Contemporary Authors

• Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change Nation Books (New York, NY), 2017

• Morgan Simon - http://morgansimon.com

  Simon is a widely-recognized leader in impact investment who builds bridges between finance and social justice. Over the past seventeen years, she has influenced over $150 billion in capital. Simon currently co-leads Candide Group, which supports two clients, including members of the Pritzker family on behalf of the Libra Foundation. She is also co-founder and chair of the non-profit Transform Finance.

  Previously, Simon served as the founding CEO of Toniic, a global network of impact investors, and as the founding executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition. She has worked with the United Nations in Honduras, in corporate reform with ForestEthics, and in domestic microfinance with the Women's Initiative for Self-Employment. She currently serves on the boards of the Restaurant Opportunity Center, The Working World, and CARE Enterprises. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Simon serves as an adjunct professor at Middlebury College's graduate school program. She lives in the Bay Area.

• Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey - https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/additional-programs/certificates/frontier-market-scouts

  Frontier Market Scouts Certificate

  A Frontier Market Scouts Certificate provides participants with the knowledge and foundational network to launch a career in the field of impact investing and social enterprise management.

  The Frontier Market Scouts program selects and trains compassionate and capable young professionals to become talent scouts and investment managers serving local entrepreneurs and social-minded investors in low-income and weak-capital regions of the world.

  Overview
  The award-winning Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) program provides intensive two-week certificate trainings that prepare participants for careers in the fields of social enterprise and impact investing. Through a combination of lectures and actionable projects, participants gain a comprehensive understanding of the key players in the impact sector, how to design an innovative impact-focused business model, and what it takes to implement and scale a social venture.

  After the training, participants have the opportunity to become candidates for a competitive two- to 12-month fellowship in key global areas for social enterprise. The fellowship option is an essential part of a self-sustaining ecosystem for social enterprise development and investment, designed to enable entrepreneurs whose ventures are either too large to receive microfinance funds or too small to attract traditional venture funding. There is no additional cost to enroll in the fellowship program.

  Since 2011, FMS Fellows have worked to grow and improve processes for over 100 social enterprises around the world during field assignments based in countries such as Brazil, India, the Netherlands, Ecuador, Vietnam, Tanzania, South Africa, and Lebanon.

  Partners
  The Frontier Market Scouts program collaborates with a network of social enterprises, impact investment funds, and incubators in around the world. Our current partner organizations include the following:

  African Entrepreneur Collective

  Burn

  Eco Fuels Kenya

  Moving Worlds

  Unreasonable East Africa

  Village Capital

  Waste Capital Partners

  Curriculum
  The training curriculum combines lectures, cocreative projects, and experiential learning facilitated by leading social entrepreneurs and investors. Sample courses:

  Social Enterprise and Impact Investing

  Portfolio Management

  Designing an Innovative Business Model

  Due Diligence and Deal Structure for Early Stage Social Ventures

  Managing Impact Investing Advisory Services

  The Metrics and Management of Social Impact

  Faculty and Staff
  The two-week professional certificate training is designed and delivered by experienced professionals in the social and commercial venture investment industries. They are leading practitioners in the impact space and work with organizations that include Omidyar Network, Accion Venture Lab, and Unreasonable Group.

  Past faculty:

  Morgan Simon, Pi Investments

  Ross Baird, Village Capital

  Patricia Chin Sweeney, IDEV

  Jason Spindler, IDEV

  Alex Lazarow, Omidyar Network

  Sarah Olsen, SVT Group

  Yuwei Shi, FMS Founder and Middlebury Institute Professor

  Tuition and Fees
  Nondegree students: $4,000; Middlebury students: $2,000. Fee includes tuition, career advising, networking events, and light breakfast/snacks served during the training.

  A nonrefundable deposit of $500 is due upon acceptance.

  Full and partial merit scholarship rates for the training are available.

  There is no additional cost to enroll in the fellowship program.

  Apply
  Participants can choose to apply for the training program or both the training and field programs.

  Upon successful completion, participants receive a professional certificate in Social Enterprise Management and Impact Investing. Successfully completion is required to become a fellowship candidate. There is no additional cost to enroll in the fellowship program.

• Toniic - http://www.toniic.com/portfolio-item/morgan-simon/

  Morgan has spent the last decade building bridges between finance and social justice. She co-leads Candide Group, which supports Pi Investments and the Libra Foundation in executing their 100% impact agendas.

