 All right, let's get started. Hello and welcome, my name is Andrea Minelli and I'm a Senior Advisor at Titan Partners and we're a strategic advisory firm focused on the global knowledge sector. I co-lead our impact investing work where we assist investors and philanthropists with their impact and investing strategies. We are a proud sponsor of SoCAP and excited to jointly present this webinar on how the events of the past year have changed impact investing and what it means for the future. Today I'm joined by three exceptional women in impact investing who are gonna share their thoughts and perspectives. Please join me in welcoming Tracy Pelangin, Co-Founder and CEO of Social Finance, Kari McKelog, CEO of RedF, Impact Investing Fund and Maya Sharpley, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Juvo Ventures. Okay, the format for today. We're gonna start by having each of our panelists introduce themselves because I really want you to get to know them and why they are in impact investing and how their organization is unique in the impact investing landscape. Then I'll facilitate a discussion but please put your questions in the chat and what I'd like you to do is make sure that you mark all attendees and panelists so that everyone can see them. If you have a question just for the panelists you can go ahead and do that. We really want this to be a lively conversation. These are amazing speakers and amazing organizations. We'll try to end at 10 minutes before the hour so you can get on with your next appointment. And right before we end, I'm gonna ask each panelists a question about whether they're optimistic or not about the future of impact investing. So panelists get ready for that question at the end. So to get started, Tracy, why don't you kick us off and tell us about social finance and yourself? Well, thank you so much, Andrea. It's wonderful to be with you. It's always wonderful to be with you, Andrea, and to be with great fellow travelers in Cary and with Maya and just so pleased that Titan Partners is supporting this work. And it's always great to be at SoCal, even on Zoom. So as Andrea mentioned, I am the CEO and I have this amazing privilege of having co-founded social finance 10 years ago. A little over 10 years ago, we are indeed 10 years old and we are a non-profit, but a pretty unusual non-profit. We work nationally and we work on impact finance and advisory projects to build innovative partnerships and investments to improve lives in a way that's measurable. So 10 years ago, I had a pretty conventional path and management consulting and an asset management and then kind of saw the light a little over 10 years ago and had the privilege of co-founding social finance with two amazing dear friends and mentors, Sir Ronald Cohen and David Blood. And the idea back in 2010 was to harness, at that time, a very nascent impact investing movement. Remember, Rockefeller had just coined the term impact investing in Bellagio in 2008 to think about new financial tools at the intersection of finance and policy to think about driving social change in a meaningful way to complement philanthropy to complement government to drive social change. And at the very, very beginning of our founding, we've always seen ourselves as kind of impact first participants in this very, very big tent of impact investing. And our first tool that we brought into the world was the social impact bond and we spent the first few years developing the ecosystem around the social impact bond, which involved the public sector, the private sector, the traditional nonprofit sector and we launched our first deal, if you will, in 2013. And since then, we've created a range of other impact first investment tools, including the Korean impact bond, which we'll hopefully have a chance to talk about today. We're building a loan fund to enable dreamers to achieve their professional aspirations. We have a really exciting donor advice fund platform that we're in the pilot basis of, but all with the aim of helping people from under-resourced communities realize better outcomes in education and economic mobility and housing and health, et cetera. So hopefully we'll spend a little bit more time talking about kind of the impact first, not that we need to be frameworky about these things, but we see that there's just a big range of space between principal recovery and getting adjusted market rate returns. And we don't really have a position on returns, but what we are not willing to give up and compromise is being impact first. So achieving impact at the center of every single deal or fund is caught our DNA. So we start everything with, what is the impact? What is the outcome that we want to achieve? And then the financial structure and then the stakeholders fall from that. And that commitment to interrogating our work in an ongoing way to make sure that impact is at the center is something that our team of 80 is incredibly passionate about. So I'm just so excited to be here with you, Andrea and Carrie and Maya and have a conversation about how we can use the capital markets to complement government philanthropy for good things in the world. Tracy, thank you so much, Carrie. Take it away. All right, thank you. And again, so nice to be here and be with these fabulous women on this panel and just acknowledge Tracy and the role of social finance in creating this space for us. And as a relatively new entrant, I am grateful for all of the space that's been created. So my name is Carrie McKellag. I'm the CEO of the Red F Impact Investing Fund. And the Red F Impact Investing Fund is an affiliate of Red F, which is a venture philanthropy that was started about 20 plus years ago with the mindset of using enterprises, revenue generating, regular businesses, enterprises to employ people who have faced significant and often structural barriers