Tag: social impact

Not Business as Usual: Being an Effective Social Impact Leader in the Year Ahead

Posted on by NationSwell Team

The discipline of social impact is evolving quickly, driven by sociopolitical shifts, technological advancements, and stakeholder priorities. Meeting the moment will require us to home in on trends facing the practice of social impact, forecast the demand for new strategies and approaches, and collectively brainstorm around what’s needed most to lead our field into the future.

During a NationSwell virtual Leader Roundtable on February 4th, a group of cross-sector leaders gathered to discuss how we can energize, advance, and even reimagine the work of social impact into 2025 and beyond.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the event:

Simplify messaging, align on definitions, and stay grounded in principles. As organizations face shifting social and political dynamics, clear and principle-driven communication is important. Some leaders are adapting by focusing on internal business integration rather than public-facing messaging, prioritizing that their initiatives remain intact. While terms like DEI and ESG are politicized, organizations should maintain focus in their mission, ensuring that internal leadership and external stakeholders understand their long-term business value.

Prioritize business-aligned impact strategies that create shared value. Companies should root their social impact work in business strategy. A strong alignment between social impact initiatives and business operations, such as embedding sustainability into supply chains or leveraging core competencies to support workforce development, can create long-term economic opportunities while driving positive social change. A shared value approach, where business success and social progress reinforce each other, strengthens stakeholder buy-in and helps organizations navigate external challenges while continuing to advance impact goals.

Leverage collaboration and coalition-building. Systemic challenges cannot be solved in isolation. Some organizations are shifting away from launching entirely new initiatives and instead seeking alignment with peer institutions to pool resources, avoid redundancies, and drive greater collective impact. Leaders have also emphasized the growing need for match-making between nonprofits facing funding constraints and private sector stakeholders eager to engage in meaningful solutions.

Consider global implications for your work while maintaining localized focus. As political dynamics complicate the U.S. social impact landscape, companies have an opportunity to think strategically about globalizing their efforts. Social impact looks different depending on context, and considering how you can broaden your scope and scale to support global communities may support the continuance of your work. However, it is important to tailor strategies to local needs. Leaders emphasized the importance of deep community engagement, listening to local stakeholders, and adapting social impact efforts to regional contexts rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.

Use data-driven insights and storytelling to reinforce credibility and trust. Combining quantitative impact data with human-centered narratives strengthens stakeholder engagement. While metrics are crucial for impact assessment, personal stories, such as how a single classroom, community, or entrepreneur benefited from a social impact initiative, bring data to life and make corporate efforts more relatable and compelling. This approach also helps maintain confidence among employees and external stakeholders in moments of uncertainty.

Empower employees at all levels to engage in social impact and civic participation. Amidst social and political upheaval, employees are eager to find out how they can engage in social impact and civic engagement. As a first step, keep an open door policy for employees to meet with you about their concerns and ideas. Furthermore, consider investing in education and enablement programs that help employees better understand and contribute to social impact goals.

Demonstrate courageous leadership by staying committed to core values. Social impact leaders are navigating increasing scrutiny and rapidly changing political and economic conditions. Many are choosing to stay the course on DEI, ESG, and other mission-driven initiatives by focusing on principled business-aligned approaches. Courageous leadership involves making strategic decisions that uphold long-term commitments while adjusting to new realities, ensuring that both employees and external stakeholders see consistency and authenticity in your actions. 

Not Business as Usual: Being an Effective Social Impact Leader in the Year Ahead

Posted on by NationSwell Team

The discipline of social impact is evolving quickly, driven by sociopolitical shifts, technological advancements, and stakeholder priorities. Meeting the moment will require us to home in on trends facing the practice of social impact, forecast the demand for new strategies and approaches, and collectively brainstorm around what’s needed most to lead our field into the future.

During a NationSwell virtual Leader Roundtable on January 16th, a group of cross-sector leaders gathered to discuss how we can energize, advance, and even reimagine the work of social impact into 2025 and beyond.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the event:

Encourage proactive leadership conversations to align on forward-looking strategies.  Convening leadership outside of crises helps companies fortify their positions and respond confidently when challenges arise. Bringing key decision-makers, such as all leaders that report to your CEO, together regularly to discuss and preemptively resolve key issues (e.g. how to navigate political headwinds on material issues) can lessen the need for reactivity during moments of external scrutiny, ultimately promoting consistency in your work. 

