 I'm going to start it off here by just giving us a definition of catalytic capital so we know kind of what we're talking about. Then I'm going to have each of the panelists introduce herself, and then we're going to dig in some content. So what is catalytic capital? So I teach now, so I'm always tempted to say, hey, okay, actually anybody want to take a cut? Anybody have a great definition of catalytic capital they want to share? Yes. Capital that catalyzes excellent and great in its brevity as well. I just jotted down capital that catalyzes innovation, change, and ultimately impact that would not have otherwise occurred. So truly catalytic. So thank you for stepping out with a very similar definition. So before we get into the content, starting with Deborah, I'd like each of you to introduce yourselves and share with us a little bit about your background and the organization you're representing and how it's connected to this notion of catalytic capital. So thank you, Matt. Great to see everyone. It's great to be on the stage here in person at SoCAP. I'm Deborah Schwartz. I'm managing director for impact investments at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. We're a global philanthropy headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. And we are proud partners, along with the Rockefeller Foundation and the Omeriard Network, in the catalytic capital consortium. And you get a prize, if you can say that, really fast without stumbling. So we call it C3. C3 launched in 2019, the MacArthur Foundation has been making impact investments, pretty much catalytic capital impact investments, since 1983. So this is our 40th year. We're approaching, I think, the 800 million mark of cumulative capital committed. We invite everyone, of course, to visit macfound.org if you want to read more about it. But our work really spans equity, inclusion, and sustainability through partnership with a whole range of programs at MacArthur, including criminal justice, climate solutions, and our Chicago commitment. We just convened the catalytic capital partners, about 120 grantees and investees and thought partners and consultants and co-investors all got together in Copenhagen at the beginning of October, which is definitely impact Palooza month, so many conferences. And it was just incredible to see the energy and the momentum in that room as people from literally all around the globe, from Africa to India to the UK to the US, had a chance to really talk about their catalytic capital practice. So I'm thrilled that SOCAP is doing this track this year. This is Mike Agil. Hello, everybody. Good morning. Hi, my name's Margo Brandenburg and I'm the Senior Program Officer for Mission Investments at the Ford Foundation based in New York. Ford is a large social justice foundation. Our headquarters are in New York and we have 10 offices across Latin America, Africa and Asia. And the team that I sit in, Mission Investments, is a little unusual in that we manage three different types of capital. We have an allocation of capital from our endowment for market rate impact investments known as MRIs and sort of foundation parlance. We have a program related investment portfolio or PRIs, and Ford is actually one of two foundations that worked with the IRS back in the late 1960s to create the PRI designation under the tax code to allow foundations to make other than grants and count them towards their charitable distribution. And then we have a grant portfolio where we really seek to grow the field of impact investing. And personally, you know, I've been in and around the space since the term was coined, was lucky to get to go to the first SOCAP and so it's amazing now that there's 2,000 people here and we're still just sort of a small sliver of the people active in the space. And between Stints at the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations, I started a company, a benefit corp focused on climate resilience where we raised catalytic capital, including from the MacArthur Foundation and others here. So I've seen it from both sides and just really excited to be here. Wendy, good day everyone, it's lovely to be here. And I want to just start by thanking SOCAP for sponsoring me to attend this year's gathering. I'm excited to be here. I also want to play my respects to the Indigenous peoples that are here in this room. My name is Lourdes Inga, I'm Ketchum Desen from Peru and I'm the Executive Director of International Funders for Indigenous Peoples. We are the only global funder network and dedicated to mobilizing resources to Indigenous peoples worldwide. We're a network of foundations and we're very pleased to have Ford Foundation as a member, MacArthur, I think I also saw Kellogg Foundation on the program and others. I think at the core of our work as IFIP we are here to address the asymmetry of power in philanthropy. And that includes also the catalytic capital. We are also here to call for respect of Indigenous peoples in every way and shape and form that funding happens in their territories and their communities. And we're also here to build partnerships, partnerships that honor Indigenous priorities, the Indigenous worldviews and the respect that they embody for nature and every living being that we share spaces in this planet. We are a growing team, a mighty team with Indigenous women at the moment made up of Indigenous women and we also have a global board, a majority Indigenous board as we seek to mobilize and really shift how philanthropy engages with Indigenous peoples in every philanthropic sector, being if it's in Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the US, Canada. Thank you. Thank you and good morning. My name is Catherine Crystal Foster and I am vice president for