Co-Authored by Arabella Advisors, Article Tracks A Foundation’s 15-Year Journey In Impact Investing
When my wife, Betsy, and I formed the Betsy and Jesse Fink Foundation [now The Fink Family Foundation] 15 years ago to help solve large-scale environmental problems, we were faced with a big question: how could a foundation of our size be impactful when hundreds of billions of dollars are needed to achieve our mission globally?
We started with two core principles. First, as former entrepreneurs, we wanted to be catalytic—to take risks to prove new models, so that larger funders with less risk tolerance would feel able to adopt them, too.
We focused most of our funding on seeding new organizations and pilots in the Northeast, where we have strong local relationships and knowledge...