to employment. It started with a mindset of trying to find solutions to homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area. And over the last 20 years has now expanded to be a national funder. So after 20 plus years of doing kind of grant funding, venture philanthropy, which is a combination of grants and sort of deep technical assistance to really grow new base and grow the employment opportunities of these social enterprises that we focus on. We saw that there was sort of a need for capital that wasn't being met. And we saw that there was an interest in social enterprises to grow using debt in maybe a way that hadn't been present years before. So I came from the international development sector. I was an economist at the Treasury. I was at a couple of the international financial institutions. And so when I came to Red F, brought some of the interest and some of the innovation that I had been seeing in the international development space. And with the support of our board, our management really started something new, which is this loan fund that came out of Red F in 2017. And in 2019, we're still very new. And 2019 became its own loan fund. And we are just, we're trying to prove the credit worthiness of social enterprises. We're trying to think about risk differently, which I know we're gonna talk about. And we're really trying to show the larger kind of financial. Maybe we carry might have frozen. So let's see if we can get her back. But Maya, why don't you take over and pick up the ball and tell us about yourself and Juvo. Great, thank you. Let's hope the same doesn't happen to me. I just switched over to link to my phone, just in case. So thank you so much, Andrea, for having me. Uh-oh. Well, Tracy, you and I can certainly carry on. Let's see if we can get our panelists back. It looks like they maybe clicked out and clicked back in. But Tracy, why don't we start the conversation? And what I really wanted to do was first talk about the big picture, right? The last two years have been incredibly tumultuous. And you've been in this game for a while, but to say that any of us could have predicted, I think is an understatement. The twin pandemics, COVID-19, the fight for racial justice. Why don't you talk to us about the major shifts in investor mindset that you've seen sparked by these events? And Maya, let's stick with this first question, and then I'll definitely cue you in to introduce yourself, right? Tracy, go ahead. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you, Andrea. I think we're all still recovering from these twin pandemics, or probably more than two. And I think it's been a huge wake-up call for a lot of folks in the impact investing community. And I think that increasingly we're seeing more impact investors begin to prioritize impact in light of these significant shifts and challenges. And then it's just been a very welcome conversation. I feel like for a very long time there's been so much debate about returns. Is it market rate? Is it risk adjusted? What kind of risks are you being compensated for? Almost, that was the center stage of the conversation. Market rate, concessionary, et cetera, right? Rather than, let's talk about impact integrity. Let's talk about maximizing impact. And what we like to say is instead of saying, you shouldn't have to compromise returns for impact. We wanna say you should never have to compromise impact for return. And what we are really increasingly seeing in our conversations with impact investors is that impact has taken a much more center stage, how we measure, how we monitor, how we define it and making sure that any kind of washing is not present. So I'm incredibly excited about what's to come and I'm very optimistic not to start answering the last question that this energy is here to stay. And it's almost like a reshifting of the conversation. And we'll pick that up later whether if we wanna talk about COVID silver linings, is that one of them and is it gonna stick, right? So come back to that, Tracy, later. Maya, let's go to you and do your intro and maybe you can piggyback on that investor mindset shift because I know as folks will hear, you operate in a slightly different space than maybe social finance or reddit. Great, thanks, Andrea. I'm sorry about that, the perils of Zoom. So my name is Maya Sharply. I'm co-founder and managing partner of Juva Ventures. We are a double bottom line venture capital firm focused on early stage technology enabled companies that we invest in pre-K to gray, both domestic and international. And so I came to venture, which I jokingly called the dark side. I started my career as an operator as I was mentioning with Andrea. I started by building and running businesses around the world out of consulting. I then switched and worked with Joel Klein when he was chancellor of New York City Public Schools under Mayor Mike. As Mayor Mike had kind of blown up the board of education and we put back together the department of education. So just an amazing team that Joel had assembled the children first team. I was part of that core founding team, worked my way up to executive director of operations for the entire department, then decided, okay, I've had the public sector experience. Let me get back to the private sector and went to Kaplan and spent almost 10 years at Kaplan doing two things, building and running businesses around the world for them and managing any large hairy strategic initiative on the CEO's desk that he wanted the front page paper did not write two sides of the same coin. So for example, I built and then I ran Kaplan's online business and higher ed launching in Hong Kong and Singapore simultaneously. So blank sheet of paper to butts and seats, a host of other businesses, both for profit like the higher ed and not for profit like the dreamers business which eventually became