Simplify messaging, align on definitions, and stay grounded in principles to stand the test of time. Amidst politicization of DEI and ESG, organizations are grappling with how and when to use these acronyms. While there’s no right answer for terminology use, it is important to ensure that your board and leadership teams are aligned on a unified vision of how you communicate about social impact, building a strong foundation for persistence in the face of internal and external shifts. To maintain focus and clarity with key stakeholders, consider simplifying your communication, focusing on principle-driven and business-focused messaging.

Stay informed on legal and political developments impacting ESG, DEI, and more. Monitoring legal and political shifts is critical to safeguarding social impact initiatives. For example, Judge Reid O’Connor’s recent ruling in Texas challenges the legality of ESG investments. While appeal options exist, the ruling underscores the need for organizations to remain vigilant about regulatory trends that could affect their ability to operate in this space. Companies should collaborate with legal, investor relations, and government affairs teams to proactively develop strategies that address emerging risks while maintaining a commitment to their principles. Get familiar with and follow a credible ESG legislation tracker. 

Align social impact initiatives with business goals to drive shared value. Integrating social impact efforts with core business objectives promotes durability amidst political headwinds. Identifying a key business challenge that can also generate social value (e.g. skills-based training) can secure leadership buy-in for continued investment. Evaluate your impact strategy’s shared value by answering questions like:

  • To what extent does this initiative address a pressing business challenge?
  • Does the initiative address a clearly defined societal need?
  • Does the initiative leverage the company’s unique strengths (e.g., products, expertise, supply chain)?
  • Are there clear metrics tracking the initiative’s contribution to business goals (e.g., revenue growth, cost savings)?
  • Are there measurable societal outcomes (e.g., number of people impacted, carbon emissions reduced)?
  • Are key internal stakeholders (e.g., business leaders, employees) engaged and supportive of the initiative?

Get innovative and holistic with your funding strategy to fill gaps amid policy shifts. As you build your social impact strategy for the year(s) ahead, consider how your full capital stack can address emerging challenges for your business and communities. For example, blended financing (e.g. impact investing, philanthropy) and collective impact models can be used to support innovative, untested ideas or provide critical funding for markets that are at risk of being deprioritized amidst policy shifts. Collaboration with peer funders and aligning on co-investment opportunities can amplify your ability to support a significant funding gap. 

“Make talent instead of take talent:” Be intentional about talent development and inclusion. With shifting social impact priorities and roles, it is important to consider strategies to invest in and nurture your existing team’s growth, focusing on both skills and adaptability. For example, prioritize mentorship, hands-on coaching, and shadowing opportunities that prepare team members for their next roles while creating an environment of empathy and inclusivity.

Pathways to Economic Opportunity: MassMutual Foundation and Opportunity Finance Network

Posted on by NationSwell Team

In the Pathways to Economic Opportunity interview series, NationSwell is taking a closer look at how companies are pursuing remedies to disparities that exist in vulnerable communities that lack access to financial opportunity and prosperity. In spotlighting these partnerships, this series hopes to uncover the “secret sauce” that makes these solutions successful.

NationSwell recently sat down with Dennis Duquette, president and CEO of the MassMutual Foundation to discuss their newly-announced partnership with Opportunity Finance Network to launch the CDFI Innovation Initiative — a new effort designed to drive innovation, scale impact, and build new infrastructure for the Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) industry.

Here’s what he had to say:

NationSwell: To start, what is the theory of change behind CDFIs — how do they work to expand economic access and provide financial stability in low-income communities?

Dennis Duquette, president and CEO of the MassMutual Foundation: CDFIs are financial institutions dedicated to delivering responsible, affordable lending to disinvested communities that are often underserved by other lenders and banks. By their very nature – certified by the Treasury Department to be prioritizing community development, serving underserved markets and providing wraparound support services – CDFIs seek to fund the needs and dreams of businesses, housing providers, schools, and community facilities that other financing providers deem to be too risky.

NationSwell: What challenges in the CDFI space is the MassMutual Foundation looking to help solve, and what positions the Foundation to do so?

Duquette, MMF: As it turns out, the biggest challenges facing the CDFI space have a lot to do with their own success – there’s been incredible growth in the visibility and recognition of CDFIs’ unique positioning in addressing community needs in the last few years.

The industry stepped into extraordinary visibility and expanded scale as it supported small businesses and economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic, including deploying more than $30B through the Paycheck Protection Program. The Barber of Little Rock, an Oscar-nominated short documentary that the MassMutual Foundation helped fund, highlights the work of a CDFI called People Trust and further contributes to public awareness of CDFIs as effective, community-centered providers of the financial capital and personalized support communities need to achieve financial health and resilience. And most recently, the EPA’s $27B Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) includes one of the most significant new flows of capital to the CDFI space anticipated over the next six years.