  She was instrumental in the founding of three leading organizations in the field:

  She is co-founder of Toniic, which she served as founding CEO from 2010 – 2013.
  She is a co-founder and Chair of Transform Finance, a non-profit organization raising awareness about social justice issues within the impact investor community.
  As the founding Executive Director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, Morgan provided social investment education to over 100 colleges and universities across the country.
  Morgan has worked with the United Nations in Honduras, in corporate reform with ForestEthics, and in domestic microfinance with the Women’s Initiative for Self-Employment. She currently serves on the boards of the Restaurant Opportunity Center, The Working World, and CARE Enterprises. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Simon serves as an adjunct professor at Middlebury College’s graduate school program.

• LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgan-simon/

Print Marked Items
Simon , Morgan: REAL IMPACT
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Simon , Morgan REAL IMPACT Nation Books (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-56858-980-0
Investment adviser Simon outlines the concept of impact investment, "the practice of investing not just for
profit, but also for social benefit."In some ways, impact investment aligns with Bangladeshi financier
Muhammad Yunus' experiments in microfinance and what he is now calling "social business," giving
would-be entrepreneurs in developing countries opportunities to enter the marketplace. Simon holds that
some of Yunus' programs, however, have not scaled well in the marketplace and may have worked
backward; the first step, she suggests, is to "identify a good idea that has a mix of qualitative and
quantitative, micro and macro approaches to addressing poverty and structural inequality"--and always with
an eye to profitability. In her understanding of impact investment, a great deal of due diligence is involved to
assure not only that investors' money is well placed in projects that do good in the world, but also that
communities are well served. To this end, Simon offers a series of operating principles--e.g., the call to "add
more value than you extract," again with an eye to such things as providing long-term, well-paying jobs to
help break the cycle of poverty. Throughout, Simon insists on some of the basic tenets of capitalism,
including the notion that the value added should yield return on investment. Even so, she counsels that
investors take steps that, en masse, would shake Wall Street to the ground, such as the thought that the
conscious impact investor should "break up with your bank" and look to community banks and other
institutions that are better inclined to social justice. Simon also suggests that investors realign their
portfolios so that they know, as the adage has it, where their money spends the night, investing in funds that
provide small loans to entrepreneurs, funding for sustainable agriculture projects and water systems, and the
like. A cleareyed case for socially conscious investment, of much interest to those who want their dollars to
do good.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Simon , Morgan: REAL IMPACT." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500365059/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c3f0fcf.
Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500365059
Real Impact: The New Economics of Social
Change
Publishers Weekly.
264.21 (May 22, 2017): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change
Morgan Simon. Nation, $26 (256p) ISBN 9781-56858-980-0
Simon, founder and chair of the nonprofit Transform Finance, opens this fast-paced, provoking book with a
crash course in impact investing, "the trillion-dollar trend most people have never heard of." As she
explains, impact investment (the Rockefeller Foundation's term) means investing for social benefit as well
as profit. Simon starkly concludes that the current, well-intentioned "free-market-plus-charity model" hasn't
effected substantive change. According to a study cited here, only 12% of foundational giving goes to
social-justice causes; the rest supports education and arts organizations that largely service the already
wealthy or at least economically secure. Rather than raising relatively small amounts of money expressly for
charity, impact investing seeks to leverage the much larger sums in the global economy by pressuring
companies to do better with their money. Simon talks frankly and critically about established philanthropic
practices, stressing that wealthy donors must not wholly control the process of dispersing funds. Her
bracing, hard-hitting message for big business is accompanied by advice for middle-class investors, who are
encouraged to move personal accounts from big banks to community banks and clean up their stock
holdings. Clear-eyed, explicit, and tinged with just the right amount of outrage, this is a clarion call that the
world of well-meaning social-justice activists needs to hear. Agent: Victoria Skurnick, Levine
GreenbergRostan. (Oct.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change." Publishers Weekly, 22 May 2017, p. 82. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494099087/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=05b48732. Accessed 30 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494099087

• Stanford Social Innovation Review
  https://ssir.org/book_reviews/entry/keeping_it_real
  Word count: 906

  Morgan Simon has spent the past 15 years building bridges between the worlds of finance and social justice. From working in close partnership with marginalized communities around the world to serving as managing director of the Candide Group, where she currently supports members of the Pritzker family on behalf of the Libra Foundation, Simon has been paying close attention to the values at work in the way money is invested.

  Her experience, knowledge, and passion in guiding wealthy families, foundations, and financial institutions coalesce powerfully in her first book, Real Impact. She documents the learning process that led her to work in impact investing and social activism, and how it informed her nuanced understanding of the many unaddressed issues that limit systemic change.

  Simon’s book is about the myopia she sees in the impact investing field. She calls out the short-sightedness that frames impact investment as “alleviating poverty” (a short-term fix) rather than “creating value.” She challenges the inability of its players to question the effectiveness of the “free-market-pluscharity model” in producing global prosperity, and its tendency to tolerate, if not replicate, the extractive practices of finance.