the dream.us. So built that with Don Graham and Amanda. And so, you know, across the spectrum really looking at impact, right? Kaplan's mission is we advance, we had successes measured by one student at a time. And so really kind of had that embedded. I also ran Kaplan's ed tech portfolio and managed the accelerator that we ran which was the very first ed tech folks accelerator in partnership with tech stars. And that's where I really started this is they shifted to the dark side, right? Started to get involved in helping others build and run businesses. And so companies that came out of our accelerator include Newzella, DeGreed, Rancou and a host of others. Learn Capital were more mentors in our accelerator. And so I got to know them through that, stayed in touch, next thing you know, long story short, they've made me an offer. I can't refuse a partner in a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, boom. I'm on the dark side in the belly of the beast. So I come to this and that was about three years ago. And so I come to this from the view of an operator and an operator that's really looking at how do we make the most impact? Whether it's K-12 or higher ed, professional test prep, language training, pathways, foundations, you name it, publishing early childhood. How do you actually make an impact in what you're doing? And if you're doing the right thing, then your returns will follow, right? So the two can actually go hand in hand. And I think we've seen that at the companies and Learns portfolio and Kaplan and what we did at DOE in New York. Dre, my partner and co-founder, Dre Vanine and I branched out and decided let's do this on our own. We think now is the time in the middle of a pandemic. So at the end of 2020, we left the comfortable to our thing and branched out to create Juba Ventures with the belief that as a double bottom line impact and returns can go hand in hand. And we found a really great partner in WGU, Western Governors University, who is our anchor investor and really partner along this journey. And they by dent of their, if you look at their reputation and what they do and how they actually think about the learner first and saying, okay, how do we ensure that people actually get the education and the skills via competency-based training that they need to become nurses or in the field of IT or business, et cetera. And so the two of those, putting the learner first at the center, I think is something that's very core to what we're doing here at Juba and the companies that we've already invested in. That leads me to the second question of impacting, I think your first question actually, Andrea, of why am I, what do I think about impact in the shift? Obviously, I believe there's a huge shift. Dre and I uprooted ourselves and have shifted personally and professionally during this pandemic. And obviously we think it's here to stay. But I also see that in education, what it always been kind of off on the side, like people are like, oh, you're in education. Let me go talk to the FinTech guys or where's the mobility people are? Now people are saying, whoa, actually let's pause and look at education. And we're seeing that in the numbers, right? So there was an acceleration from 2019, there was about $7 billion that went into EdTech investing. That number shot up to $16 billion in 2020. And already for the first quarter of 2021, we've seen 3.9, so approximately $4 billion going into EdTech investing. So we're seeing a surge, not just from traditional players, but also new players are coming in. Folks like Dre and myself at Juba, new companies or zeal partners are also spinning up. But also you have a lot of generalists now who are coming into the field and deploying capital across all stages, whether that's venture or all the way out to private equity. We're seeing all stages of the investing landscape change as people actually realize, wow, we actually need to focus on education and healthcare and climate and other areas that are traditionally kind of impact. And in the back row, while we're looking at the more sexy areas of investing. So I- We're in the front row now. We're in the front row and I think we're here to stay. I- That's all. And I wanna hit this risk question again. And I think clearly audience, you see we have a spectrum here of the way people are using capital and maybe a bit the risk and return profile that Tracy talked about. Kerry, talk to us about what you're seeing. Are investors ready for this conversation? And Tracy, I'm gonna go to you next because I'd like you to talk about career impact bonds and the rebalancing of risk. To Maya's point about education, that definitely touches both education and a risk reward transfer. But Kerry, start us off with what you hear your investors saying and are they doing what they're saying? Yeah, it's a great question. There has certainly been more interest in what we are trying to do since the murder of George Floyd, right? I think just by virtue of focusing on companies that exclusively employ people who are left out of the traditional workforce system and people who are sort of left out of the labor market because of all the systemic factors that everybody's aware of, our portfolio is disproportionately represented by people of color, right? You know, we have about 4,000 people that have been employed by these companies in our portfolio in the last three years, 39% African-American, 37% Latino, 40% of the CEOs in our portfolio of people of color. So sure, we got a lot of interest from various funders that had not previously been interested in what we were doing. And I think the inspiration was very genuine, but I think the conversations around risk is where it really starts to challenge what we're all, I think genuinely interested in accomplishing together. And so I think what we've been trying to do is a couple