we were able to demonstrate, we're paying the interest, the payments, and return to principal around that. And, but beyond the capital demonstration, it's really just about the results, right? This fully linkage, if every payment is based off of, if you have a job that month, and what the salary is, every payment is just data, and so how do you create the right incentives for the system? So with that demonstration as a very small proof of concept, we wanted to say, if this is really the future, we want to both do a few things, obviously raise more capital, have that cover a higher percentage of what the cost is potentially, to further demonstrate that, and work with not just foundations, which are really important as PRIs. So at that point, we had pure grants, we're PRIs as investments. We want today an impact investor, an institutional impact investor, so that we can demonstrate further if this can work for institutional investors. And that's the next slide. So thinking about the structure evolution, then work with Amy at Blue Earth, to know Amy over the years, and work with her and others to kind of structure the second vehicle, where Blue Earth was kind of a lead. You can see they're $8 million as kind of the senior tranche. We again had $2 million as a PRI that kind of catalyzed it, lower interest, different expectations, obviously, and then also different amount of set aside for a couple of grants and grants. And then outside of this, Segal Family Endowment supported us through $1 million grant outside of this to enable this, and this covered maybe 50% of costs at the point in time. So I think we're trying to be deliberate at what we can demonstrate, move off the capital stack also. We need different kinds of capital of different purposes. And this is really with the intention of our different stakeholders in mind, right? There's long histories of financial products, good for people that were people. We want to design something that's mission driven, good for our audience, but also balance these various interests to demonstrate that. Great, thank you for walking us through that. One thing I want to sort of loop in here is government dollars. So billions of dollars, public and philanthropic are spent in the workforce development space every year in the US, not enough clearly, but also billions of dollars that I'm a workforce development early stage investor. Billions of dollars that from my vantage point often seem to go into a black hole, like very difficult to understand where dollars are going as a implementer, as an executor, like you are very hard to figure out how to access those dollars to scale something that's working. Very difficult from an investor perspective to understand what the outcomes are and which programs should be scaled. So the government dollars piece of the workforce development space in particular feels like a very complex but very essential part of this conversation. I wanted to sort of turn it over to you all to ask, do you think this model has the ability to be a lever to bring government dollars towards this type of financing mechanism? Or what is your, how do you sit alongside government funds? How does this type of structure complement or ultimately leverage the billions of dollars that are in public coffers to do this type of work but to date maybe haven't been doing it very effectively? Maybe I'll start and then, yeah. I mean, I have a prospect on this but I'm curious for others and want to learn. I agree, and that's one of the biggest challenge of workforce. I mean, you look at the history of workforce training, it's very hard. We even talked about complexity of all this, but I think oftentimes funders in government ask the question, is it working as effective? And there's a lot of unknowns, as you're saying. I think hopefully this is, it changes the incentives of institutions. We really want to understand what's working and not so we can learn from it from everyone else too. But think about the tens of billions in workforce funding. It's also, there's different purposes and aims for all this funding. There is so much of wheeled out as was the traditional funding system. A lot of it goes to benefits, right? To access public benefits in various ways so you can live, you can do other things. There's direct training, there's capital investment, so actually bring that down. What is actually direct training dollars is very tough. I would argue government does play a role, but actually the biggest role right now that government plays in, let's say more broadly, opportunity financing, let's say, whether education or workforce, it's the student loan market. 1.7 trillion dollars. We subsidize as taxpayers 12 cents a dollar. Right, so I think there's different ways beyond the direct payments or what that means and also these different things that government plays a role. So I do think there are roles that governments plays around shifting these incentives. And I think like over the past decades, as student loans were created, obviously helped a lot of people, more people access opportunity in the US, but then obviously the reforms are needed where you have now there are over 200 universities in the US where the student loan default rate for those universities is higher than the graduation rates, right? So the student loan default rates could be 30, 40%, and the graduation rates are 20, 30%. So that just speaks to like, obviously, wow, much more capital, much more if you can access it, but if the financing's not coupled with the success, it creates these negative incentives. So I think that's a role government plays and also all financial products are regulated as well. So how does that affect that? And I think it's probably blended, but if there's better understanding outcomes and you can better direct dollars, you can better direct needs, this isn't paid for everything. This is important to have different roles of play. Yeah, I would add, so I think there's a few things. One is philanthropy, which obviously at work in philanthropy, I don't have a ton of friends at a philanthropy because of what I'm about to say. We tend to look at