F.B. Heron Foundation Is Going 'All In' with 100 percent Impact Investments
Clara Miller, who has headed the F.B. Heron Foundation for the past three years, wants to take the ultimate impact investing step: to go "all in". That means moving the foundation's $300 million endowment entirely into impact investments. As of the end of the year, about 60% of Heron's funds were in such vehicles, with the goal of hitting 100% by 2017. (Here's a previous post I wrote about going all in).
I recently talked to her about the foundation's approach.
Anne Field: Why did you decide to go all in?
Clara Miller: When I arrived, we were still in post-2008 cleanup. We had to reevaluate our strategy. Our mission is to help people help themselves out of poverty and we'd traditionally done that by helping people to get access to bank credit or home ownership. But the strategy assumed there would be a reliable environment in which somebody would get a job and that would allow them to get a home and a nice path to the American dream. We concluded that just wasn't true anymore. So we looked at how we could make a difference and decided one thing would be to align all of our capital with our mission...