  Simon draws from her own experiences to support these insights. As a Swarthmore student doing aid work in Sierra Leone, she encountered a street vendor selling a can of tuna that was labeled as a gift from the Japanese government and “not for sale.” She paid the vendor $1 for it—an amount that could buy five full meals in Sierra Leone—and realized that the tuna generated far more economic value for the people who had fished for it, donated it, and sold it than it had for its intended beneficiaries. Simon knew “in that moment that if I pursued a career as an aid worker, the balance of my life’s work was going to create much more value for those with power than those without it.”

  Since then, as cofounder of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, Toniic, and Transform Finance, Simon has emerged as a leading reformist challenging impact investors to eschew “easy Band-Aid solutions” and avoid repeating the mistakes of the conventional finance world. She points out that Americans often unquestioningly work and consume in sectors that are damaging to the very social causes they support via volunteerism or charity. And she notes that US foundations are legally required to give away only 5 percent of their resources to charitable causes and often spend the other 95 percent in money-generating investments that operate in “contraindication with their stated missions.” Even in the well-meaning arena of impact investing, she shows, a “topdown” structure ensures that those on the “doing well” side of the equation often benefit exponentially more than those on the “doing good” side. The habits and incentive structures of the finance world are so entrenched that even the most benevolent are often blind to how they contribute to power imbalances counter to the systemic change they seek.

  Simon’s solution for countering this myopia is for us to view the world with a bigger lens—one that’s both focused enough to clarify patterns of power and wide enough to bring other people and their concerns into view. In chapter 5, the linchpin of the book, she offers what she calls her Transform Framework, composed of three simple but far-reaching principles that originated from a three-hour conversation with change activists at the World Social Forum. They are:

  Engage communities in design, governance, and ownership.
  Add more value than you extract.
  Fairly balance risk and return between investors, entrepreneurs, and communities.
  This framework was designed not as a list of rules but as a prompt to help investors ask the right questions: “What resources are being created through investments, and are they good for people and the planet? … Who is making money from an investment, and what are they choosing to do with it? … How does one replace historically stolen resources within communities in a way that enhances autonomy?”

  In subsequent chapters, Simon offers detailed examples of how the framework has been used to ensure transformative impact, in cases ranging from renewable energy projects in Mexico to worker-owned cooperatives in Argentina. The book also provides ample, disheartening evidence that many impact investors fail to treat the communities they serve as more than inputs—to “empower, not exploit!”—and fall prey to the practice of placing themselves above “those people.”

  Real Impact is a clarion call to impact investors and a guide for those who genuinely want to do good and do it better. The book covers a lot of ground, speaks to several audiences, and is overfl owing with actionable advice for each of them. Its concluding chapter, which guides and encourages investors and social entrepreneurs to create a “pathway of connection” to the communities they are affecting, almost reads like an etiquette guide for white allies.

  At times, Simon’s desire to speak to everyone seems excessive. But the book was devised to educate both impact investors and those interested in social change around impact investing. Simon’s message comes from someone steeped in social activism and is one that impact investors must take to heart, as well: “Take your lead from the affected community you seek to serve,” it says. “And not just for the benefit of others, but for your own liberation, as well.”

• Seeking Alpha
  https://seekingalpha.com/article/4140425-book-reviews-clean-money-revolution-real-impact
  Word count: 913

  Summary
  Joel Solomon, pioneer of social impact, ESG investing tells all in "The Clean Money Revolution".

  Morgan Simon applies social ESG investing with her millennial generation lens in "Real Impact".

  For full disclosure, reviewing these two books was a delightful personal trip down memory lane with many old friends.

  As one also involved since the 1980s in the development of this type of investing focused on social environmental and governance (ESG) factors, I have seen this field evolve to now account for one in every six dollars traded on US public markets (US Social Investment Forum).

  Joel Solomon and Morgan Simon exemplify this pioneering entrepreneurial investing mindful of our responsibilities for the future called for by BlackRock's Larry Fink in his famous letter. This evolution of finance and technology beyond GDP-measured economic growth to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) ratified in 2015 by 195 member countries of the United Nations (UN) may yet steer humanity into a safer, fairer, healthier green future.

  Author Joel Solomon describes in The Clean Money Revolution his journey from his upbringing in a Jim Crow culture in Nashville, Tennessee to his exploration of Asian spiritual traditions. He began in the 1970s to invest in his now over 100 early-stage companies all geared to this healthier, more equitable future envisioned now in the UN's SDGs.

  He chairs the Renewal Funds in Vancouver deploying $98 million in mission-related venture capital, while he also advises the RSF Social Finance group in San Francisco. In this book, he describes in detail his investment philosophy, method, metrics and gives a wealth of examples of companies, strategies with other lead investors and consortia.