government dollars as this sort of magical like, oh yeah, and then the government will pay for it once we've scaled it, but that's not happening. I don't know if anyone's noticed. So first, I think one thing that Juké didn't say is like they're really obvious. So we're calling it a job bond because there's a world in which you could imagine a city issuing a workforce bond like this, right? And that piece is something that's really the aspirational element of this is to say, hey, it doesn't only have to be philanthropic capital and impact capital that's here to sort of support the needs of these potential workers, these people who are looking for opportunity. So that's one thing. But I think also there's a lot of money that is sort of floating around this ecosystem of workforce without sort of where the purpose is most explicit is where the regulations around it tend to be the most outdated. So things that are easy to understand and train for because we've been doing them for a long time, some health care professions, lots of sort of esthetician training, things that are sort of older models of what career training might look like. And so there's a lot of work to be done to update the kind of eligible programs that are actually pushing people into jobs. And so if we can demonstrate the success of programs like Pursuit and others that are pushing people into jobs in sort of the new economy, then the government should be right behind us looking at those and saying, oh yeah, let's add those and make them eligible for grants and loans that'll pay for these things. And then lastly, I think there's just a lot of opportunity for us to look differently at outcomes. When we're thinking about outcomes and what it takes to get there, when we're thinking about the four years that you guys talked about, and when we first started working together, it wasn't a four year program, it was a training program, it was a year. And then there was a lot of informal scaffolding that was happening. Why is this fellow not coming to alumni events? Oh, they're not in their job anymore. Well, what happened there? Or why is this fellow suddenly stopped communicating with us? They are super depressed at work because we sent them into a really toxic environment. Like there were all these things that we would talk about. And so that's where I think when you think about, it's not just the cost of training, it's the longer term scaffolding that helps people get into a new career but also sort of travel through it and get on a pathway where they'll persist and where their mobility actually continues to grow is really, really important. And so can we think differently about what training programs look like and how we judge outcomes on a longer time horizon? I think there's obviously lots of government data that could help us do that and I wish it was easier for programs to access that sort of information, to track sustained wage growth over time. But there's also just I think a lot of potential in thinking longer than just the actual 10 or 12 months of training that you give someone. Maybe some two cents here. And Katie, I'm gonna probably say this a few times, the will and the way I love that. So I'm gonna use that for the rest of this conversation but thinking about it from a will and a way, there's apparently no will because the government can finance, they can unlock loads of capital that's incredibly subsidized funding. I mean, the IRA is just a humongous bill of essentially free capital. If you have anything in energy efficiency, you just have to find the right person to call but someone is gonna give you something at like 1%. So I mean, yes, we need to do this because we need to save the planet that we all live on. However, there's also ensuring a worthwhile way to have livelihood as well. So there certainly is the ability for governments to be able to effectuate additional capital into this space. And in fact, in emerging markets, this is quite commonly a role played by developmental finance institutions if anyone is in the room from a DFI where their specialty organization set up with the express purpose of promoting development and usually through different tools, whether they be guarantees, loans, equity, that is done at a cost that is much more palatable to higher risk environments. And a similar comparable would be the Community Reinvestment Act of Banking, CDFI community in the US. And I would think that if there were to be a way to ensure there are more explicit carbats for workforce within the CRA or the CDFI acts there, that could unlock a huge amount of capital. So I think there just apparently is there needs to be more action on the will to unlock those tools. Your points around outcomes though, the here I'm not sure if I'm agreeing or disagreeing but I see a little bit of a nuance as I'm not sure in my opinion and just mine, whether it is the onus of the government to be in lining and regulating the outcome itself. I mean, we're all impact oriented people here and who here can truly say that they can calculate outcome. It's incredibly hard. It's something that the entire industry has been struggling with. So how, and if you look at the traditional markets, the folks that end up doing the ratings assessments or the infrastructure for aligning what is good or bad, they're actually independent and for profit institutions that act alongside government. And in order to be able to do that though, which is what I think it's not the outcomes, I think it's the regulations, what you were saying. There needs to be guidelines as to how to create this, we're calling it pursuit bond maybe we're jumping ahead about some point where we're not gonna call, they're not income share agreements but there is something such as an income share agreement and what does that actually entail? No one actually knows and there's so many different types of income share agreements. Student loans for better or for worse, it's a loan as a coupon to pay it back and you know that if you pay more than this amount then it's extractive. Whereas this current iteration of the bond, the concept that we haven't talked about, ensuring