Future Impact Finance- our first social mixer and what people want

As two ambitious future leaders in impact finance, who have spent the last few years growing through the social and impact finance sectors, we have noticed some key barriers to developing our careers.

First, while senior people in this space seem to be well connected, for more junior peers the market can seem fragmented. With many of us working across small organisations, building a network and understanding how our work fits together at scale can prove challenging.

Second, with the growing recognition by the sector of the importance of diverse sector expertise from across the social, public and private spheres, many of us are coming into the social finance space with different (and often non-financial) skill sets. Understanding how we can leverage our skills while also being good investors will be key to enabling us to progress.

To address these barriers, we set up Future Impact FInance to provide a space where our peers can nurture their passion to drive impact, to collaborate, to learn and to thrive.

Last week FiF hosted its first social mixer, and these are the main things we learned from our members:

1. Understanding, scoping and collaborating in the market

While the growth of the social/impact finance market has been a welcome indication of a movement towards a more sustainable economic system, our peers want more clarity on the differences and similarities between social, impact and ESG investors. Particularly, we want to know how we can overcome siloed working between these groups of investors.

2. Training and finance skills

Unlike our senior colleagues, many of the impact sector’s ‘home grown’ talent has not had formal corporate finance training, which is seen as one of the biggest challenges to rising through the ranks in our careers. The small organisations that many of us work in have limited resources to train its junior members, which means many of us need to step out of the market to gain the right skills (if we can afford to do so). Our members are interested in finding ways to avoid this. For example, could we explore partnerships to improve the provision of training at a ‘low bono’ rate?

3. Peer network

Our members were most excited with the fact they feel they belong somewhere, to a movement and a community of like-minded individuals.

So what’s next?

We will endeavour to continue building the network, specifically setting up a clear process for interested people to effectively join the movement.

If you know of early or mid-stage professionals in your organisations that might be keen to interact with like-minded individuals to shape the future of impact finance please reach out via our social media channels or on our email (futureimpactfinance@gmail.com).