Ceniarth 2021 Annual Report

Wednesday, June 8^th, 2022

Download our full 2021 Annual Report

Introduction Letter from Our Directors

2021 was a challenging year on many fronts, but we remain unwavering in our intention to deliver impact-first capital to marginalized communities.

We take great pride at Ceniarth in our honesty, openness, and frankness.  We are not going to sugarcoat it. 2021 was a tough year. The pandemic. continued to cause innumerable challenges to our investees, we suffered meaningful capital impairments, we struggled to deploy enough capital to substantially move the needle on our long-term, impact-first goal, and we grieved the passing of Ronnie Isenberg who, along with her late husband Eugene Isenberg, founded the Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation, Ceniarth’s primary philanthropic vehicle. It was, to put it bluntly, a slog.

Through it all, we stuck to our first principal of centering our work on communities in need. We spent the year recommitting to a number of core themes that were critical before COVID-19 and remain intractable problems: the unequal impact of climate change on vulnerable communities, the ongoing struggles of the world’s women, and the plight of marginalized communities. The pandemic continued to amplify these challenges, but, like all, we are learning to live with it as another thorny variable in the inherent risks of our work.

Despite the headwinds, we forged on making over $30M in new commitments in 2021 across 20 transactions, a pace very similar to 2020. Our work continued to span the globe with expanding activity in the U.S. CDFI and renewable finance market, renewed deployments in the financial services and agricultural sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as transactions that broke new ground for us in the Middle East. As you will read about in this annual report, these commitments represented trust in existing partners such as Global Partnerships, WaterEquity, and One Acre Fund, as well as confidence in new relationships with IIX, Kiva, Dirt Capital, and others.

2021 highlighted the common threads that we find in these partners, both new and old. Integrity, transparency, and rigor. Impact-first investing requires patience with uncertainty and tolerance for unexpected bumps in the road. These challenges can only be successfully and collaboratively navigated with partners willing to work hard on every detail and willing to share every aspect. Our annual reports are intended to illustrate our ongoing commitment to these values.

Download our full 2021 Annual Report

Ceniarth 2022 Annual Report

Monday, April 3^rd, 2023

Download our 2022 Annual Report

Managing Director’s Letter

There is much to recount about our 2022, but there is no other way to begin than by acknowledging the irreplaceable hole in the heart of Ceniarth that was left by the passing of David Freeman, Diane’s husband of more than thirty five years. David served as a Board Member of the Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation, but much more than that he was a grounding, ever-supportive force for those of us who knew and loved him. While we have grieved and remembered him this year, we know that he would want us to enthusiastically forge ahead in our good work.

Forge ahead we have in 2022. The headline of the year was a record amount, nearly $70M, of new capital commitments across 41 transactions. After two full years of Covid-induced struggles that slowed our transaction activity and forced us to focus on restructurings and portfolio stabilization, we were finally able to confidently accelerate new commitments. As you will read in the pages ahead, we accomplished this goal by both growing our own team capacity and also leaning on our trusted partners.

While Ceniarth may still be most associated with our earliest investments and strong opinions on the agriculture and energy access markets in Sub Saharan Africa, our portfolio is growing more global and diverse every year. In 2022, we made a number of new investments focused on impact in the United Kingdom, continued our activity around racial justice initiatives in the United States, and deployed capital in a wide range of sectors including housing, healthcare, financial services, and renewable energy.

Finally, while much of the sector continues to embrace the hype of “mainstreaming” impact, we continue to quizzically scratch our head wondering when, if ever, some portion of those declared trillions of impact dollars will ever reach communities in real need. That said, we were heartened this year by the Catalytic Capital Consortium (C3) shining a brighter light on the true impact-first work being done by many. Anchored by the MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Rockefeller Foundation, the C3 initiative has devoted meaningful investment capital, as well as resources, to educating the sector on what it takes to truly seed, scale, and sustain high impact work. We hope to build on this activity in 2023 fostering increased collaboration amongst peers committed to moving the needle on impact-first capital.

Download our 2022 Annual Report

Ceniarth 2020 Annual Report

Monday, May 3^rd, 2021

Download our full 2020 Annual Report

Introduction Letter from Our Directors

For the impact sector, and particularly for impact-first investors like us at Ceniarth, 2020 was a year that demanded our full attention and action.