  Solomon paints a lively picture, entwined with his personal story, of how these investing trends evolved since the pioneer mutual funds, Pax World, Calvert, Domini and Parnassus emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. He explains why he shifted away from publicly-traded companies to direct investing in early-stage private equity deals: "Public markets are a casino where hundreds of millions of people are betting on an assumed value" while "public securities are only pieces of paper traded on a perceived value" (page 173).

  Many others have come to the same conclusion, especially since 2008! I also invest privately and directly, as do many family offices and high net worth individuals, with an estimated $4 trillion globally, while exceeding average hedge fund returns. Family Office Network.

  Solomon's key message for his baby boom cohorts and millennial colleagues focuses on the $50 trillion that will change hands in the USA by 2050 - now underway. He shows how this capital can be successfully shifted from the 19th and 20th century fossilized industry sectors to the future cleaner, fairer, knowledge-richer sectors and technologies now widely envisioned with increasing clarity in the UN's SDGs.

  Solomon's vision sees a global $100 trillion investment worldwide in a Clean Money Transition from 2017-2050, which he itemizes on page 220:

  Transition to renewable energy ……………………….…$10 trillion
  Sustainable transportation …………………………….……$10 trillion
  Green and living buildings…………………………………...$10 trillion
  Soil restoration and carbon capture ………………….…$10 trillion
  Zero waste (now termed the circular economy) …$10 trillion
  Guaranteed incomes, healthcare, education………..$10 trillion
  Steady state economy transition……………………….…$10 trillion
  Reparations for colonialism and slavery ……………. $10 trillion
  War and weapons industry reduction……………………$10 trillion
  _________

  $100 trillion

  Today, similar sums are discussed in global financial forums, including the private investments in green sectors we track in our Green Transition Scoreboard® (a cumulative $8.1 trillion since 2007). Governments, international finance agencies, think tanks and the World Economic Forum are now discussing its sobering Global Risks Report 2018. Yet all these problems can become successful investments in solutions, as Joel Solomon shows in his book.

  Investor Morgan Simon Managing Director of the Candide Group echoes this new urgency in her book, Real Impact. Since age 23 she still devotes all her efforts to this same global transition to a sustainable world also, through managing and the Libra Foundation and as co-founder of non-profit Transform Finance. Simon was also founding CEO of Toniic, an innovative consortium of high net worth investors, family offices bent on shifting their portfolios toward 100% sustainable companies.

  Real Impact is chock full of specific models, strategies, investment goals and successful examples of enterprises she has helped nourish. She is equally tough on empty promises of market-based returns offered in some "impact" investing prospectuses. The word "impact" is confusing, since all investments have impacts: Some blow the tops of mountains or pollute the Gulf of Mexico, while still others live up to their promises. Simon summarizes the objectives of Pi Investments in addressing structural challenges reinforcing today's extractive economies:

  Shareholder primacy misaligns incentives.
  Remote limited ownership leads to wealth extraction.
  Infinite growth models incompatible with a finite planet.
  Limited leadership stunts creativity to address global challenges.
  Support investments focused on human needs; ethical production and consumption; incorporate communities in design and ownership of enterprises; creating and broadening direct, transparent investment opportunities.
  Balancing risk and return between investors, entrepreneurs and communities while exploring investment structures encouraging enterprises to maintain their social mission focus.
  Morgan Simon combines vision and expertise with hard-nosed realism and achieves verifiable results.

  Both these books will be useful to adventurous asset allocators, trustees, high net worth owners, family offices and researchers, as well as international agencies and the UN now driving the SDGs toward their goals in 2030.

• Lunarmobiscuit
  https://lunarmobiscuit.com/real-impact-by-morgan-simon/
  Word count: 265

  Two weeks ago Morgan Simon announced her new book, Real Impact. I was going to toss it on the end of my queue, not expecting it to be part of my quest for answers to inequality, but was proven wrong.

  First and foremost, the book is the best primer I’ve read on impact investing. The first half walks through why we need to align capital with social and environmental solutions and the second half explains how to do that.

  Along the way Morgan goes deep into example investments, many of which address social justice issues. She beautifully explains how she and her various partners thought through the issues and in detail list out their outlines for how to architect socially justice businesses.

  From all my readings, one key missing component to fixing inequality is employee ownership, and Morgan has already implemented some of these ideas. Confirmation bias almost always feels good, but in this case I’m thinking I’m a few steps behind Morgan’s deeper experience.

  Morgan is one of the people in the community of impact investors who makes me feel like a slacker, but I’m hoping to someday catch up. The good news is that we’ve met a few times before and that her partners Andrea and Aner both helped with my workshop at SOCAP last week, so I’ve got a good path to get my questions answered, to fill in the details not included in this book.

  More on those when I have them.