For philanthropists, it’s a season of goal setting, exploring new strategic giving approaches and vehicles, and planning for a successful year. And sometimes all it takes is a spark of inspiration to embark on new initiatives that can lead to meaningful impact. In our first Foundation Friday Series of the new year, we spoke with A to Z Impact to dive deeper into their philosophy of impact investing and how they’re happily sacrificing financial returns on their investments in exchange for shared prosperity and positive societal outcomes.
Read on to learn more about the inspiration behind their foundation, the causes they’re passionate about, and the one piece of advice they’d share with philanthropists based on their experience.
About Your Philanthropy
What inspired you to start your foundation?
We wanted to empower those who are expected to perform on an uneven playing field.
What causes are you most passionate about?
The foundation focuses internationally (across sub-Saharan Africa, Haiti, and India) on impact themes of livelihoods and health, and in the US on shared prosperity and building assets/wealth for under-served communities. We support both nonprofits and for-profit social enterprises.
What projects/initiatives are you excited about currently?
Recently we have had more focus on healthcare, investing in two reproductive health organizations. Be Girl distributes sustainable high-quality menstrual products and menstruation education. Fòs Feminista provides contraception and sexual education to marginalized women and girls, with abortion care when needed. We also committed to an investment in Nexleaf, which created a temperature sensor to help keep refrigerated vaccines viable in clinics and trucks in even the most remote places.
Can you talk to us about your philosophy around impact investing?
A to Z Impact focuses all of our efforts on impact-first investing. For us, this means happily sacrificing financial upside on our investments in exchange for shared prosperity and positive societal outcomes, while still prioritizing capital preservation. These investments empower underserved communities, leading to better jobs, improved health, and a higher quality of life.
With this focus, it allows us to drastically increase our ticket sizes. More concretely, for an organization where we may be willing to give a $10K-$20K grant, we are happy to provide a $500K-$1M loan if we believe the money will come back to us so that we can recycle it for further impact.
What we hope is that if we can prove that you can have deep impact while preserving capital, we can help inspire other foundations to use more of their endowments towards this work, and more high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) to carve out portions of their investment portfolio for impact-first investing.
Can you share how you’re using program-related investments and mission-related investments?
Concretely, given our impact-first orientation, the preponderance of our investments are classified as program-related investments (PRIs), while the remainder are mission-related investments (MRIs).
What is one of your private foundation’s achievements that you are proud of and why?
To date, we have committed ~$26M to impact investments, despite only starting the foundation with $12M-$13M of capital. This means we have already recycled all the capital at least once, and we hope for many more cycles!
Can you tell us about a time when you were able to see the impact of your giving?
Some examples of our work include Food 4 Education, a Kenyan nonprofit that provides nutritious school lunches to 600K students per day. However, there is a large timing gap between when they have to pay for their ingredients (rice, beans, etc.) and when the Kenyan government ultimately pays them back for serving the meal. Low-cost debt helps them bridge this gap!
Another example is The Fountain Fund, a US nonprofit that provides low-interest loans and financial coaching for formerly incarcerated people, helping them build credit and achieve their self-determined goals. By providing them with low-cost lending capital, they can match this with their philanthropic grants to grow their loan portfolio beyond what they could otherwise.
How do you stay connected with other philanthropists?
We co-invest with other impact investors and foundations, attend conferences, etc.
Do you work with other grantors, foundations or nonprofits to drive specific projects forward? If so, how?
We very regularly co-invest alongside other foundations and impact investors, as we often can’t meet the full need of an individual organization. We are also always looking to help build the ecosystem and are happy to talk to anyone who is curious about learning more about impact-first investing!
What would you want other philanthropists to know about your work?
We write about each of our investments here, where we try to outline the case for why we invested!
About Your Foundation
What is one long-term goal for your foundation?
To entice others to enter the world of impact-first investing.
Is there a unique foundation feature that has helped you pursue your mission?
PRIs and MRIs have helped us pursue our mission, have impact, and recycle the capital which allows us to do it all over again with another impact-driven partner.
If you could go back to the beginning of your philanthropic journey and share one piece of advice with yourself based on what you know now, what would you say?
Be open to looking beyond the shiny, sexy current trends and explore additional avenues which may have to be dug into a bit more. There’s more out there than what everyone else is working on.
What was the worst mistake you made? How did you solve it?
We invested in an organization that we knew wasn’t completely impact-driven because of the potential financial return. We didn’t solve it; we lost the money.
Working with Foundation Source
How does Foundation Source help you achieve your goals?
They help to keep us within proper compliance and governance guidelines.
Can you tell us a little about your experience working with the Foundation Source team?
They provide us with strong support on the granting, compliance, and governance side.
How was the process of getting your private foundation set up or transitioned to Foundation Source?
Foundation Source helped us get started altogether from day one, helping us to get incorporated and to establish our 501(c)(3) status.
Thank you to A to Z Impact for sharing their story with us! To learn more, visit atozimpact.org.
Have a Foundation Source story you’d like to share?
Write to us at for a chance to be featured in an upcoming issue!
Want to learn more about the ways we support private foundations?
Whether you are looking for support for your existing foundation or want to create a private foundation, our philanthropic specialists are here to help. To learn more, schedule a call with us or reach us at 800-839-0054. Together, let’s #begiving.