How do we possibly begin to succinctly summarize 2020? It was a year that the world was brought to an unimaginable standstill by the COVID-19 virus and shaken to attention by impassioned calls to address racial inequalities that were exacerbated during the crisis. 

In April of 2020 as we all struggled to come to grips with the scope and impact of the pandemic, we laid out three guiding principles that we would follow in hopes of remaining true to our mission through these challenging times. 

First, we vowed to stay in our lane as a provider of impact-first capital deploying money via the funds and enterprises serving vulnerable communities that we have long supported. We knew that this form of capital was needed before the pandemic and that it would likely become even more scarce. We executed on this promise making over $31M in new commitments across 22 transactions. 

Second, we wanted to ensure that we were building bridges to somewhere. We acknowledged the brutal reality that many enterprises would not be able to survive the economic fallout of the year. Consequently, when we provided emergency funding – for example, our support of businesses seeking Payroll Protection Program (PPP) money in the US – we did so via intermediaries such as community development finance institutions (CDFIs) that were well positioned to offer technical assistance and to help enterprises make best use of the capital.

Finally, while others made lofty claims that the crisis would drive a fundamental realignment of our economic and social systems, we were less optimistic choosing to stay focused on using the year to strengthen the relationships that would help us tackle a world of continuing inequality. We launched the Ceniarth “What Can I Do Now?” webinar series to help co-investors identify new funding opportunities and continued to seek new networks and channels to expand the pool of available impact-first capital.

As we release this report, we are still in the throes of a global crisis with no definitive end in sight. While we cannot predict the future, we can stand ready to continue using our capital to support resilient, high-impact funds and enterprises that are bravely and tirelessly weathering this storm.

Download our full 2020 Annual Report

Ceniarth Webinars & Podcasts: Climate Justice, Racial Justice, Gender-Lens

Wednesday, April 7^th, 2021

January 4, 2021
Gender-Smart Investing Journeys: An Interview with Ceniarth Founder, Diane Isenberg

December 3, 2020
Climate Justice: What Can I Do Now? Webinar

October 20, 2020
SOCAP BOLT Talk: Our Sector’s Founding Falsehood, featuring Greg Neichin, Ceniarth, Director

July 16, 2020
Catalytic Capital: Diane Isenberg lays down a 1/10th challenge for wealthy families, article and podcast

July 15, 2020
Racial Justice: What Can I Do Now? Webinar

 

We are lenders, not heroes: Ceniarth’s three-part response to COVID-19

Monday, April 6^th, 2020

This piece was initially published on ImpactAlpha in April of 2020

There are real heroes in this historic, global healthcare crisis filled with fear and uncertainty.

Doctors and nurses working overtime in hellish conditions, faced with life or death choices. First responders continuing to protect our cities and towns. Scientists working around the clock in search of vaccines and treatments. Even postal and delivery drivers and other essential workers who are ensuring that those of us that cannot leave our homes can sustain ourselves.

They deserve our respect, our praise, and admiration.  They deserve the applause they are getting from balconies in London, New York, Madrid, and Milan.

Then, there are those of us engaged in the business of impact investing.  Many of us entered this field, as stewards of capital or investment professionals, wanting our work to have purpose and meaning.  At a time of global crisis, it is understandable that well-intentioned people feel a passionate call to action. Unfortunately, the moment calls for heroes with MDs, not MBAs.  

This is not to say that our community does not have a vital purpose during this period of massive economic disruption. It most certainly does. It is heartening to see so many in the sector doing all that we can – making rapid changes to loan terms, following through on existing commitments, and identifying new sources of flexible capital.  We should be doing all of this and more while remaining realistic and measured about the limitations of our capacities during this crisis.  

At Ceniarth, wading through inboxes full of contingency plans, field updates, requests for assistance, and other COVID-19 analysis, we have come up with a few principles to guide our actions.  We present these not as a playbook for others, but as a datapoint for how one impact-first investor is choosing to use limited resources.

No. 1: Stay in our lane: In a time when it seems as if almost every form of capital is simultaneously needed – from grants to loans to guarantees to equity – it might be tempting to start thinking outside of our lane. As a family office, we do have the flexibility to entertain all of these ideas. That said, we know very little about how to best deploy all those other forms of capital. We know how to lend patient, impact-first capital. It did not take a crisis for us to realize that vulnerable communities need deeply concessionary capital to survive. They only need it more now.  This is why we are committed to staying in our lane.

