Our History
As the beneficiary of the assets of the late Eugene and Ronnie Isenberg, Ceniarth was founded in 2013 by Diane Isenberg to begin directing her family’s assets in pursuit of impact in marginalized communities around the world. As we have experimented with a variety of impact investing modalities over the years, our focus on impact-first capital has evolved out of these learnings.
The assets of Ceniarth and the Isenberg Family Charitable Foundation originated through the generosity of the late Eugene 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. From humble beginnings in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Gene often remarked that “his success far surpassed any expectations that he had when he was younger”. 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 where the business school, the Isenberg School of Management, bears his name.
Upon Gene’s passing, his daughter, Diane Isenberg, became responsible for the family’s assets and undertook an extensive, strategic review with an eye toward how to maximize impact. Diane’s personal background in international public health, community organizing, and rural livelihoods strongly influenced her founding the family office, Ceniarth, to pursue her vision for impact investing in marginalized places.
Our strategy has evolved since our first days in 2013. While we had resolved early on to focus on investing toward economic development as opposed to grantmaking, we initially experimented with a wide range of impact investing modalities from more finance-first interventions to much higher risk, philanthropic investments. Over the years, we have found that the sweet spot of our work centers on impact-first transactions where the probability of preserving capital and achieving a modest return is high. From time to time, we do invest in funds with more commercial returns if impact is justified and do reserve a portion of our capital for pilot transactions where higher risks are difficult to mitigate. That said, our focus is on deals that balance a focus on impact in target communities with a reasonable likelihood of financial sustainability. Our approach to monitoring the impact of our investments has similarly evolved over the years. We have invested in a number of innovative impact assessment initiatives such as 60 Decibels, as well as various industry efforts to consolidate data. We have concluded that portfolio-wide impact metrics and goals tend to be both impractical and diluted in operational meaning. Consequently, we focus primarily on transaction level impact goals working with our investees to define their individual metrics of impact success.