that the level of repayment or payment that you get from the share of your revenue is capped at a certain point or after a certain amount of periods you will stop paying. It's not like you're paying this thing forever that that would also not be aligned to outcomes and ensuring that these are reasonable and you can compare and benchmark this product to hopefully this is a demonstration for other products so that people can compare, that's what's needed and I think that's where the good work of pursuit to advocate for more regulation but the government needs to come out with that regulation and that even starts with who regulates it. So it's a great segue. We're going deeper in ISA land here. So I talked to all of you about it as an investor focused on workforce development, looking at a lot of early stage companies working with low income populations, trying to help create access to mobility as pursuit is doing. I've looked at a lot of different sort of alternative financing structures and ISAs have been a big, income share agreements have been a big part of the conversation for the last decade. In the last couple of years, ISAs have really had some hard times and I think their actual impact alignment has been questioned from the beginning regardless of some really good intentions in the space. So I think a lot of the challenges, I mean some people will say ISAs are totally dead and maybe with that terminology they are but we're seeing a lot of these types of creative structures emerging and I think there's really interesting potential because you are trying to align actual outcomes and ability to pay with a structure in order to not be extractive or burdensome to the folks you're trying to help. I tend to think that a lot of the challenges that were encountered were more around a failure of implementation, caps you mentioned in terms of repayments but also really around this regulatory issue. It's an aggressive regulatory space I think, consumer financial protection is a huge need but I think a lot of the ways that that agency has acted towards creative innovators in this space has been really challenging when you're a leanly finance startup trying to do something new and innovative. It's difficult to sort of bring the resources to bear against a force like that. So, Juke, I wanted to talk a little bit about, first the pursuit bond is not an ISA and we talked a little bit about some of those differences. I imagine some of the audience have questions about what are some of these differences that you think are most important and then how are you navigating the regulatory environment that is a tricky space to be in as someone who's creating an innovative financial product? Yeah, thanks. We're figuring it out. And that's why we're trying to do this very deliberately as you see, every time we're demonstrating, proving and then kind of evolving the structure and trying to be very thoughtful about that and I think that's why blended finance is important. That's why philanthropy is important to yours if it's a purely market instrument, you can create certain outcomes. So I think we want to demonstrate that. So again, all these financial products, not necessarily all created equal differences. I don't want to say ISAs are all bad. I think so some important differences for us that we really care about. One is that most income share, for example, is there's a fixed tuition concept. So let's say something costs $50,000, it's focused on variable payments, right? So you're paying based off your income, but there's a fixed tuition amount up front. So it is like repaying. So then that gets in the trouble also of, is there an effective interest? What does that mean, et cetera, right? And so in other countries, for example, England has this, Australia has this, there's fixed tuition, but variable payments based off of your job and what your income is. So that's one concept. I think for us, from a structural standpoint, it's very important for us that, oh, sorry, and going back to that, that let's say $50,000, let's say in the case that you don't have the income and you're not paying, in that case, it is let's say forgiven, but then there's tax consequences to you as an individual because you owe that, it's debt, essentially. It's still debt, but just variable payments. So that's how most income share agreements work. For us, there's not a fixed tuition up front. It only, your payment obligation only starts at every month that which you have a job is of an income. So that feels like not different, but actually it's very different. And so it's not like a debt-like structure there. There's no tax consequence for that. So I would say as more as, and that shifts the risk from the individual to the institution. So I think all these things are like, who's taking the risk and how's that shared? I think in this, there's a shared with the institution. Pursue bond, the financial vehicle is a debt instrument, obviously, to us as an institution, but for the individual, the opportunity seeker, for us, it is more like a tax equity-like structure. It's purely based off the gains versus, I say, it's more like a debt-like structure to the individual. So those are some of the differences, but obviously lots of nuances around that. Other people are experimenting, like we just met with our friends at Google yesterday. They don't want to do ISAs either. They have a, and you might read about their $100 million kind of fund around this. They have an outcomes-based loan structure. And again, different, and they don't want it because it's not income-shared. There's more loan-like structure. So I think there's different reasons, but I think from a principal perspective, we wanted to assign something where everyone's better off, where it is not a fixed debt because that changes the incentives of institutions and individuals and from a consumer protections and underwriting standpoint. Like right now, it's not underwritten to the individual. Right? If you're serving loan-come adults or there's all these issues with underwriting, so this is actually pretty, we're trying to shift that to something else where