We are grateful for the work of firms such as Open Road Alliance, expert practitioners in emergency, bridging loans. Or aid organizations such as Direct Relief, Partners in Health, or GiveDirectly (if you want your money going directly to individuals!), all skilled in making sure that relief is equitably and efficiently delivered around the world.  

On a local scale, our food banks, community health centers, homeless services, and countless other charitable organizations are working around the clock.  From the Gates Foundation to Google, philanthropic support is pouring in.  It is truly charity’s time to shine. If you are an impact investor inspired to leave your lane, give money to groups like this as opposed to making it up as you go.

This is also a time when closer collaboration with those in adjacent lanes could be more useful than ever. We are working on a number of active opportunities, particularly in emerging markets, where limited loan guarantees are urgently needed to help us and others keep liquidity flowing to enterprises.  These transactions do not require reinventing the wheel during a stressful time and do not require outright grants. We would be eager to collaborate with guarantee providers interested in achieving greater leverage during the crisis.

No. 2: Build bridges to somewhere: We see enterprises and customers in increasing need and we all want to help. That said, there is a cold, hard truth that some businesses and funds will not survive this. Our work in deploying higher risk, pilot debt as program-related investments (PRIs) from our foundation acknowledges the reality that even in more “normal” times, unforeseen shocks can mean the end of a promising enterprise. Just because we are operating in a crisis environment does not mean that we are throwing prudence to the wind.

We are still relying on careful sensitivity modeling for our loans. However, our previous worst case scenarios are now our base cases, and our worst cases are downright apocalyptic. If we do not see a plausible path for an enterprise or a fund to survive a major business downturn for six to 12 months, and come out the other side able to eventually pay us back, we cannot responsibly make the investment.  A loan, even a PRI, without any investor prudence is not a loan, it is aid. Thankfully, there are organizations better than us at deciding who is worthy of those grants.

We know that we, and other impact-first lenders, will lose money in the months ahead. That is to be expected.  However, the more money we can avoid chewing up in situations where the survival of businesses is unlikely, the more capital we can preserve to assist in post-crisis recovery and growth.

We are seeing survival strategies vary widely by sector and geography. In the last week we have spoken to funds and enterprises that are still aiming for growth during this period; those shuttering completely in an effort to preserve cash and restart on the other side of the crisis; and those threading the needle. There are compelling cases to be made for a range of different approaches, so long as management is clear-headed, decisive, and impact-focused. 

Our prudence does not mean that we are not restructuring loans, approving interest deferments and/or lowering rates, extending investment periods to give funds more runway, and entertaining other creative options to ensure that we are continuing to move money. We are doing all of these things every single day, just as we had been doing many of these things prior to the crisis.  The work of impact-first investing has always required flexibility – and even more so now.    

No. 3: When this ends, the world will still be unfair and unequal: Those of you familiar with us know that we thrive as contrarians and pragmatists.  This is not to say that we do not appreciate optimists. We are heartened to see friends like Cynthia Muller at Kellogg Foundation call the crisis a “complete economic reset opportunity,” and passionate pleas for “making this s**tstorm matter” from ImpactAlpha’s David Bank.  We may be the yin to their yang, but we have deep respect.

While we do think that there will be aspects of life that are different on the other side of this pandemic, we do not think things will look much different for the lives of poor people around the planet. As in all crises, they will bear the brunt of economic disruption, social unrest, and illness.  As in all crises, those living in the least developed economies will have the least available from social safety nets and stimulus. As in all crises, their plight will be highlighted, aid will be secured, and then the world will move on, as will most impact investors.

The double bottom line will rise again and we will return to a world where sacrifice is deemed no longer necessary.  We are not waiting for a revolution or mass-scale systems change. If this crisis results in just a handful of new impact-first investors committed to long-term sustained investment in marginalized communities that, by our standards, would be a silver lining.

2019 Ceniarth Year in Review

Thursday, December 19^th, 2019

This piece initially appeared on ImpactAlpha in December of 2019

It has been 18 months since Diane Isenberg, Ceniarth’s founder, announced our intention to focus our capital on impact-first investments. These are transactions that maximize the impact that we can have in underserved communities, and require more modest return expectations.