advisory at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which is distinct not the Rockefeller Foundation, we are Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. We spun out of the Rockefeller Family Office 20 years ago. I myself have been in the social sector in various roles for about 30 years and my first connection with catalytic capital came when I was running a family foundation and we were using our philanthropic capital, both our dollars and our beyond the check assistance in order to catalyze the growth of early stage young social entrepreneurs. Fast forward to today where I'm at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, which intersects with this world of impact investing and catalytic capital in three primary ways. First, we advise ultra high net worth individuals, foundations and corporations on all aspects of their philanthropy, including on impact investing. We define philanthropy as the voluntary use of resources for the public benefit. So that's a very broad definition. Second, we also incubate and manage collaborative funds and innovative nonprofit ventures. And those things include such initiatives as Upstart Colab, which some of you may know, Catalyst Fund. So there's a lot of interconnection with the world of impact investing in catalytic capital in our sponsored projects and funds work. And last, what we also do is we are providing thought leadership and research and field building to philanthropy. As a social enterprise, we put out all of these resources for free. We are very eager partners with a whole variety of folks in building out this field. And you'll see actually in the back of the room, there's a QR code where you can get our impact investing handbook where people who are newer to impact investing can also learn more about it. Although it does go pretty deep. We also have, I'll hope to talk about it later, some interesting research forthcoming on PRIs. Right now we advise on about half a billion dollars, advise on or manage about half a billion dollars of philanthropic capital. So we have the ability to really make some important shifts. We're a values driven place and so we're eager to see this field grow. And last I want to just say how much I appreciate being on the stage with the folks who are kind of luminaries who have really started this field. So thank you. Great, thank you, thank you, each of you. Just quickly by way of background, my name is Matt Vanick and in early career, early on with eBay, ran eBay International, was first president of PayPal after eBay acquired PayPal. And then worked with PRMidiar as a founder of eBay to create the PRMidiar network where we focused on early stage for profit and not for profit investing. We saw both of them as investing in innovative organizations that we felt had the potential to have massive scale impact. And I did that for a dozen years. Now I do, and after a dozen years we had created six initiatives within PRMidiar network and then we spun them out independently. So you may know them as florist mentors or imaginable futures and there are four others. And since that time I've been teaching two classes at the Stanford Business School. One on sort of profit with purpose businesses in lower middle income countries and one on how do you measure impact in business and social enterprise. And I do some advisory work, so that's some quick background. And notwithstanding an exciting career in tech, I really think those, that dozen years and since then work in philanthropy, work at the intersection of philanthropy and sort of innovation and innovative business models has been a real highlight. And one of the really interesting intellectual and practical exercises is how do you actually catalyze change? And we understand pretty rapidly, pretty readily the role of for-profit investments. And we recognize that there are tens of trillions of dollars available for for-profit ventures. But how do you get an organization? How do you get a company? How do you get a sector to the point where you could have that takeout, buy the private sector and get to massive scale? And I think in one sense or another, that's what we all have been working on. And we're using today this term, catalytic capital. So, Deborah, I'd like you to maybe kick us off and talk a little bit, each of you, about how your work connects to this specific idea of catalytic capital. And then what do you see are the big innovations in the field? Or the state of the field, the innovations? What's happening that has you kind of most excited? Thank you, Matt. I'm gonna do a quick intervention though. Nicole or Mark, could somebody grab some napkins because my water landed on Matt's table, we haven't seen each other in years in person. And now he's thinking maybe such a good idea to get together. So, and by the way, the definition that I often use for catalytic capital is patient, flexible, and risk tolerant. And so obviously sitting right next to me, Matt, you're like living it. You're living the definition. So I think, first of all, in terms of how our work connects. We've been making investments, as I mentioned, for 40 years out of our impact investing program, which is a $500 million allocation carved out of the Foundation's endowment. We have a dedicated team, which I'm fortunate to lead. And we report up to the president parallel to the endowment team, which is also doing some amazing work with diverse managers and sustainability, divesting from fossil fuels. So there's lots of great stuff happening in the endowment. But that endowment is the way that we reach our 5% real return every year to ensure that in meeting the IRS required payouts as a tax exempt private foundation that we're preserving and growing our capital into the