of things. One is to redefine risk and try to pull out some of those baked-in systemic factors that are what we all just believe to be the five C's of credit and sort of the things that we just bake into our underwriting. And I'll say we're at the very early stages of this process, we don't know much, but we are starting with things like building a credit rating system which sort of takes out some of that bias. Thinking about assets that our borrowers bring to the table differently. That's another thing, like what is the benefit that they are generating in their community? What is that dollar of wages or net profit that's being generated in that particular business mean for that community? And trying to then take that conversation to our investors who are fairly traditional foundations. I think there's the beginnings of some interests on the part of more traditional investment firms of high net worth individuals, some of whom have never done impact investing before. There's definitely new players in this market. And so what we've done has been much more upfront about what that risk is in our loan documentation when we take in funding from investors. But we also wanna talk more about what the benefit looks like because we know that the interest is really to achieve that social impact. And so we spend a lot of time measuring what that means in terms of employment and it earned revenue and these kind of ancillary community benefits that come from this investment. And I'll say there's definitely the willingness to take a chance on a new fund that sort of understands this business model has been kind of grant funding this social enterprise thing for 20 plus years but to take a leap of faith with us and translate that into a return, but it's still slow. I think there's still a lot of traditional and there's a lot of requests for collateral. There's a lot of requests for sort of buttressing it and I think that's where we can talk about the future but I think there's gonna have to be a slight recalibration of that risk return, a conversation between newer, more innovative funds and more traditional funders. Yeah, super, super interesting. And we will return to that, who are the people that could buttress and take that first loss position, right? I think that's super interesting. Tracy, tell us about career impact funds because that, and I'm pretty aware of them now and just incredibly impressed with the reimagining of the risk balancing and what you did and I don't wanna give it away too much by really putting students first, putting students at the center of the equation. Yeah, and it's great to be in this conversation because both Carrie and Maya are working on the same challenge, right? How do we help more people get on better lives of greater financial stability and up that economic escalator? And obviously, you know, Red F has been such a stalwart partner in all things workforce and Maya's seeped in education most of her professional life. So the, and I'd love to hear your reaction. So the career impact bond was born from this concept that, you know what? College is not the only pathway to the middle class. There are some extraordinary short-term credentialing programs. In fact, you know, more than half of the 9.2 million unfilled job openings right now in today's economy, which by the way is the highest, record highest number of unfilled job openings since the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking this in the year 2000. More than half of these 9 million jobs are actually middle-class jobs, decent jobs with decent pay and benefits that do not require a four-year degree but require some training beyond a high school diploma. And this is the space that the career impact bond is focused on. How do we enable low-income individuals, low-age earners to access these high quality credentialing programs to put them on a pathway to the middle class to acquire the skills to participate in the 21st century economy in jobs that are continuing to grow like IT, like green energy, like healthcare. Yet the population that we care about, you know, don't have the savings to go to general assembly or sign up for a truck driving license class or becoming an allied health worker. You know, they also, in addition to not having the savings or the credit to borrow to attend these programs, they also need more support than just tuition support. They need wraparound supports. They need help to get through life, transportation, childcare, food insecurity. Sometimes they even need a living stipend to persist and graduate from the program to land the job and importantly to keep the job. So we started developing the idea of the Korean PAC bond, which is at the end of the day, a student-friendly income share agreement targeted at underemployed folks and unemployed folks before the pandemic. This was in 2019 when we decided to think about this and then the pandemic hit and we decided to be an investment manager in the fourth quarter of 2019 and had the ambition of raising $50 million as a first-time fund manager, talk about being the first-time fund manager to take on the strategy. And the idea is to enable low-wage earners to go to vetted high-quality training programs. And if and only if they earn over a particular income threshold, it could be 40,000, it could be 50,000, then they either pay a percentage of their gross wages or fixed amount of monthly payment for every month that they stay in that job that pays over that threshold. They only have this obligation for a fixed period of time. It could be three years, four years, five years or until they hit a payment cap. And what undergirds a whole arrangement is a student bill of rights because we feel very, very committed that the student stays at the center of the arrangement because there are lots of ISAs out there, income share agreements out there