We are crystal clear about where we fall on the continuum of investment capital. The “Beyond Tradeoffs” series of podcasts, produced by ImpactAlpha in partnership with Omidyar Network, laid out how the impact investing sector is moving past the circular debates that used to produce industry gridlock. 

Some investors are pursuing purely market-rate returns, and demonstrating under certain circumstances it is possible to achieve risk-adjusted, market-rate returns with substantial social impact, as the series acknowledges.

Others, Omidyar Network suggests, “identify types of impact that are not conducive to market-rate returns, underscoring the importance of a rigorous approach to making decisions about when and how to deploy subcommercial capital. 

We have embraced this subcommercial end of the spectrum and have set out to infuse an impact-first ethic across the entirety of our Ceniarth portfolio, reshaping how both our private foundation and unrestricted family office assets are deployed. We have committed nearly $100 million in those 18 months, all with an impact-first lens. In 2019 alone, we made $55 million in new commitments across 30 transactions.  Yeah, we’ve been busy.

Ceniarth’s team is not the only one that have been busy in 2019 embracing the thorny challenges of serving the fringes of the capital continuum that are unappealing to those with conventional financial expectations.  The MacArthur Foundation dedicated $150 million in support to the Catalytic Capital Consortium earlier in the year. Major development finance institutions led by the likes of OPIC, KfW, FMO, and CDC made new commitments to blended finance vehicles. Significant, impact-first institutional capital was mobilized in 2019. 

Multiplying our Impact

While we have the privilege and responsibility of stewarding a significant amount of capital, it is a tiny amount in comparison to the needs that we are hoping to address.  For this reason, it is critical that we use our dollars to catalyze and support others.  

The runaway winner of our “leverage unicorn” of the year was Global Partnerships’ Impact-First Development Fund.  Our $3 million subordinate debt commitment was part of a $5 million tranche that unlocked $50 million of capital from OPIC.  The 10X leverage on this deal allowed us to mobilize, in one transaction, nearly the entire amount of capital we deployed ourselves in 2019.   

Large capital deployments from development institutions made possible a number of our other significant commitments this year.  Our largest single transaction was a $7.5 million commitment to Blue Orchard’s new InsuResilience Fund, a vehicle supporting microfinance institutions that incorporate climate insurance products into their loan offerings. That was anchored by a $32 million first loss commitment from German development bank KfW.  We joined alongside OPIC’s $25 million commitment to emerging market solar energy financier SunFunder to make a $5 million commitment of our own to the Solar Energy Transformation Fund.  

Similarly, we joined Dutch development investor FMO and FinDev Canada in making a $2 million commitment to EcoEnterprises Fund III, a manager focused on longer-term, mezzanine debt to agricultural and conservation enterprises in Latin America.  Finally, we were able to use a $250,000 equity commitment, in the form of a program-related investment, to Cross Boundary Energy’s new Mini-Grid Finance Facility. Thatenabled mezzanine debt from the Rockefeller Foundation and project-level debt from the UK government-backed Renewable Energy Performance Platform (REPP). 

We are encouraged by the appetite that many of these development institutions have shown to lean into deeper impact. 

Catalytic can mean reasonable 

While many have come to associate the concept of catalytic capital with blended finance or creatively structured, multi-tranche vehicles, sometimes the most catalytic thing that an impact investor can do is to offer reasonable, low-cost capital where it is most needed.  A number of our 2019 commitments were made to community development finance institutions, or CDFIs, in the United States working in areas of persistent poverty and deep need.

We provided $2 million in 2% debt to FAHE, an Appalachia-based CDFI focused on lending for a variety of community development needs from housing to facilities.  We made low-cost capital available to two CDFIs working specifically on resident-owned mobile home communities. Innovative financing from the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund (NHCLF) and ROC-USA is allowing mobile home residents to avoid park take-overs by aggressive financial investors that lead to steep increases in rent (see John Oliver explain the problem in comedic detail here!).  We provided $2 million in 2% debt to NHCLF for use in New Hampshire and $3 million in 3% debt to ROC-USA for parks across the country.  