it's purely based off success, right? An equity-like investment for venture underwriting is about the upside and what people can achieve versus debt-like underwriting is based off of downside protection and risk, right? So I don't know, that's very, but there's like, I think in between there that we're trying to create on the individual and what is their risk and what's the consequence of them? Sorry, long answer, but that's the... Amy, do you want to add that first or do you want to add that? Come on, guys, like come on, yeah, I know. I would just add one thing, which is a lot of ISA innovators got hammered because they were delivering crap training, just to be clear, period at the end of that sentence, they were delivering substandard training that was not getting people jobs and so the consumer financial protection element there was important because it wasn't the instrument, it was the training and I think the instrument has now been thrown in the fire and thrown under the bus and is sort of allowed us to ignore the problem but there's a lot of really bad training that is actually predatory when it comes to low-income people and opportunity seekers and so we shouldn't have thrown away the notion of ISAs, we may have to stop using that language and I think a lot of people are turning to outcome-based loans because it is easier to fit inside an existing regulatory scheme so it makes it easier for them to innovate than the realm of understanding but the problem wasn't the ISAs, it was the training. One more thing for Katie and Amy on this topic, how as investors and you have different profiles and how you're looking at investments but how do you navigate the regulatory gray zone that is the reality with innovative financial structures like the pursuit bond? I don't know if you've looked at ISAs as well but how do you think about that and navigate that? What's the risk tolerance when companies are innovating in a space that's highly regulated and yet doing something that no one really knows how it's gonna be treated? I mean for us, typically if we were to do a standalone straight loan facility to another company this level of regulatory risk would kind of be a deal killer but this is why the blended finance structure is so powerful because maybe going back into the way that the little circles that we were shown this is a way for us to coalesce different risk profiles into a one single goal. We have the, we have as Blue Earth, we had saw that there was a 75, 750,000 pilot that where there were a number of fellows where this seemed to work but the jump from 750,000 to 12 million is tremendous. The operational impact, the number of people, all of that. So there's execution risk there. That in itself was a, how do we handle that? Then secondly, with that growth we also understood that there's regulatory risk and we know as impact investors that we want to evolve and continue to manage and work alongside our borrowers but how do we work with this? So the way that we worked with Pursuit and their funders to structure this is to ensure that there was philanthropic capital that essentially sits as first loss. So our eight million, we know that we're not the first money out and that helps us de-risk a bit as to how much our loss rate could be. Furthermore, we actually also structured our investment into two tranches. So we first gave out half of our capital then we saw, we waited to see, okay, what is the training completion rate look like? What are the job placement rates look like? And within a year, the Pursuit bond was just blowing it out of the water. So while there remained regulatory risk, they just were doing a good job. And if you do a good job, it's a lot harder for someone to just shut you down. So after discussion and ensuring that we can work alongside the various partners, we released the second tranche and we feel very comfortable that now with where it's come and the fact that the payments are just, it's working. People are happy with the training that they've received and therefore sharing their income. Yeah, that's how we get around it. And I think we're able to have much higher risk tolerance and philanthropy broadly and then in particular because I'm always sort of pushing us as far as we can go. I think from the bigger picture perspective, it was really important for us to invest in this way with a nonprofit partner so that we were demonstrating this model in a space where we could be sure that it wasn't just about promises and good thoughts that made the fellows actual stakeholders in this and the organization itself an actual stakeholder but that there was some actual responsibility to act as a nonprofit operator and to be in service of the community. And so that along with I think the level of transparency that we had into pursuit and what they were doing and even into what our investor partners thought and what they were doing and what their kind of risk tolerance and risk assessment was was really, really important for us. Great, I know we just have a couple of minutes and we'd love Q&A from the audience. So if you all have questions, be thinking about them. Maybe just to close out here and this is a hard question to answer I think but for folks maybe in the audience who are needing this type of capital structure interested in helping to build these type of capital structures, how do you get started? Are there any intermediaries helping to bring parties together who are doing financial arrangements like this or is this at this point sort of peer relationship based you know, organic opportunity? You hope you know the right people kind of thing. You all know Amy, no. Yeah. No, can be things like SoCAP are critical so. Yeah, I think we, I think if you have a partner that can do what we did for pursuit, that is a really helpful piece. If you're in the nonprofit space already and you're in the impact space and you have like a philanthropic partner, I think often we're not pushed to think about alternative arrangements like this and so it starts with maybe just asking that partner to sort of step into the gap and I think to take what would have just been