which are simply another consumer finance option. Like this is built as a tool for impact and making sure that the well-being of the learner and the worker stays at the center for the arrangement. So you ask the question, you're a funding wraparound support. You are doing very student-friendly ISA repayment terms. How do you enable this to happen? So we're very lucky to have found impact first investors who care first and foremost about the impact. So we're lucky to have limited partners and Bloom-Ridian partners and Schmidt Futures in the Pershing Square Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and dozens of other family offices and importantly donor advice funds which is hopefully a topic that we'll touch on because we get to work with Carrie at RedF on that exciting initiative to support this $50 million fund. And we are beginning to see people actually get placed into jobs in the midst of a pandemic, begin to make those ISA repayments so the impact is happening on the ground. The last quick thing I would touch upon is Andrea, your excellent question around risk. So you might think that this is super risky, these people don't have traditional FICO scores and credit, how are you gonna make sure that they repay and are these investors gonna get their money back? Two things, one is that we would love to prove to the world that these people are credit worthy. That the reason why most people default on student loans is because they don't have the ability to pay and this whole total alignment that you only pay if you have a good job will hopefully prove to the world a very, very different message. The second thing is that we are completely reinterrogating how schools and training programs have financial stake in the game and skin in the game if you will. So right now traditionally in my you can wax eloquently on the subject, schools, higher ed, training programs get paid on seat time, butts in seats. Whether or not the program was successful at delivering skills for people and whether they get on to have a better life, they get paid the tuition dollars no matter what. And here for the Korea Impact on Arrangement, whether it's General Assembly or the American Diesel Technician Center or Alchemy Code Labs, our provider partners only get a fraction of the tuition dollars up front and after the successful graduates go on to getting good jobs, they first pay back into the fund so that our investors are made whole and then the provider are quote unquote last in the waterfall so that they may or may not recoup their full tuition payments. So in other words, we're basically saying to our provider partners, you gotta eat your own cooking, you gotta believe in your program and you gotta do your best to make sure that these graduates go on to better lives. So that's just one example. That's super exciting, Tracy, because we've been watching ISAs for a while now and it's really the Wild West out there. Regulated no less. Regulation's coming, I'm sure it's coming. And for the good players in there, it won't be a problem. But what I love when you're talking about is just thinking about the breadth and scope of ISAs. So there are always bad actors, but there are folks who are a little more unscrupulous in not putting the student first, but there are also different types of loans that we're seeing and we're investing in this, right? We have two ISAs, Mental Works and Stride in our portfolio. There's another one that we're currently, I can't mention it yet because we haven't signed the term sheets, but we're investing in another one. And there are different underlying financial structures, right? There are loans and then there's an equity play. And so we're also seeing a breadth of like the alignment of a more traditional loan product, still with the repayment after you get the job and you hit certain marks, but it's a lot less predatory. There's a model that we just invested in where actually both the financial service provider and the school take a haircut on the amount that they normally pay so that the student actually, if the student goes, I'm making up numbers, let's say they take a certificate course for $2,000. Generally speaking, the student would have to pay 5%, 10% over that 2,000, depending on the financial instrument they're using. This company actually has worked it out that they only pay the $2,000 back once they have the job and over time. So that means that the financial, that the school is willing to take a haircut on the tuition and give that back to the provider because they recognize they're actually able to put more students through the program and get them onto a track, onto a job. And the financial services companies are also willing to take a haircut because they're actually getting access to an entire unbanked population. And so being able to expand the unbanked population, the key is that this company that we're looking at actually has advanced algorithms, but they actually can determine credit worthiness on things that don't include houses and cars and credit cards, which the unbanked don't necessarily have. And so super excited about this space and how it's expanding access and equity, making an impact, but yet at the same time, is not a charity. So it's financially sustainable and therefore can grow on its own. Yeah, and Tracy, just thank you, Maya, to augment that conversation because my observation over the years has been is it takes a village of new ideas to push the envelope, right? And then we do coalesce, hopefully, eventually around positive, whether we need a little bit of regulatory change, a little bit of assist in terms of the federal government recognizing and a student bill of rights and setting up something like that. I mean, let's hope that this is a way that you're both participating in and we drive real change. Super exciting. Tracy, there was a question