Outside of CDFIs, we used our financial “reasonableness” to extend $5 million in 3% debt to MCE Social Capital, a non-profit impact investment manager focused on lending to high-impact MFIs and SMEs in emerging markets, as well as providing $2.5 million in 2.5% sub-debt to trade finance lender Root Capital.  This sub-debt position allows Root to continue raising senior debt to scale their activities.  In addition, we committed $2.5 million to emerging market private credit specialist AlphaMundi, an investment that we expect to generate between 3-5% in annualized returns.

In a transaction that we did not include in our annual tally of $ committed, as its scale would have skewed the headline, we transitioned $15 million in fixed income holdings to a specialized managed account mandate with Community Capital Management.  We will be focusing these bond holdings solely on offerings that are located in persistent poverty zip codes in the United States.   

Fintech inclusion

Emerging market fintech has become a hot category for all investors, whether impact-focused or not.  The potential to enable a leapfrog change in financial services infrastructure has drawn significant interest and venture capital over the past five years.  And while technology advancements such as mobile money play a key role in facilitating the rural business models that we fund, we have been more an observer of this market than an active participant.

This changed in 2019 as we made a number of investments in the category.  We made a$2 million commitment to Quona, an impact-oriented venture firm focused on investing in fintech for inclusion globally.  As their first, pilot lender, we have watched happily as Lendable, a tech-enabled lending platform for non-bank financial enterprises, has grown their capital under management.  As they have evolved their own model to raise structured funds, we have extended $2 million in corporate debt to support their expansion, as well as specific transactions that do not fit their main fund criteria.  Finally, we have extended $2 million in debt to 4G Capital, a provider of short-duration working capital loans to micro and small enterprises.  The platform primarily serves traders and shopkeepers in rural areas, 80% of which are women.  

New approaches to income-generation

Our focus on rural livelihoods has often meant using our limited PRI (program related investment) dollars to focus on agricultural initiatives, with a particular emphasis on inputs and direct assistance for smallholders.  We have outstanding loans, a number of which we renewed this year, to One Acre Fund, MyAgro, Good Nature Agro, Apollo Agriculture, iProcure, and others engaged in this type of work. In 2019, we began to expand our scope of pilot lending however to include a range of interventions, both agricultural in nature, as well as those focused on other income-generating activities for rural individuals.  

We completed a $1million PRI loan to Victory Farms, the largest fish farm in East Africa that cultivates tilapia in an operation on Lake Victoria in Kenya.  The Victory Farms model not only provides local employment, but aims to engage small fishers in the area, as well as local fish traders, many of whom are women that are exploited by suppliers.  We have extended $500,000 in PRI revolving credit to All Across Africa, a Rwanda-based business that employees local women weavers in the production of baskets, vases, and other craftwork.  Our line of credit provides the business with cyclical working capital to fulfill a growing queue of purchase orders from major western retailers.  

In the agricultural domain, we have continued to look for enterprises that are pursuing innovative models that could offer step-change improvements in income for individual farmers.  We extended $285,000 in debt to Kheyti, an India-based enterprise that supports farmers with a “Greenhouse-in-a-box” solution that allows for the sustainable cultivation of high value vegetables. 

In addition, we provided $300,000 in debt to WARC (West Africa Rice Company), an enterprise based in Sierra Leone that is attempting to leverage a large-scale, profitable farming operation to train managers that will eventually be able to support smallholder outgrower units.  WARC is a more centralized and coordinated model than we have seen elsewhere and is one that we believe is worth keeping an eye on. Finally, we made a number of pilot loans to organizations working, in a variety of ways, to offer unique market access to smallholders.  Get It Rwanda ($500,000 loan), FarmFresh ($450,000 loan), Moringa Connect ($250,000 loan), and East Africa Fruits ($225,000 loan) are all engaged in helping to increase farmer incomes through value added production.  

In total, we made $7.1 million in new PRI commitments, not including renewals, in 2019. We currently have ~$15 million in outstanding PRI capital, the majority of which we expect to be able to recycle in the coming years. 

Leading on impact measurement

Those of you who know Ceniarth know that we rarely invest equity in early-stage enterprises.  For a variety of reasons, it is not our preference. We are even less likely to lead an equity round.  In fact, 2019 marked the first time that we played a lead role in an equity financing as we supported the spin-out of Acumen’s Lean Data team into their own new independent business, 60 Decibels.  Structured as a PRI, our $625,000 equity investment was matched by investment from Acumen, as well as support from other private investors.

