This post, hear from Co-Founder and Chief Impact Officer, Tom Dawkins, as he reflects on some more out and about activities (this time joined by Cameron Neil Co-Founder and CEO too!)
The Power of Convening
I shared a video last week on my way to the Impact Investment Summit Asia Pacific, and some have been kind enough to ask for my thoughts after the event. You can watch the video on Youtube here, but to summarise what I said…
The Summit is always a wonderful chance to be inspired and learn from people leading in this area, ie. the bright spots. But attending the Summit year-on-year it’s impossible not to notice the same conversations reoccurring, and when you pull back and look big-picture, to see that while the bright spots are exciting we are not making the required progress towards mainstreaming impact investing and scaling the social enterprise movement so that we can achieve the grand challenges of our time, like the Sustainable Development Goals.
This isn’t a critique of the Impact Investing Summit – it’s a critique of the impact investing sector. The Summit does a great job of reflecting the sector as it is and creating space to discuss what it could be.
The fact is, if impact investment is to play the kind of role we talk about playing in transforming the world towards sustainability and greater equality, it will need to grow 10X faster in the next ten years than in the last ten years.
Some of that sense of urgency showed up at the Summit, but not enough imho. There is still a lot of incrementalism – calls for family offices to put 10% of funds into a “catalytic” fund, and lots of discussions of how to do impact, but only in a way that doesn’t question or threaten what the investment industry considers to be “commercial returns.”
This needs to be turned around. We need to move past discussing if you can combine commercial and impact returns – obviously you can, in certain circumstances, and this should be considered proven by now – and ask the more important question – can we transform the world in the way we say we want if we only do this style of “impact investing”?
The most interesting conversations I had on the thorniest topics were in the corridors, which is typical. I had some great chats and catch-ups with a range of peers, and I’m very grateful for the Summit bringing us together in one place.
Catching up with peers, meeting new people and having real conversations are what I value most from conferences (I don’t tend to attend many formal sessions). And this year was great for that. So good to see you Cameron, Tara, Sven, Chuck, Craig, Elise, Maxx, Kylie, Jennifer, Belinda, Simon, Matt, Amber, Matt, Kirk, Karen, Jessica, Kayleigh + those I know I’ve missed (sorry).
Convening is always about the possibility of ignition. It doesn’t happen every time, but every so often you meet the right person at the right time and boom, something new becomes possible. And it is from myriad such connections and collaborations that the system is changed.
Events like the Summit create the platform for those catalytic connections to occur and increase the density of relationships within an ecosystem to enable larger-scale change. Thank you for all your hard work Kerry, Ben and team!
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