though in the chat about who are the students or the people that you're serving? Could you just go through the demographics again? Because I think this is important. And I go back to something Maya said about, I was a Catholic too, and we did help a lot of people, but there also were a lot of people left behind. That's not necessarily Kaplan or anyone organization's problem to solve. But I do know that you're pretty focused with career impact bonds on those that have been left behind, right? The targeting of the population is central to the impact thesis because, again, we're not trying to be clever and rebrand an ISA and call it a career impact bond just to have some like marketing mileage. It is fundamentally a different application of the ISA. It is built as a tool for impact. And what kind of impact is the economic mobility impact thesis, right? So in order to have economic mobility, right? The curve, we're targeting people who are hourly workers who are completely unemployed or underemployed. They're stuck in this vicious cycle of low wage work. And the targeting as it's expressed in a set of eligibility criteria is actually quite tight. So in our financing with General Assembly, you can only qualify for this career impact bond program if you've been on the public benefit system or you've been on EITC, the Earned Income Tax Credit or you've been in the criminal justice system. So if you hit these things, one of these things, then you go into the program and because of the program you'll be and the income share agreement parameters by definition, if you're successful you have been trusted into the middle class making $50,000, $60,000 a year. So that targeting of the population is critical. And that's why we also have to wrap around supports to make sure that they can persist and graduate and get on with their lives. So I'm so happy you asked about that, Andrea because we seek out these people to serve. And I know we have to go to Kerry because Kerry's fund is so exciting. But just to mention very quickly because Maya mentioned the unbanked, we're also working with the unbanked and the undocumented. So Don Graham and we, Maya worked on the dream.us, lots of dreamers for those who are not familiar with the dreamers population, these DACA or TPS status folks, they're allowed to live in this country, go to public school, work in this country but they do not get programs. They do not get any federal loan program. So Don and his wonderful friends set up the dream.us and raised hundreds of millions of dollars to enable dreamers to go to college on a free rock scholarship. But now these wonderful students want to go on to graduate school. They want to be dentists, doctors, lawyers, business people, data scientists and we're raising a $100 million loan fund to enable dreamers, graduates of the dream.us program to get the exact same rate that Americans could get through the grant plus program to pursue their professional aspirations. So a different credit profile, a different set of risks but again, we couldn't wait to prove to the world that these are some of the most credit worthy people to lend to. Great, thanks Tracy. Let's shift the conversation to, I mean, we've gotten a little technical already but I do want to talk about new models that have been born because of whether the past two years or not it's part of the natural evolution. And Carrie, I do want you to talk a little more deeply about the impact, the debt fund but also how you shepherd a social enterprise through your process. So people get a sense of the kind of deep work it takes but also the potential reward when it works. Yeah, and it's both of those things. So I guess what we have learned over time is it's a very disparate ecosystem from startup to early stage to growth within social enterprise which there's a lot of definitions for it but we're talking about for-profit and non-profit companies we're talking about companies that provide both transitional supported jobs like Tracy was mentioning with a lot of these wraparound services like childcare, like mental health like access to benefits to help that person sort of work through some of the barriers that made them made it hard for them to get a job in the past. So it's a very big universe and we can't fund it all but we have really tried to be strategic in creating some more momentum with early stage social enterprises that are able to get started and up and running. So in 2016, we created an accelerator for these companies and it was a combination of just bringing some of that content that we had learned through those 20 years of advising about business operations about program models to weave in the supports with the job and about tracking the data to be able to make the story later about the impact that these social enterprises are achieving. So we're now getting one and starting next year, two cohorts a year. So we'll do about 35 small social enterprises each year and we'll run them through an accelerator which happens over about five months and we're virtual hybrid who knows how it's gonna be in the future but the end goal then is to select a group of high-grotential social enterprises to come into what is called our growth portfolio which is then a three-year grant-funded relationship with very deep technical assistance and coming out of that, there's a lot of opportunity for follow-on funding from the loan fund. In some cases, we're actually able to blend that financing at the same time and we had a lot of internal discussions about what does that really mean to provide blended finance? And I think at the end of the day, what it means is you can have two very different purposes. One can be funded with grants and one can be funded and underwritten with loans and they can both work. So we're in the process of trying that out but it's this combination of the right kind