As we pursue the deployment of greater amounts of impact-first capital, investment in more rigorous impact measurement is essential to ensuring that scarce subcommercial dollars are being used for optimal impact.  We had engaged with Acumen’s Lean Data methodology as a client, funding a comparative study of seven of our agricultural investments. The quality and granularity of their data collection work convinced us to become an investor in the business itself as it is a platform that we hope will become a critical tool for the industry.  

Ceniarth’s Diane Isenberg: ‘I am a gender-lens investor’

Wednesday, February 6^th, 2019

This piece initially appeared on ImpactAlpha in February of 2019

Truth be told, these statements of affiliation do not come naturally to me.

I have never been a big fan of joining clubs and recoil at the over-simplification often inherent in these types of identifiers.

That said, I have found myself, circuitously, embracing this new badge.

When I first casually glanced at promotional materials for last November’s Gender Smart Investing Summit, organized by Suzanne Biegel, I was not sure that it was a forum that would be relevant to me or my team at Ceniarth.

Yes, we deployed over $40 million last year in a range of global funds and enterprises, almost all of which, given their rural focus, must be attentive to gender and power dynamics in underserved communities. Yet, I still did not consider myself a gender-lens investor.

At the time, my perception of the gender-lens dialogue was a relatively narrow one. Most of the discussion and strategies that seemed to be getting air revolved around relatively blunt and superficial gender-based assessments – public equity funds that screened for a specific number of women board members, venture funds investing solely in women founders. Given that, for purposes of our mission alignment, we are actively divesting from our public equity portfolio and generally steer away from venture capital, I had assumed this gender lens conversation was not particularly germane to my work.

That is until more emails started turning up in my inbox. Emails from funds in our portfolio inquiring if I would be there. Emails from prospective investees requesting time for pitch meetings during the event. Industry coverage of the impending Summit was filled with references to relevant themes. Perhaps, I had been missing something and should attend.

The catch: I did not have an invitation to this invite-only gathering. Just as I did not see myself as a gender lens investor, clearly neither did the conference organizers. I dutifully filled out the conference web form, waited, politely nagged, and was finally able to secure a last-minute seat to the Summit.

I am very glad that I did. I emerged with a much fuller picture of the gender-lens dialogue and a conviction that not only is it relevant, but, given our work at Ceniarth, we have a leadership role to play in the field.

If I now see a richer, wider spectrum to the gender-lens conversation, where do we fit in? Upon reflection, our gender-lens strategy at Ceniarth has three clear components:

1. We invest in funds and enterprises that serve women as primary customers and assess their effectiveness in doing so

Our mission at Ceniarth is to invest to improve rural livelihoods. Given the population and gender dynamics in many of the regions that we invest, our mission is synonymous with investing in women. Women as customers, entrepreneurs, service-providers, advocates, and decision-makers. Many of the organizations participating in the Gender Smart Investing Summit were investees in our Ceniarth portfolio. For example, we have over $10 million ($7.5 million committed, $3 million pending) invested with Global Partnerships in large part because of their women-centered investment initiatives and their thoughtful impact assessment.

Our investments in Pro Mujer ($2 million of revolving credit), WaterEquity ($3 million invested in their newest fund), and Women’s World Banking Capital Partners ($1 million invested in their first private equity fund) were predicated on their explicit focus on women as customers for financial services. Similarly, our investments with Root Capital ($3 million of revolving credit) and Frontier Markets ($500,000 grant) are based on their emphasis on serving women in rural communities. Women are at the heart of these places and any funder hoping to make a lasting difference must have a gender-lens to their work.

2. We aim to, pragmatically, invest in diverse management teams, including women-led funds and enterprises

If a fund or an organization is demonstrating real success in addressing issues core to our mission, and if they are doing so with thoughtfulness and integrity, we tend to reject dogmatic approaches to filtering them. We understand that in some parts of the world, it is incredibly challenging to build diverse, talented teams. The work of supporting rural communities should not go unfunded because an enterprise is having a difficult time finding qualified women managers.

