IMPACT INVESTING
We believe capital can be a powerful force for creating a world of shared abundance, collective thriving, and democratized power.
When we began our journey toward 100% mission alignment, we discovered that few tools existed for investors like us, who seek to advance gender and racial justice. Rather than accept those limitations, we’ve spent the past decade working with our partners and peers to fill in the gaps. Together, we’re envisioning a world where finance exists to serve people, instead of the other way around.
We know our investments and philanthropy can't create this change alone. But we're trying—experimenting with new approaches, making mistakes, refining our practice, and hoping our piece of the work contributes to a future where women, gender-expansive people, and BIPOC communities can lay full claim to capital and power.
Public Equities (Stocks)
Reshaping lives by reimagining markets
When guided by values of equity and justice, investment capital can help create material conditions that allow everyone access to the resources they need to thrive.
From our founding, we planned to achieve 100% mission alignment across all our assets, including public investments. So we set out to build a fully mission-aligned public equity portfolio focused on our early mission of advancing women's health.
We used our grantmaking dollars to fund research to advance the field of gender-lens investing, and then evaluated companies for investment across economic empowerment, education, health, legal rights, and personal safety.
In 2022, we created a racial equity fund, working with the Racial Equity Asset Lab to audit our holdings and ensure that our final years of investing prioritize both economic and racial justice. Our investments now include the Adasina Social Justice All Cap Global ETF, which uses community-sourced impact data to evaluate companies across racial, gender, economic, and climate justice—an approach developed by our former grantee and ongoing partner, Adasina Social Capital.
We also partnered with Mission Driven Finance to support emerging fund managers of color, using our grant dollars to build infrastructure and a low interest loan fund that provides working capital for launching investment firms—because transforming who manages capital is as crucial as transforming how it's invested.
Since 2015, our portfolio has met or outperformed major benchmarks. Even accounting for market volatility, we have consistently demonstrated that mission aligned public investing can be both profitable and impactful.
Private Equity
Investing in lasting change
Through direct investments in companies addressing critical gaps in women's health, we've helped build an ecosystem of market-based approaches to systemic problems. But creating lasting change required more than funding individual companies—it meant building infrastructure to attract additional capital to this overlooked field.
From our early years, we developed a co-investment strategy to foster partnerships across the investment lifecycle, positioning ourselves as a key player in early-stage investments focused on reproductive health and gender-lens investing. This approach allowed us to leverage our resources beyond grant dollars, using investment capital to demonstrate market opportunities others had overlooked.
In 2018, this led us to incubate and launch our anchor organization, Rhia Ventures, which builds new pathways for directing investment capital toward health equity and reproductive justice.
By working alongside many partners and co-investors, Rhia Ventures has attracted tens of millions of dollars into reproductive health innovation: a glimpse at what’s possible when philanthropy acts as a connector, rather than controller, of capital.
Private Sector
Upholding values and building value
Every day, businesses shape the lives of millions through their workplace policies, healthcare benefits, and ways they influence the systems and structures that govern communities. These decisions determine whether workers are able to live safe and financially stable lives, whether communities thrive or struggle, and whether our democratic institutions strengthen or erode.
As investors, foundations hold a uniquely powerful, yet often overlooked, tool for advancing justice. Through shareholder resolutions, proxy voting, and direct engagement with corporate leadership, we've advocated for expanded reproductive healthcare benefits, transparency in corporate political giving, and data privacy for consumers.
Today, our shareholder work is ongoing at Rhia Ventures, and our corporate engagement work is carried forward by our anchor organization, Inclusive Business at BSR, which is helping build an economy where corporate influence strengthens rather than erodes our collective capacity to flourish.
IN PRACTICE
Gender Equality Funds Tool
Putting investments to work differently; not just in our own portfolio, but across the entire ecosystem.
Early in our journey, we discovered something that shouldn't have surprised us: the financial world had no tools to measure whether investments actually supported gender equity.
Investors who cared about advancing women's economic power were left guessing which funds aligned with their values—a perfect example of how systems preserve the status quo through opacity.
We partnered with Equileap and As You Sow to address this gap, using our grant dollars to build the Gender Equality Funds tool. It's a simple premise: make gender data on mutual funds and ETFs publicly accessible, proving investors don't have to choose between their values and returns.
The tool evaluates funds across dimensions like women in leadership, pay equity, and workplace policies; information that was previously scattered or unavailable. By funding this infrastructure, we aimed to enable more investors, including ourselves, to consider gender impacts in their decisions.
With the Gender Equality Funds tool, we saw how a single grant created a multiplier effect: our philanthropic dollars built infrastructure that redirects investment dollars at scale, demonstrating how strategic grantmaking can catalyze collective power and contribute to entire fields of practice.