This success and opportunity to scale brings many new challenges, as CDFIs often have limited internal resources and too often face major challenges in deploying capital to meet their communities’ needs due to infrastructure challenges. Solving these challenges will help both better utilize the existing capital available to CDFIs and help attract further investment in the industry by institutional investors.

NationSwell:  What made Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) stand out as an ideal partner for the MassMutual Foundation?

Duquette, MMF: We always strive to make investments that can unlock opportunities that may otherwise not be fully leveraged – as we were just discussing, CDFIs stand at a major juncture of opportunity, and we want to ensure that it’s not missed. OFN is an ideal partner for us due to a number of reasons. They are themselves a CDFI and have been the leading CDFI support network for forty years, offering the critical capacity building, relationships, and loan capital that members across the country (over 430 member CDFIs and counting) need to fulfill their missions. Their role as convener and capacity builder for such a wide swath of CDFIs means that they have an incredible view into the challenges and opportunities facing the ecosystem. They also have a proven track record of executing visionary partnerships and, perhaps most importantly, share our view that collaboration and cooperation between funders and community partners is an important attribute for maximizing impact. Together, we aim to attract additional partners to the table to help fund the many innovations that this initiative will spur over the next five years.

NationSwell: What are the goals behind the MassMutual Foundation’s partnership and $25 million investment in OFN? How does the CDFI Innovation Initiative fit into your larger impact strategy as an organization?

Duquette, MMF: OFN and the MassMutual Foundation are in alignment that building and scaling resources and capacity of financial intermediaries like CDFIs is critical to achieving key shared outcomes, including income and wealth creation, financial resilience of individuals, and new jobs and small businesses nationwide. This partnership represents a natural evolution of our giving and is an outgrowth of all the things we’ve seen and learned through our local grantmaking focused on financial resilience across our recent focus communities (Springfield, Boston, Memphis). We’ve learned that the neighborhoods with the greatest need for affordable and accessible financial products and services are the very ones that most often lack them. More specifically, pathways to homeownership for first time homebuyers, small businesses loans & support, and access to quality jobs are consistently top needs expressed by residents and nonprofit leaders. This opportunity allows us to extend those lessons nationally to other communities and potentially engage like-minded funders to join us in this work.

NationSwell: What’s the special sauce behind the initiative – the novel or innovative elements that you’re most excited by?

Duquette, MMF: This initiative is structured to ensure that a strategic mix of voices, expertise, and resources are continually at the table to identify how to best innovate and invest in the infrastructure needed to help CDFIs grow, evolve, and scale into the future; with three core pillars designed to drive new strategies and innovations:

o   Creating an Innovation Advisory Council with investments in thought leadership and data-driven insights into scalable innovations.

o   Establishing an Innovation Center, an action tank that will take insights and promising solutions and seed them with capital and support.

o   Launching an Innovation Fund, a blended capital pool that will help take innovative and promising solutions to scale each year.

NationSwell: What impact are you intending to achieve through this initiative, and what are your metrics for success? How will the initiative measure the long-term impact of innovations on underserved communities?

Duquette, MMF: The CDFI Innovation Initiative aligns with the MassMutual Foundation’s goals of building and promoting the use of critical networks, fostering financial health and resilience, fulfilling basic economic needs, and expanding employment opportunities for low-income households and communities. The initiative will help advance new systems, and develop solutions needed to support scale and impact in the following areas:  capitalization innovations, new financing products, technology platform innovations, operational efficiencies, and data analytics and research. The complexity of this overall project means that we’ll be evaluating success on multiple levels, including increased growth rates in overall assets under management, financing closed from OFN members, number of housing units developed, small business loans closed, and jobs created or retained. We’ll also track specific outcomes for each individual innovation that is piloted.

NationSwell: How do you see this initiative evolving in the future? What’s your longer-term vision for the work with CDFIs?

Duquette, MMF: We have a long-standing history of supporting CDFIs in the cities where we live and work and we’re excited to grow that investment commitment with this initiative. We, along with OFN, are confident that the structure, approach, and impact of this initiative will really lay the groundwork and make clear the case for sustaining this initiative beyond the next five years.

NationSwell:  Finally, do you have a call to action for leaders at peer organizations who have opportunities to help advance this work forward? 

Duquette, MMF: We would absolutely love to connect with anyone at any peer organization who may have a shared interest in any element of this work and initiative. We think there is a very compelling case for collaborative funding here, and as I just mentioned, we see shared investment as part of the longer-term goal of sustaining and growing the impact of the CDFI Innovation Initiative long into the future!