a grant that goes out the door and you never see it again anyway and to think about it as hey, what is the longer-term return on this is actually exciting for a philanthropy. I think this is obviously hard to do. You can see many years, many different kind of capitals, many different stakeholders and I feel very grateful and lucky that we've been able to do this and have really great partners. All different stakeholders have an interest but a line in that. I think we are trying to think about and that's always been the goal. As it gets bigger, how does it become less of a bespoke kind of model and become a job on in the future or something that can be applied more broadly, right? Like that is really important. How can go from a financing vehicle for pursuit but create something that's replicable but also a market for these things? I think that's the next stage. That's why we're interested to be here at SoCAP. But if anyone, yeah, if there are other workforce that needs to interest in this, it is probably hard to stand up and so we just can't do it about it. So maybe in the future, we're thinking about how we can take these models as it evolves so that it can be more broadly adopted and that's the ultimate goal for that and working with other partners in a room that may wanna help do that. Great. Do we have some questions? Yes. I think that rather than doing the writing out thing that didn't work, we'll just come around and give you the mic. I thought I was gonna write this. Where are employers at this? Employers are seeking talent and not just in tech and auto repair. Why are they not financing the bonds and then people have to repay if they leave? Where are you seeing employers play in the space? Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. So we kind of simplified part of this. Workforce is challenging. If we think about it as a labor problem, there's pre-job training, which is what we're talking about. This is financing. And let's say even before that, there's community development. The third year, the year's two, three, four that we talked about on the job training, that is actually where employers play a role and we have actually a structure there in which this has evolved as Katie said, where they're paying for that and we're financing that also. This is different structure. So I think there's like different parts of the valley, different stages and we're trying to be very thoughtful. Everyone should contribute based off of where they gain value. So yes, employers are very much part of that and we just did a financing on that that we hope to share. Yeah, that's more too. Absolutely. Yes, I'm curious. A little bit off topics. I'll just bear with me a little bit. In this higher interest world, I'm just curious how that's affecting your business. It seemingly is a thing of the past and interest rates certainly have the potential to keep going higher. And I'm just curious how that's affecting the credit part of your businesses. So I'll take that. This facility is a fixed rate facility and we set that really to just ensure that there's consistency and we're proving out of market. And actually one thing that notes on top of that, if you would think about the layers, it's the philanthropic first loss, then it's us. And actually, if the bonds continue to outperform, that residual actually ends up going to pursuit. So it is really aligned in terms of incentives. So if you wanna go more macro and you think about how interest rates impacts overall income, it could in this case, because of the training in this specific sector, it actually could be a bit of a win for all parties here. But if you wanna speak specifically about lending markets and how our portfolio manages this higher rate environment, it's a delicate balance. Because on one hand, it's very easy to just get very attracted by, you know, 12, 13, you're seeing 12, 13% return. So for plus 700 off of like a triple B, you know, and that was unseen before. But this is not sustained. You cannot, these companies continue paying that for longevity. So it's about how do we ensure that there's the right alignment of the business model to the effective cost of that capital. And that could be, from our perspective, we still have to still, to our business, return an investment target that is acceptable to LPs, but we can think about managing that in less interest out front or having it be cash interest versus pick interest, trying to adjust the amortization schedule in a way that it could perhaps a bit shorter so we can see what it looks like today, but reset in a way, in a time that's a bit more palatable to companies, because again, we don't wanna choke the businesses. Thank you so much. That was really interesting. And what I am curious about is how you think about the application of this to regular university programs. So we have an innovative financing platform that is doing something similar to what you said, Jouquet, in making sure that there is skin in the game on the part of the university in the sense that we lend to their students. So we have a lending platform that lends to African students coming to US universities, including HBCUs, and the lending on the front end is such that the university only gets part of the money and will receive the remainder of it once the student finishes making their payment. So everybody is aligned in that way to the point you made earlier around the divorce of the divorce between the trainer and the outcomes. This makes the trainer more aligned in if I don't have the student trained and getting a job, then they're not likely to repay and therefore I'm out of pocket for the 30% that is being held back. But I wonder if for the rest of the parties around the table, whether you think this is something that has possibilities for your kind of capital going in there, because like the workforce training programs you're describing, you also need to have some senior debt that is de-risked by some tranches of higher risk-taking capital that is often concessionary or philanthropic. Yeah, I mean I think for us, thinking about holding something back from the university is certainly