That said, when our investees do not have a woman on the management team, they better have a damn good reason why they do not. There are numerous women-led funds and enterprises in our portfolio. We were an early, catalytic investor with Advanced Global Capital (more than $5 million invested), founded by Janet McKinley, have deployed capital (more than $6 million) in multiple Bridges Fund Management vehicles, co-founded by Michele Giddens, and recently made a program-related investment commitment ($1 million) to the Community Outcomes Fund, founded by Andrea Phillips. In scanning our prospective pipeline of enterprise lending and fund investments, I am heartened by the number of talented women at the helm of many of these organizations.

I was further moved, at the Gender Smart Investing Summit, that the ranks of female leaders in the field is multi-generational. While millennial women are in fashion and garner the majority of press platitudes, it should not be forgotten these women stand on the shoulders of previous generations. I was proud to see a broad representation of women leaders, some of whom started work as finance professionals at a time when the only other women in the office would have been secretaries and assistants. I recognize the complexity of the dialogue around women’s issues has changed over the decades and that differing generational attitudes exist. That said, what unites us should be bigger than what divides us and I am hopeful we can continue to listen and learn from each other.

3. I am committed to building a team at Ceniarth that is made up, predominantly, of women

As the leader of my own family office, I have complete autonomy to shape our team. The investment field is ripe with sexism and gender-based discrimination and impact investing is no exception. I know this because I have suffered through it over the past five years even as a woman responsible for a vast sum of capital. If I am regularly condescended to, I can only assume what it is like for rank-and-file women working their way up the ladder.

I own my own destiny, so I feel responsible for hiring a team that lifts up women in the field. That does not mean that we do not have men at Ceniarth. We do, and, from time to time, they are allowed to have an opinion (just a joke!). Ceniarth’s first employee, my co-cirector Greg Neichin is a good man and from day one has been focused on empowering me to achieve my vision. And while I appreciate Greg, and the other men on my team, I have been very active in recruiting women to Ceniarth. Our women, including me, now outnumber our men (7-4).

We still receive vastly more submissions from men for any open position, but the caliber of the women that we see in our hiring process is humbling. I know that our ability to attract incredibly talented women to our team is not only a product of our growing brand in the impact investment field, but is also a product of having an office led and founded by a woman, and an office with a majority of female employees. In addition, we have a variety of flexible work policies that are appreciated by women and men alike. In the pursuit of building diverse teams, success leads to more success.

Beyond the office walls at Ceniarth, I am similarly committed to supporting women in the broader world of business. It is equally, if not far more important, that women make strides not only in elite niches such as impact investing, but that they populate the management ranks of mainstream finance, accounting, and consulting firms. The Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts bears my family’s name. It is a public institution that gave my father, the son of immigrants to Massachusetts, a chance at the education that would fuel his success. I am incredibly proud that it has grown into one of the finest public, undergraduate business programs in the country educating a student body that is 42% female. Not yet full equality, but impressively close.

Later this month I will be venturing to the school where I have the distinct privilege of delivering the opening keynote to this year’s Women of Isenberg Conference. I will return to campus with a message that tries to inspire and empower this next generation of women leaders and also includes a proud proclamation that I am a gender-lens investor.

Fighting Poverty, Remaining Rich

Monday, August 20^th, 2018

This article by Ceniarth Founder Diane Isenberg appears in Impact Alpha on August 20, 2018.  Read the full text here.

“Those promising comfortable market-rate returns while solving global poverty are the equivalent of diet gurus promising that one can lose weight while eating limitless amounts of chocolate cake.”

In the year-and-a-half since my Ceniarth co-director Greg Neichin and I wrote about the tension between investing in difficult, underserved markets and the desire of many in the impact investing community not to sacrifice commercial returns, we have ventured further in pursuit of opportunities to support marginalized communities, both in developed and developing regions. We have only become more convinced that trade-offs between impact and return are real and unavoidable.

