It’s been eight years since ImpactPHL was launched in Philadelphia, and its mission to encourage investors to put their dollars in companies that do good and drive change locally has caught on.
Over the past three years, nine local foundations, including Women’s Way, The Alliance for Health Equity and the Kind Foundation, have switched financial advisors so that they can engage in mission-aligned investing and look for opportunities to fund local initiatives. Another four will be making the change in the near future.
That means in a moment when Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs are under attack, close to $1 billion in assets will be invested in companies that create living wage jobs, support the climate transition, double down on hiring women and people of color and otherwise want to make change in Philly.
“If you believe in gender equity, we have tons of women-led companies here. If you believe in racial justice, we have plenty of companies here, led by diverse people who struggle to get access to capital,” says Cory Donovan, ImpactPHL’s co-founder and senior vice president of engagement.
For several years, ImpactPHL has spread this message both in Philly and beyond at their annual conference, Total Impact Summit, for which The Citizen is a media sponsor. This year’s event, held May 14 and 15 at Convene CityView on S. 17th Street, will center on the theme Invest In Transformative Impact. Financial advisors, high-net-worth individuals, leaders of family officers and foundations, and other leaders who influence capital will gather to consider how they can invest to address some of the biggest challenges we face.
As in other years, the conference sessions are structured to answer the “why,” “what,” and “how” of impact investing: Why should investors do this? What are the best practices and innovations in the impact investing space? How can investors practice this and take action? Last year around 400 people attended and Donovan expects this year will keep pace with last.
“If you believe in gender equity, we have tons of women-led companies here. If you believe in racial justice, we have plenty of companies here, led by diverse people who struggle to get access to capital.” — Cory Donovan, ImpactPHL
Speakers this year range from national names like Christine Looney, deputy director of mission investments at the Ford Foundation, and Jay Lundy, managing director of NAACP Capital; to local leaders like Adriana Abizadeh, executive director of the Kensington Corridor Trust and Kevin Williams, CEO of the Black Squirrel Collaborative.
“We outsource our financial decision making to people at JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, but once you start to show people — This what your money is doing, and here’s what you could be doing — that’s when the switch flips,” Donovan says. “They just have to engage and become advocates for their investments.”
Total Impact Summit considers how impact investing can be applied to all asset classes, but Donovan suspects there will be an increased interest in local efforts given that many city and state governments, as well as a host of universities and nonprofits, are realizing that they can’t rely on the federal government. We need to fix our problems locally, an idea that Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak championed in their book The New Localism eight years ago.
“The white knight from D.C. is not coming to fix our problems. Those problems will be solved in community, at a local level,” Donovan says.
A few sessions will touch on how investors can move forward in the face of this precarity. For example, “The Next Generation: How to Think, Act, and Invest in the Face of Shifts + Uncertainty” will look at how investors can make decisions and deploy their funds to address local and global issues in the midst of the climate crisis, technological disruption and other factors driving unprecedented social change. Another session, “Ground Up: Revolutionary Models for Just + Equitable Community Investment,” will consider investment models that have justice and community power at their core.
There are also more opportunities for attendees to network with and learn from one another. In addition to the conference sessions, many attendees meet informally at other events that have sprung up around the conference. Donovon refers to them affectionately as “barnacle events.” They offer opportunities for attendees to connect and continue to share ideas, building on conversations that got their start during the conference sections.
“People visit Philadelphia to come to the event, and maybe they’re working on something in Colorado. Is that a model that we can use?” Donovan says. “I think that connectivity is great, whether it happens at a barnacle event or it happens at the main session.”
ImpactPHL’s Total Impact Summit 2025: Invest in Transformative Impact will take place from May 14-15 from 8am to 6pm. The event will take place at Convene CityView 30 S. 17th Street. You can register here. Tickets are $1,595 for general admission and $650 for staff and board members of endowments.
Correction: The proper spelling of the organization behind the Total Impact Summit is ImpactPHL.
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