future. So they have a finance first objective. They have to meet, that's their job, to meet that goal so that we have capital to give away, which is our primary business, to give away as grants, $300, $400 million a year. And then we have this adjunct to the grant making, and we think of it on the programmatic side that is impact first. That is saying, where are the problems for which capital in the form of a debt, equity, or guarantee structure could be a solution? Where are the gaps? Where if we come in and we fill them, let's say in the case of innovative business, like Take Prime Impact Fund, which is one of the C3 supported, what we call field partnerships. They're investing in breakthrough climate relevant technology that is in that valley of death. Where it's really hard to get the capital, and yet if it breaks through, it might not only return our capital that begin to provide market meeting or market beating opportunities and start to crowd in really substantial capital at scale. So that's one use. I wanna call out another because I'm looking at a pioneering visionary leader from my hometown of Chicago, linear Richardson. He's created a fund called Trend, and I encourage everybody in this room to reach out to linear if you wanna learn more. But Trend is trying to do something different. It's not launching the next breakthrough lithium solution. It's trying to work in communities that have been marginalized and disinvested for decades, and to figure out how to spark the economic development that can create well-being in those communities and jobs and growth, and also crowd in that mainstream private capital that is at a quantum that none of us in philanthropy can provide. And one of the things that we're so excited about with the Trend investment, which we made in partnership with our Chicago commitment team, is that linear is exploring ways to give ownership and voice to the people that are in the developments in which he's investing. So that they can have a stake in their future and have something that wouldn't otherwise be available. So sometimes you're filling a gap because other people have left communities behind, sometimes you're filling a gap because the risk is just so high and uncertain. Sometimes we're working with funds like Anchor Capital in India, where again, there are breakthrough opportunities, but the market is one where conventional investors have said, you know what, I think I'm gonna take the past, whether it's currency risk or political risk, or the fact that they're targeting the well-being and being purposeful about the well-being of people who have not historically been seen as the engine of great profit making. People again, who've been either overlooked or deliberately marginalized. So I think for us, the link between catalytic capital and our purpose as a foundation is that it is a way to create equity, to create inclusion, to build sustainability by looking for those strategic opportunities where other investors as you said at the beginning, that would not otherwise happen. And there can be lots of reasons things don't happen. It can be outright discrimination and injustice. It can be that there's just not been activity of this kind in this market, in this place, with this population. And so it truly is, by all definitions, riskier because there's no data, there's no experience. So if we can come in, create the data, create the experience, support the organization so they grow, and they have track records, and they have scale, then we can make things investable in ways that couldn't otherwise happen. So that's kind of how we think about it, and we're doing it today. We were doing it for years in housing, with CDFIs. The good news to me in terms of the state of the field is people are understanding this is a mindset. It is not an asset class, it cuts across. We're doing it with venture, with real estate. We can do it with nonprofits. We can do this with for-profits. The question is, where is the gap? Where is the gap that we want to fill so that if we fill it, it will unlock that next level of scale and opportunity? So I do think it's hopeful because in my mind, people are embracing the idea that there's a spectrum of capital. And when we started four years ago with the C3 initiative, we felt the narrative in the field was leaning more and more toward the idea that the only real impact investments were fully market rate risk adjusted returns. We're finance first. And now, in our view, people recognize that sometimes the opportunities require an impact first solution. And they may grow over time into a different kind of investment profile. Or you might, through blended finance, pull capital from multiple buckets together by combining risk-taking impact first capital with more conventional finance first capital. The spectrum is actually the bigger deal in my mind in some ways than the specific term, catalytic capital. If you call it impact first, you call it patient capital, it's all good. Just remembering that there is the spectrum of need and a spectrum of investment tools. Thank you. That's just an aside, and we won't debate terms endlessly here, but at the mid-yard network, we referred to a returns continuum. It's the same concept, right? So how do you invest across that? Because you may require sometimes grants, you may require subsidized investments, or sometimes for profit, full risk adjusted return. So it's that entire spectrum that one needs to keep in mind. Margaret. And I just want to give you credit because Matt, while you were at a mid-yard network and Robin, Stefan, and others and Paula were there, you guys were the first ones to really push out thought leadership talking about that continuum. And so, so important and gave us, I