of financing, the right kind of terms, trying to be very creative now with our loan borrowers when they sort of exit all of that grant relationship and they're in a loan fund. There's a lot of education about what a lender is gonna need which is part of the process. A lot of discussion about things that lenders do and don't wanna pay for and a lot of discussion about what your financials have to look like and what your projections have to look like. So we do a lot of that sort of coaching while we go. And then I think we're not a traditional bank in the way that we interact with our borrowers and that may not be for everybody but it's a very close relationship and we ask for a lot of data. I think that's an area where we would like to get more still really being able to tell the story of the impact. But overall, this kind of funnel approach has really I think increased the opportunities for us to expand our network. And again, social enterprises sort of loosely defined and I think we're interested in uncovering sort of that universe that's out there that's not on the radar. So would encourage people to take a look at the website and see if that's something that we might be of interest to you to help with. But I guess one other thing I would say is it's not always the largest most established enterprises that are interested in debt. We actually saw more demand for debt financing come from the earlier and startup stage enterprises. And I don't know if it's a risk orientation. I don't know if they're just scrappy and but that has been a surprise for us because we thought it would be much more linear and it hasn't been. Kerry, that's just so interesting. And I think it gets back to the whole premise of investing at its core, you're forming a relationship between the borrower and the lender whether it's equity or whether it's debt or whatever instrument it is and that through your relationship and your deep knowledge and understanding these entities you have tailored your capital to really live with them. And I think it's so important for the audience to understand it can't be one and done when you're doing impact investing. It is not like a one time, hey, here's your money. Oh, that's what you needed. It's about understanding the situation, understanding client, being really client centric. And I think this is what all these, our great panelists have proven. I think one more, Kerry, just tell people in the GEOs in the US, because you said you're national now, so where so people know that they could contact you or be with you? Yeah, so we are open for everywhere. We tend to have concentrations of historically Red Fs was headquartered in California. So we do have about, I think 30, 40% of our portfolio happens to be in California but we really are quite spread out and we're actually in many industries. I mean, social enterprises operate in any industry. And so we're very kind of industry agnostic and we tend to have a concentration of enterprises that focus on individuals who've had justice system involvement and tend to have some enterprises focused on young people as well. But we're again, we have a very broad definition of what that means. And so yeah, I encourage people to take a look. Awesome, thank you. So Tracy, I'm gonna go to you next on this new models, new instruments, new investors. Let's talk about DAFs because, and I know we're gonna put- We're so excited about DAFs. We're gonna put in a chat what a DAF is. And Maya, you're gonna be my first, I'm gonna cold call you on what you're optimistic about because we're getting close people. I think we have about six minutes left, but Tracy, go ahead. We'll be really fast. So donor advice funds. It's, there are $140 billion sitting in donor advice funds. These are 501C3 public charity vehicles and you can open an account at Vanguard, at Fidelity, at your community foundation, at the Jewish Federation, et cetera. And $140 billion are just sitting in donor advice fund waiting to be given away. The donor has already taken their tax deduction and this money is typically being invested in mutual funds or passive ETFs. Just Tracy, this could be me or you or anyone. It's not like, you can open an account with like a few thousand dollars. This is not like a qualified purchaser, accredited investor thing. So it's a retail instrument. So literally hundreds of billion dollars are sitting in donor advice fund on the sidelines. And we've, over the years, throughout social impact bond work and the UP fund, which is this portfolio of Korean PAC bonds, we've enabled several dozen, like 50, 60 investors to participate in these deals and funds through their donor advice funds. For those who might know about program related investments, which is in the foundation world, we're basically trying to create a PRI, a program related investment vehicle for the donor advice fund world. Particularly the legal term is a recoverable grant. So the money goes out as a grant, but it has the likelihood of coming back to your donor advice fund so you can stretch the charitable mileage of each dollar. So what we've been able to do over the last couple of years is working on a set of pilots with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, as well as with the Jewish Federation in California. And we put together a kind of a COVID response portfolio, a menu of amazing CDFIs, including our wonderful Kerry McEllog of Red F as part of the menu for donors to respond back in their own backyard and housing in climate, in economic mobility, et cetera. And we are so proud that in these pilots, both at Silicon Valley Foundation, Community Foundation and the Jewish Federation of Northern California, that we've mobilized over $9 million in impact-first investments to CDFIs like Red F and others to usher in a more equitable COVID recovery. But the idea, just going back to DAFs, we