Those of us with the privilege and responsibility of stewarding great wealth must confront this reality.  If we genuinely wish to deploy capital in ways that will support people and places that are being left behind by market forces, than we cannot delude ourselves into believing that we can have it all…

Read the rest of this article on ImpactAlpha

Navigating Toward Impact

Wednesday, August 1^st, 2018

Last week, the Omidyar Network published a new resource guide, Building an Impact Investing Team, to support family offices and foundations in their journey to expand their impact investing activities. We were appreciative and humbled to have Ceniarth featured as a case study alongside industry pioneers such as the Gates Foundation, KL Felicitas, and Mission Point Partners. When we first began our journey five years ago, these were the organizations that we called upon for guidance, so we felt a particular point of pride in having grown into peers in the industry.

When we were initially asked us to participate in this guide, we were quick to jump aboard. We feel strongly that despite the growth of the impact investing sector, new entrants to the field, particularly families and foundation with significant means and sophistication (i.e. assets in excess of $250m+ and with nuanced points of view on the impact areas that they wish to pursue) continue to be ill-served.

Yes, there are plenty of industry organizations offering solid educational resources and networking opportunities, but the majority of these gatherings cater to those that operate on a smaller scale and face a significantly different choice set than those with larger asset bases. And yes, there are a growing number of financial advisors that have added capabilities around impact investing, but most all of these advisors are financially incentivized and best trained to guide you into an expanding array of market-rate products, not to help you strategically assess how to use your capital in pursuit of specific impacts.

There is a major gap in the market for sophisticated, strategic consultancy services that have no agenda around specific products or issues areas and are first and foremost incented to help large family offices and foundations figure out how to define and achieve their goals. When we are asked who can provide this support, we shrug, and typically advise hiring a dedicated in-house resource to lead this strategic effort.

The new Omidyar guide will not solve this strategic gap that exists in the market, but it is a good start to helping families and foundations begin to ask the important mission and capabilities questions that are essential early in their journeys. We will continue to support new entrants to the field and are always open to sharing our points of view and methodology to those embarking on building their own new teams.

Download the resource guide here.

Ceniarth Portfolio Summit @ UMASS

Sunday, November 5^th, 2017

On Tuesday, October 24^th, 2017, Ceniarth was proud to host its first ever Portfolio Summit.  The convening brought together an invitation-only group of our portfolio companies, advisors, and peer investors for a closed-door chance to reflect on the development of the impact investment field and to share insights from our collective work.  Given Ceniarth’s historical support and affiliation with the University of Massachusetts (via the Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation), the Summit was hosted on the campus of UMass Amherst.

Ceniarth Founding Director Diane Isenberg opened the Summit by framing the challenges that the sector faces in stark and honest terms:

“Last week I attended the annual conference of a well known African private equity fund . As I listened to speakers extol a rosy vision of a modern Africa enabled by leap frogging technologies  and fueled by  the disposable incomes of a growing middle class , I thought about all of the people who would be left behind just as they have been in markets in developed countries. It reinforced the importance of the work that many of us continue to do, despite the challenges and uncertainty of returns, to  figure out  how to  provide  at least some of that rosy future to those populations that traditional market-based companies often exclude to reach profitability . To me the elephant in the room is just this.  The emerging populist view of impact investing is that investors can do good and do well and that this will solve all of the problems that development aid and philanthropy have been grappling with long before the words impact investing were even invented. Thankfully doing good and doing well will be the answer to some problems.  However it will also be a formula that continues to exclude many of the most vulnerable populations both urban and rural.”

Diane’s remarks set the tone for a day of open, frank sharing that touched on some of the thorniest issues in our sector: the potential trade-offs between impact and returns, the utility of impact measurement, and the appropriate use of subsidy and grant capital were all featured topics of lively debate and dialogue.

Panel discussions were organized around Ceniarth’s three primary investment strategies, Responsible Asset Management, Impact-Driven Capital Preservation, and Programmatic Investments.  For more information about the composition of our portfolio, you can download this recent presentation on our strategy and holdings, or view a Confluence webinar by Ceniarth Director Greg Neichin.

We are incredibly appreciative for all of our portfolio companies, managers, advisors, and peers that attended including: Generation Investment Management, Bridges Fund Management, Bain Double Impact, Generate Capital, Hall Capital Partners, Goldman Sachs, Global Partnerships, Root Capital, Advance Global Capital, One Acre Fund, Frontier Markets, ColaLife, Maycomb Capital, Village Capital, Candide Group, MacArthur Foundation, Packard Foundation, Sorenson Impact Center, Calvert Impact Capital, Omidyar, and Acumen.