Why Mission Investing Matters, One Foundation Official’s Perspective

September 1, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute

Putting for-profit investment capital to work in ways that benefit society has the potential to unlock substantial sums of money to tackle the world’s problems, says Antony Bugg-Levine, a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation, in New York. In time, he says, the scale could dwarf anything the nonprofit world could have dreamed possible.

But, he says, the goal of mission investing is not to supplant the efforts of philanthropy and government, but instead to complement them.

Using for-profit capital to achieve social and environmental ends, he says, allows scarce charitable dollars to go where they are most needed.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Bugg-Levine talked about why mission investing matters, and used the example of a school-finance company in India to show how harnessing for-profit capital allows government and philanthropy to focus on problems markets cannot solve.

About the Author

NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.