Deadline: 30 July 2019
The Sorenson Impact Foundation (SIF) is inviting potential grant recipients to propose solutions that advance or augment the foundation’s work in three key focus areas:
- Advancing the impact investing ecosystem by:
- developing and supporting intermediaries,
- creating tools and services that make the impact investing ecosystem more efficient, and/or
- facilitating access to data and education to help lower barriers to entry for traditional investors and inform better investment decision making
- Identifying, measuring and promoting best practices in the area of community development and impact achievement for Qualified Opportunity Funds as established by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
- Support the development and training of future impact investors and social entrepreneurs
The Sorenson Impact Foundation invests in innovative, scalable solutions to the world’s most pressing issues. As an impact investor, SIF seeks to simultaneously support social entrepreneurs while also building impact investing field overall and crowding in new investors who can using their investment dollars to “do good”. The Sorenson Impact Foundation has investments on five continents and across asset classes and sectors.
Funding Information
Awarded grants will vary in size and between $50,000 and $500,000 each.
Problems To Solve
Within its three key focus areas, below are examples of the specific problems that the foundation seeks to solve. Note that these are not the only problems that exist within our focus areas and applicants are free to propose outside of this problem set.
- The impact investing space lacks connected, coordinated intermediaries who are incentivized to bring investors and entrepreneurs together efficiently
- There is a lack of wrap-around investment support including due diligence, legal and post-investment support for impact investments, especially as a means of lowering barriers to entry for newer, smaller investors (common term sheets including both financial and impact terms, etc)
- There is a lack of simple, inexpensive coaching for impact entrepreneurs / start-ups
- There are not well-coordinated means by which to share deal flow and learnings by and among impact investors in a streamlined and efficient manner that can easily become common practice in the industry
- There are not efficient mechanisms for established impact investors to crowd-in potential new impact investors and leverage the work they’ve done
- There are no centralized, holistic databases of impact investing data such as benchmarks, sample portfolios, returns and/or performance ranges, market deal terms and other common datasets that the broader finance community typically uses
- There is limited information on the full lifecycle of impact investments
- For opportunity zones, there are not well-coordinated databases where investors can find projects to invest in, data in order to assess potential impact, and community dynamics information so that impact can be better wrapped into opportunity funds
How to Apply
Submissions can be emailed at the address given on the website.
For more information, please visit http://sorensonimpactfoundation.org/apply/
