Letter from TPI's President

Dear friends and colleagues,

We are pleased to focus this e-newsletter on the emerging topic of using business principles, models and capital to make sustainable, scalable social change.   TPI has always advocated an investment approach to philanthropy but today we are delighted to be introducing our clients and colleagues to a new breed of organization and approaches that take the investment mentality to a whole new level. First there were program related investments.  Then we had venture philanthropy, social finance, micro-enterprise portfolios, social enterprise and mission-related investing.  Now we have a dizzying alphabet soup of hybrids like B Corporations (that’s “benefit”) and L3C Companies (that’s “low-profit, limited liability”) that up-end what some believe is an artificial tax distinction between doing well and doing good.  All of these are designed to bring more capital into the social sector and make the business of “doing good” more sustainable, scalable and widespread.

TPI recently had the privilege of hosting a lively program on this topic, moderated by our own Peter Karoff with guest panelists Ben Binswanger of the Case Foundation and Elyse Cherry of Boston Community Capital.  The room buzzed with the questions, ideas, challenges and even moral dilemmas posed by the panelists and attending funders, business executives and social enterprise leaders.  It was clear that this was only the beginning of what needs to be an ongoing discussion, exploration and experimentation. 

In this e-newsletter, we share with you some “nuggets” from the breakfast as well as a few examples of hybrid investments and our preliminary list of resources for learning more.  But most of all, we would like to invite you to share your ideas, your questions and your experiences so that together we can better understand and frame the opportunities.  To that end, we have started an online bulletin board... Who knows what will come out of this, but we know that our collective ideas will add value.

It’s an exciting time to be in this field.  We look forward to exploring it with you.

On behalf of all of us at TPI,

Ellen Remmer
CEO and President