just think that it's such a high potential, untapped potential, a pool of capital, just waiting to do more with impact. There's just no reason why a donor, directing a donor advice fund should only be making two decisions. One decision is where to park your money, where to get the financial return with no expectation for impact. And the other decision is where you make a grant with only impact considerations, with no expectation of financial return. And we're trying to create this third way, this recoverable grant impact investing third way so that the money can go out the door impactfully, but also come back so that you can have more impact. So we're really excited about this pool of capital and the interest from sponsors like Fidelity Vanguard and others have been tremendous. Tracy, you're so exciting. So that was my optimistic question too. No, it's just, I think it's really exciting, again, for the audience where we have creative people who have exceedingly strong finance skills, but also a view toward impact and mission using these new instruments and kind of harnessing the, hopefully the optimism and the interest we've seen in the general population and in the philanthropic community. We can't all be McKenzie Scott, but we can certainly do our part to try to participate as individuals in impact investing. Now we certainly all have charitable causes we care about, but this is a really interesting way to recycle. And as Tracy said, extend that charitable giving. So super exciting. We're gonna end with this, are you optimistic? And do you see some of these positive waves continuing? And Maya, let's go to you first. I'm obviously super optimistic. We've had our career on it. So super optimistic. I think the trends that we saw prior to COVID, I know the trends that we saw prior to COVID have only accelerated during COVID. And so from an education perspective, that's positive, increased digital penetration. But with that, because everyone has had to actually learn at home and do it individually, there's much more awareness of, actually it has to be personalized, one size doesn't fit all. And when you take that from the individual sitting around the kitchen table and actually expand, well, wait, one size doesn't fit all, the traditional college model may not fit all. There's an alternative path. And so you're looking at different alternative certs and financing options coming up, super excited that we will continue this push and continue to a more equitable situation where everyone has access or more and more people have access to quality education. So super excited. Great, thank you, Carrie. How about you? Cautiously optimistic. How about that? Because I think we need to keep up the momentum. I think that initial wave of genuine goodwill and a fair bit of money behind, I think racial equity and asset building investments in particular is a really good first start. And I think it's giving some funds like ours and others a little bit of that run room to begin to prove the model. But just like in Tracy's example, where these donor advise funds that have been sitting on the sideline are taking those first steps to sort of that leap of faith to invest in funds like us, we're doing the same thing with our borrowers. And so we need some more benchmarks. There's actually some better data coming out, OFN just published some really good benchmarking on just the amount of lending that's happening in CDFIs and actually the losses. Like they are actually not, probably not what people would expect. They are much lower than what people would expect. So it actually is a bankable prospect. So yeah, we need to keep the pressure on. I appreciate the pressure that I receive from advisors and others in the industry. And I think it's kind of my obligation to continue to pressure my investors in the same direction. Thank you, Carrie. That's great. I'm sure very wise. Gotta keep up the pressure, gotta keep up the momentum. Tracy, bring us home. What are your thoughts? Although I'm really sure that you're a pretty glass half full person all the time. I know it's so half full for me, whether it's the proliferation of products across the asset classes, interest from asset owners of all stripes intermediaries really leaning in and really excited to explore this impact for a segment of the tent. What gives me the greatest optimism are actually the impact on the ground. And the stories from our upfront, the Korea Impact bonds are coming in right now. Just yesterday, I heard about a guy in the Midwest, Campbell, who joined our diesel technician training program. And he was like a personal trainer. And after five weeks, and he was just kind of moving from job to job. And after five weeks doing this immersive program, he emerged as a diesel technician, doubled his salary overnight. And just like for him to hear him talk about his experience was just what gets us up and our whole team up in the morning to do this work. And the stories just keep coming. And so it makes me very inspired, humbled and just very optimistic that this is our decade for impact investing. What a great way to close. And we're getting questions in the chat about how you all can be reached. So I know we'll check with the panelists, but you can certainly find their organizations that they're in the chat. And I know they're all, these leaders, these amazing leaders are all on their websites. So hopefully we'll make sure that there's a way to reach them. But just wanna thank you all so much. I wanna thank our audience for hanging in there and just joining this excitement. It's a call out to funders. It's a call out to suppliers to think about the world differently and just all of us as individuals to really keep pushing this forward and to challenge each other, as Carrie said. Thank you so much. Have a great day. You and me. Thank you so much. Thank you.