n.V5-5.03| WHERE THE MONEY ACTUALLY SITS
01| Before you sell anything you find out where the money is, who controls it, and what it is currently buying. In impact, almost nobody does this honestly, because the honest answer is uncomfortable.
02| Start with the bulk. Something over ninety percent of what the world calls impact capital sits in ESG and SRI strategies — buying and selling listed stock on regulated exchanges, exactly as any other investor does, with a values overlay on the fundamental analysis. The objective remains financial performance. The methodology behind the scores is opaque and varies wildly between providers: State Street found a correlation of just 0.53 between MSCI and Sustainalytics ESG scores on the same companies. Two referees, one match, different results.
03| I am not dismissing it. Corporate behaviour does shift when trillions start asking questions, and brand pressure is real pressure. But this is helping an old lady across a busy street. Sweet, positive, and not what we are selling. For Sales purposes, this ninety percent is not our market. Writing it off early saves years.
04| Below that sits thematic and standard impact investing — capital placed into ventures for a specific outcome — and community investing, which is closer to us in spirit. American CDFIs alone held serious weight: 139 certified community development banks with $42.2 billion in assets, 370 member-owned credit unions with $123 billion, 619 loan funds with $19.6 billion, and a handful of community venture funds. Vehicles holding $1.39 trillion claim some community-related criteria. Program-related investments let foundations move past grant-making into loans, equity and guarantees, with the charitable purpose primary and the return secondary.
05| Then there is market-level capital, which is the segment that should interest us most, because its logic is ours. Its argument is that a firm's impact extends far beyond its own customers: by pioneering a model, by building the infrastructure a market needs and no single player will pay for, or by shifting policy. Investors working this way accept sub-commercial returns in exchange for a compelling case that the market itself moves. The deeper the financial concession, the more compelling the market case must be. That is a demand for exactly the evidence we intend to produce.
06| And then the big bets. Between 2000 and 2012, announced US philanthropic gifts of ten million dollars or more averaged about eight billion a year. Only about twenty percent by value — roughly $1.6 billion annually across some sixty-five gifts — went to social change. The rest went to universities, hospitals and museums. The diagnosis at the time was not indifference but plumbing: universities have development offices, named-gift structures and a century of precedent for absorbing a hundred million dollars. Social-change organisations had none of that.
07| That plumbing now exists. Blue Meridian reports $4.1 billion committed on a growth-equity model — flexible unrestricted capital over five to ten years, up to $200 million per organisation, tranched against performance milestones with quarterly review. The Audacious Project reports $4.6 billion committed to 70 projects over eight years, with a further $3 billion leveraged. 100&Change awards $100 million to a single proposal per round. Running the opposite theory, MacKenzie Scott has given $26.3 billion since 2019 — unsolicited, unrestricted, no reporting, median gift around $5 million — and it is the only one of these models with independent evaluation behind it.
08| Now the part that matters for us. All of these report inputs. Capital committed. Dollars catalysed. Children reached. None of them report whether concentrated bets beat dispersed funding on the problems they targeted, because nobody publishes outcome-level results against a counterfactual. The sector has adopted venture capital's structure — concentration, long horizons, milestone tranches, portfolio language — without venture capital's scoreboard. A portfolio in which you cannot distinguish a win from a loss is not a portfolio. It is a mood.
09| That missing scoreboard is our sales position. We are not walking into these rooms claiming to care more. We are walking in with graded, validated, comparable output at the project level and a mechanism that prices it — the one thing every buyer in this segment says they want and no supplier currently offers. The intermediation gap has been closed. The verification gap is wide open, and it is the gap we were built to stand in.