enticing. Really, I think that your point is well taken. In the US, there's a super entrenched way in which we do business with universities and more often than not, it falls on the student and their family to take all of the risk and the university which could absorb a lot more risk than they currently do, don't. So I definitely think there's a place for philanthropy and higher risk capital in that equation. I'm less interested in universities coming up with new ways to charge students over time. That messing around in the fringes of that model is not particularly exciting, but thinking about universities putting more skin in the game and really linking career placement into what they're doing more holistically on the education front is really important. Yeah, I think there's interesting experiments. I don't know if that's a classic ISA, like Purdue was one of the first innovators in that. Robert F. Smith's been doing a really interesting thing with the student freedom initiative for HBCUs. These are all variations. He's also not calling it an income share. I think their structure is a little different, but I think at the university, obviously I think this can broadly apply for more outcomes, but the devils and the details are all these things, but I think I just would be remiss if I don't say that the university finance, it's very much based on the regulatory environment and the lack of access is also just on all those who are not part of the universities. There is no access to financing. It's not in the right way. That's where the highest need is for adults to get mobility. But I think it broadly applies, all that. All of this hopefully can change and apply across. One quick question. Thank you so much. I lead a nonprofit that's working to replicate something similar across healthcare, tech, and specific skilled trades in southeastern North Carolina. So I guess I'm curious how you think this can translate or be replicated in geographies that certainly don't have the capital markets or even the philanthropic footprint of major metros. I mean, I think one thing is to Juke's last point, we, those of us who are sitting in this concentration of capital, can build a marketplace for this and pull others in so that if we're able to attract the profile of investor that is interested in this, we can make it easy to do that, not even matchmaking, just to access a marketplace. I think there's also, to my earlier point, even if you don't have a high concentration of philanthropic partners, are there ways to model working differently with a philanthropic partner and having them in a way on your behalf, like approach investors or different actors? Like I think philanthropy can pull together these strange bedfellows and say, hey, we're gonna try something over here and we have a lot of money behind it. Will you come in with us, rather than it being sort of the organizations themselves? So if there are ways to kind of convene investors and with the philanthropy that you do have, that's one opportunity to kind of push on these sort of ideas. But I think the broader marketplace is gonna be more important in the long term. Yeah, I think, yeah, love to see if this can be replicated. We'd love for these kind of bonds to be utilized. I am curious, it's a better question for you. How can you or other organizations utilize this in North Carolina for healthcare or anything else? I think that's interesting. But I hope there are more of these conversations. It is, I think it is, we see this as a spectrum of philanthropy versus investment, but it's very tied, right? Like Siegel family endowment has the grants, they also have an endowment that's investing in these different things. And so putting the parties together of like what's the right risk to prove that and in the capital, I think is, I think what Katie's suggesting, I hope there's more opportunities to do that. But I hope there are other organizations that wanna adopt this model, but that's what we're trying to find also. You may wanna reach out to the Outcome Group. It's a group, they're based in New York, but they look specific. They're actually very interested in healthcare in particular and structuring programs and trying to match capital. Hi, I was curious about how do you work with the vocation of each individual that you're supporting and their passion so that you're being respectful and offering something that not only ensures a financial return, but also strong subject well-being to their natural proclivity to doing a career in what they like and what sort of agency they have in that process. Yeah, I think agency is incredibly important. That's actually my ultimate interest what I think workforce is enabling, individual agency and human potential. People select into tech jobs for us. After that though, yeah, I mean, people choose what they, I think we wanna ride a variety of kind of companies and opportunities. And also many people choose based off of what they're able to pursue. So we don't really dictate, but it's a, we're focused on software and tech jobs. So that's obviously a choice to opt in. After that, I think, yeah, we wanna help people pursue what they believe in. So absolutely. Yeah, yeah, help people pursue what they believe in. That's what's important, yeah. Final question and then we'll be wrapping up. Hi, I'm in a nonprofit organization so very curious to apply this on the service side. We use it for housing. What is the average cost that each client then will pay? It ranges from zero to 70,000. On average, medians maybe, I don't know, 30,000 or so, 25,000, 30,000. So there is, yeah, over four years. Yes, exactly. It's purely, so it's not a fixed cost for anyone. It's every month that you have a salary above certain income. That's where you get an obligation. Yes, there's a minute max. So there's thresholds right now for payments or the income. Yeah, zero. Yeah, the default is zero. So unlike fixed tuition or income share, the default is you, there's a certain amount you're reaping back. For us, the default is zero and when you get above certain income, it obligates each month. So that's an important difference.