For 15 years, the Grassroots team has been a leader in the impact investment space.
Mobilizing Capital
Our investments in small and micro-businesses, housing, sustainable agriculture, health protection and affordable education, are helping to eliminate poverty and strengthen communities.
Aligning Investments
We provide private investors with effective, reliable avenues for allocation of a portion of their resources to social investments.
Creating Opportunity
We create innovative and socially responsible investment opportunities in collaboration with partners who share our values.
Leading with Philanthropic Capital
Drawing on formative experiences in the 1990s at Shorebank, BASIX, the Rockdale Foundation and elsewhere, the Grassroots team gained an appreciation for how philanthropic capital can innovate, lead and sustain initiatives to address the world’s most pressing and seemingly intractable challenges: poverty and inequality, erosion of community, disempowerment, climate change. In subscribing to the principles of Peter Singer, Grassroots continues to support the unique role of philanthropy.
Considering All Stakeholders
Grassroots also recognizes the latent power of the much larger pool of money that is saved and invested by individuals and institutions: foundations, endowments, pension funds, insurance companies, high net worth individuals and those of more modest means. If invested with consideration of a fuller range of stakeholders – employees, communities, the environment – this capital can easily resolve our most urgent problems, but if invested with solely shareholder value in mind, its destructive potential is likewise enormous.
Building Impact through Microfinance
Grassroots has been an active participant in the evolution of the global microfinance industry from philanthropic experiment to an industry with over 300 million clients, fully integrated into capital markets and many national financial systems. Microfinance has been a poster child for the “impact investing” movement, and remains the largest impact sector today by capital committed.
Beginning with pioneering investments in BASIX and BRAC Bank in the late 1990s and going on to help launch a dozen impact investment funds since then, the Grassroots team has learned many lessons in how capital can be engaged to meet both financial and social objectives.
Going forward, Grassroots’ purpose is to help encourage individuals and institutions to regard their investment capital as one of the most powerful instruments at their disposal to affect the world and the future for better or worse and to provide vehicles to enable them to choose to constructively deploy this capital to build communities and eliminate poverty.
