Ceniarth, LLC
Ceniarth is a single-family office focused on funding market-based solutions that benefit underserved communities. Through a range of investing activity, we provide capital to enable the deployment of products, services, and support that directly impact marginalized, primarily rural, populations. We aim to finance enterprises and intermediaries in ways that lead to long term growth and sustained benefits to communities. We fund non-profits, for-profits, and hybrid organizations.
Founded in 2013 by Diane Isenberg, Ceniarth works in conjunction with the Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation. Our ability to leverage program-related investments and grants, in addition to unrestricted investment capital, allows us to think flexibly and creatively to address funding gaps. Our goal is to apply the right, most efficient form of capital for a given need in order to produce measurable impacts. Our long-term goal is to deploy the entirety of our capital, in all its forms, in the most direct pursuit of our mission as possible.
Historically, we organized our work around three different capital deployment strategies that aimed to capture the inherent risk, return, and impact tradeoffs that we saw in pursuing investments with a primary intention of generating impacts in deeply underserved places. Our experience over the years investing in these communities has led to move away from the finance-first side of this continuum and to focus exclusively, for new allocations, on impact-first opportunities. In general, we do not benchmark our activities against commercial, market-rates of return. Rather, we simply aim to maximize our desired impact while preserving our ability to recycle our capital base over time.
Download: Learn more about our strategy and our approach to impact-first investing.
Our work is global and addresses both developing economies, as well as persistently low-income regions in more developed markets. Our professional team is a small, but global organization with professionals currently based in London, New York, and San Francisco.
We deploy appropriate investment capital to support enterprises and intermediaries tackling problems that impact the lives of people in underserved communities.
The Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation
The Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation is a private, family foundation founded through the generosity of the late Eugene (“Gene”) M. Isenberg and his wife Ronnie Isenberg. A serial entrepreneur, Gene successfully built a string of industrial enterprises, most notably serving as CEO and Chairman of Nabors Industries. Under Gene’s leadership, Nabors grew from a small, drilling company employing 300 people in 1987 into the world’s largest land and offshore platform driller, currently employing over 29,000.
From humble beginnings in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Gene often remarked that “his success far surpassed any expectations he had when he was younger”. He, therefore, offered philanthropic support to causes he believed in, particularly education, medicine and the performing arts. Gene was a particularly strong advocate of education, often making resources available to those who were unable to afford or access quality education.
Gene was a dedicated supporter of his alma mater, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He had served as both President and Board Member of the UMASS Amherst Foundation, as well as co-chair of the university’s $300M UMass Rising campaign. In recognition of his contributions and leadership, the UMass business school was named The Isenberg School of Management. Gene greatly valued interdisciplinary learning and established three endowed chairs-in the School of Management, the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and the College of Engineering. In addition, the Isenberg Awards, individual scholarships to graduate students who combine management with science and engineering, continue to be granted annually.
As former Isenberg School of Management Dean Mark Fuller remarked, “during our very first meeting after I became dean, Gene made the point that ‘education is at least part of the solution to any problem.‘ To that end, Gene and Ronnie were also instrumental in the founding and support of the Parkside School in New York, which provides special education to elementary school children.
The Isenberg Family Foundation will continue to work in the spirit of Gene’s legacy supporting entrepreneurs, empowering underserved communities, and trying to provide equal access to opportunity to all people regardless of income level.