Schwartz has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BA from Yale College, summa cum laude. She is a former trustee of the Yale Club of Chicago Scholarship Foundation and a past presidential appointee to the US Treasury Department Community Development Advisory Board. Schwartz currently serves on the board of directors for the Mission Investors Exchange and the International Women’s Forum - Chicago Chapter. She has been a guest lecturer at Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, Duke and other schools and was an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago for several years. Prior to joining MacArthur in 1995, Schwartz was an investment banker in public finance at John Nuveen & Co and CFO for a nonprofit child welfare agency. Since 2001, Debra and her team have invested in more than 200 funds and enterprises working in the US and globally across diverse fields, including affordable housing, community development, and clean energy. Dedicated to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world, MacArthur has allocated up to $500 million for impact investments that advance its mission by fueling innovation, growth and inclusion. Recent MacArthur investments and ongoing collaborative initiatives that seek to build a more just, equitable and resilient future, locally, nationally and globally - including the Catalytic Capital Consortium and Benefit Chicago.ĭebra Schwartz is Managing Director for Impact Investments at the MacArthur Foundation. community development finance institutions (CDFIs) trace their roots to civil rights and social justice movements of 50+ years ago and pioneering impact investors seeking to fight inequality and injustice The urgent need to transform our existing system of finance and investment to become purposefully inclusive, innovative and catalytic, actively advancing economic, social, and environmental change by being more flexible, patient and risk-tolerant How conventional finance has fallen short for communities, families and critical needs – historically and today In this special fireside chat and audience Q&A, Impact Entrepreneur’s Laurie Lane-Zucker welcomes Debra Schwartz to discuss MacArthur’s work in building the field of impact investing and activating capital for justice. They bridge financial and market gaps to empower families, entrepreneurs and communities that mainstream financial institutions and firms too often marginalize or leave behind.” They enable innovation and rapid action to tackle urgent problems and seize opportunities for social, economic and environmental progress. They help build and fuel responsive, mission-driven institutions that meet essential needs. MacArthur Foundation, asserts that “at their best, impact investments deliver capital that aims for justice. Read our full conversation with Debra Schwartz here.In a recent blog post, Debra Schwartz, Managing Director of Impact Investments at the John D. We can help keep transactions oriented to that north star of impact. And we have “impact fidelity” in our DNA. We can absorb the extra transaction costs of doing something creative or bespoke. Because we own our assets, we can take risks that other institutions might not. But foundations have a unique potential to advance the market. We are not now, nor will we ever be, the majority of the capital in the impact investing arena. The third big opportunity I see is growing engagement among foundations. These are nascent, but we are seeing more and more of them every day. It’s also encouraging to see alternative structures springing up, like holding companies that are addressing the critical need for patient capital. The second big opportunity is for innovation in the intermediation space, with new marketplace platforms providing those important investor on-ramps that I mentioned earlier. Rising interest in impact investing is a big opportunity, so long as we can harness it in a way that makes the market inclusive and allows for investing that is unconventional and not purely commercial. What are the three biggest opportunities in impact? The GCP recently published their Why GCP conversation with Debra Schwartz, the managing director of impact investments at The MacArthur Foundation. In the months leading up to the launch event we interviewed key pioneers and leaders in the impact space about the state of the field. Read a recap of the GCP’s June launch event here. The Good Capital Project ’s inaugural convening took place in June 2017 in New York City.
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