The 2022 GIIN Investor Forum

In this Forbes article, author Anne Field sits down with Amit Bouri, CEO and Co-Founder of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) to discuss the recently released report from the G7’s Impact Taskforce. When speaking to the importance of safeguarding the integrity of impact investing, Bouri says the following, “It’s essential to the future of our financial markets. We’re operating at a time of declining trust and we’re seeing all over the world huge commitments to sustainability, to net zero, to the SDGs. That’s encouraging on the one hand, but also risks breeding cynicism if people don’t see real change. We think there’s a tremendous opportunity to rebuild trust through demonstrable impact results. That’s why the impact performance work we’re doing is so critical. You can imagine a world not that far off where investors are communicating their performance from a financial and impact perspective.”

In this Nordsip article, author Filipe Albuquerque discusses findings from the Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) latest research, Understanding Impact Performance: Climate Change Mitigation Investments and Quality Jobs Investments. Albuquerque writes, “The report offers an analysis of social investments in quality jobs to help investors understand how to optimise their impact at each stage of the investment process to facilitate better impact results. It offers insights into impact performance and discusses how investors can use the GIIN’s COMPASS Methodology and IRIS+ to compare investments and impact performance.”

This ImpactAlpha article co-authored by Amit Bouri, Tynesia Boyea- Robinson, and Michael MacAfee speaks to the importance of the standardization of racial equity investment strategies. The article highlights the new framework for racially equitable investing affiliated with the Corporate Racial Equity Alliance, which was co-founded by PolicyLink, JUST Capital and FSG, and lists the framework’s three strategic goals which are, “1. Increasing the power of historically marginalized populations due to race and/or ethnicity; 2. Shifting the perception of riskiness of investing in those populations; and 3. Creating just systems that produce equitable outcomes.”

In this episode of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Social Finance Podcast, Lisa Morgan, Technical Specialist at the ILO, speaks with Amit Bouri, co-founder and CEO of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) and Patricia Richter, Senior Technical Officer at the ILO. Their conversation focuses on the fundamental role that decent work and quality jobs play in sustainable development and how investors can leverage their financing to contribute positively to employment outcomes that address today’s pressing issues. Morgan, Bouri, and Ritcher highlight the collaboration between the GIIN and its members with the ILO, including the work on developing quality jobs investment strategies and metrics for measuring impact achieved.

In this ImpactAlpha article, author David Blank speaks to members of the design team working on The New Capitalism Project, an 18-month effort that has enlisted a dozen leaders to participate in a collective strategy process to model the movement for a new economic system. Amit Bouri, CEO and Co-Founder of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) is quoted in the article adding that, “There is still too much capital sitting on the sidelines. The movement for a new capitalism will require investors to rethink the power of capital and take a broader, longer-term view about the value investments create for people, for communities, and for the planet. It is time for a new status quo that thinks about investment capital in an entirely new way.”

In this Business & Industry article author Amit Bouri, CEO and Co-Founder of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), reflects on the importance of taking a regenerative approach when it comes to the solving the climate crisis. Bouri writes, “In practice, regeneration incorporates the concepts of renewal and restoration to overcome the extractive, degrading and inequitable elements of the status quo. It provides a solution to help us leverage the power of investment to ‘right wrongs.’ An economic system rooted in regeneration prioritises replenishing and restoring ecosystems, communities and natural stocks. Now, as we begin to see glimmers of a new future, we must do more than just overcome the climate crises that we have created. That is why so many people describe regeneration as a pathway to ‘heal the future,’ both for our planet and humanity. In our next normal, regeneration must be at the centre of everything we do.”

This ImpactAlpha article co-authored by Christina Leijonhufvud, Sarah Gelfand, Kelly McCarthy, and Dean Hand emphasizes the need for more reliable and verifiable performance reporting on sustainability and impact results. The article mentions the GIIN’s COMPASS: The Methodology for Comparing and Assessing Impact report reading, “This work builds on the GIIN’s IRIS+ system, and several years of gathering real-world impact performance data at the investment level, to provide guidance on calculations and approaches for interpreting change in impact over time as well as for assessing impact performance relative to the size of specific social and environmental solutions gaps. The COMPASS methodology reflects aspects of several industry-wide efforts designed to bring more rigor and meaning to analysis and comparisons of impact performance data.”

In this press release, leading international organizations, including the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), come together to announce the creation of the Impact Management Platform. The Impact Management Platform will allow partnering organizations to “identify opportunities to consolidate existing sustainability resources, collectively address gaps, and coordinate with policymakers and regulators to support the mainstreaming of impact management. This effort represents the next phase of a global collaboration that, until now, was facilitated by the Impact Management Project (IMP), a five-year consensus-building forum designed to run until 2021.”

This work, which is the result of a joint project between Bridgespan Social Impact, the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), PolicyLink, and CapEQ, includes a list of racial-equity funds that that explicitly seek to improve the livelihoods of individuals who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and their communities. The work highlights the GIIN’s IRIS+ racial-equity theme reading, “Advancing racial equity requires diligent, intentional processes and consistent, rigorous evaluation regarding outcomes. Racial equity is often seen as both an emergent process and an outcome—investors cannot have one without the other. GIIN, PolicyLink, FSG, JUST Capital, and CapEQ recently partnered to launch the prototype of its IRIS+ racial-equity theme to help investors select impact strategies and metrics.”

In this Private Equity International article, Amy Carroll explores impact investment’s role in the fight against climate change. Amit Bouri, CEO and Co-Founder of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) is quoted in the article adding that, “A systemic problem requires a systemic solution. The climate crisis clearly requires far more than a purely impact investment approach. It will require a shift in government policy, corporate behaviour and personal consumption, things that lie beyond impact investors’ sphere of influence. It is important both that impact investors see themselves as part of a broader systemic effort and that other actors recognise the role that impact investors are playing in the overall solution.”