think, the courage to follow in your steps. I feel like if you Google catalytic capital, you'll find the faces of Deborah and her colleagues in the MacArthur logo. So I'm, you've said much of what needs to be said, so I want a plus one, almost all of that. And similarly, at Ford, we use our grants and our PRIs to be catalytic. That's not a function that's as easy for our endowment capital to play for the reasons that you mentioned. But just to camp on to this point that 15 years ago, the conversation about impact first versus finance first felt very much like an either or. And I remember, I don't know if it was the first or the second SOCAP at Fort Mason, and UN PRI was also meeting in San Francisco on the same week. And for people who don't know, UN PRI is sort of a global community of asset owners and managers. Really focused on sort of the mainstream capital markets and raising the floor there. And there was virtual zero overlap between the participants at SOCAP and the attendees at UN PRI. And you know, everyone was nice to each other, but I'm gonna say there was a little bit of like mutual, if not disdain, just like superiority at the camps that we were in. And I do think one of the great things that's happened over the past 10 to 15 years is this nuance and this idea of a continuum and that it's gotta be both and to solve most of the problems that we're working on. And the question is like how to combine the different types of capital and the different resources that really a wide range of stakeholders can bring to the table. But the only thing I would add to what you said is like I think more often when people hear catalytic capital, they think at the kind of project or fund level. And we do a lot of that. So, you know, co-invested with the USDFC and Citibank to create a much larger pool of growth capital for SMEs and emerging markets than we could have funded with our own capital, right? So but for our role, a whole bunch of capital wouldn't have been unlocked from Citibank. And we have a lot of those examples, but we also think about catalytic capital at the field level and what types of investments and they're largely grand, but they can also be investment like debt equity and so forth to actually grow the field. And so, you know, one example last week, we announced that we'd invested in impact alpha, right? And that's not like catalytic in the sense that we're not, you know, we'll see what happens with their future capital raise, but we see that as an opportunity to expand this narrative and grow the space and the number of people that participate in it. Similarly, I mean, Matt, you asked about recent developments like policy, right? Whether it's federal policy in this country, pouring money into clean infrastructure and a low carbon transition or regulations in Europe, right, that are really raising the floor. We think that's having and we'll have going forward a huge impact on the capital markets. And so those of us that were early funders of SASB or that have been funding some of the voluntary standards setters that really laid the groundwork for that, like I would consider that catalytic, even though it's maybe different than, you know, what first comes to mind for a lot of folks. You mentioned impact alpha, you wanna tell the, how many are familiar with impact alpha? Yeah, about half. Yeah, great, I mean, I don't know what you all do when people say, hey, I'm interested in impact investing or I wanna learn more about this whole murky middle space. And like for years, what I've told most people is you should consider subscribing to impact alpha. Like it's a very efficient way to get a bird's eye view of what's happening. And so as we started talking to David about different sort of expansion opportunities, you know, ultimately we decided, and we co-invested alongside Sorenson, who is of course here in Common Future, one of our grantees, so that was exciting. And yeah, see that as an opportunity to be. So David must be here if he's getting all these props. David, you here? His ears would be ringing, he's probably speaking in a different session. Don't mention it to him at all. Okay, lords. I think I'll speak from the point of what, from I think from the indigenous world, we hope that a little capital will be or it's actually will not be. And we hope, I think speaking as I have, I've seen in the world of philanthropy that still huge gap in funding, just from grand making that still needs to be addressed by philanthropy. I've seen through research that this is the case both in the US, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, everywhere, which are like sort of the places where philanthropy is happening in terms of the grand making, right, people with wealth giving. And what I see and what I started talking about this work as I joined IFF, I've sort of started referring to as a blind, biggest blind spot, meaning philanthropy living out 6.2 of the world's population. I am now talking about it as a systemic issue because when you look at the philanthropic sector in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, it's not a trend philanthropy should be proud of. It is a systemic issue and we need to start talking about it in that way. And so how does that translate to the conversations that we're all having here? I have to admit, this is probably one of the most uncomfortable places for me to be in, both because I'm still coming up with all these terms. As I was preparing for this panel, there's a number of terms. And so when you ask what catalytic capital is and you bring that to a community level, first of all, just accessing a grant is challenging, right? So how do we then tackle that and address that in all the different ways we're having these conversations?